A Wallpaper Company Christmas Party Impro

After two months of the course, we made a little fun test run for what had already been learned: We did a one and a half hour long improvisation about a wallpaper company’s Christmas party. An impro is a journey into the unknown with vast amounts of uncertainties. None of us knew what the plotline would emerge to, there would be a lot of work to do, so the basic relational patterns of the protagonists had to be simple and intuitive in order to get rid of at least some variables and to reduce the game to copability. We needed characters that could be built from rather clear and simple goals. The actors got short infos about their roles a few day before the impro and we prepared a bit of a staging. Everything else was done with spontaneous artistic work-in-the-moment along the trajectories of goal-orientation, sculpturality, the use of props and some other lines of artistic creation. The whole class was accompanied by cameraman Michael Heislbetz, that is why we have a (highly improvised) little movie of this impro. During the impro Michael also never knew what would happen next or where it would happen. That means he had to improvise as much as the actors, always searching for where the next centre of action would be.

This is the info the actors got for their roles.

B: Wallpaper entrepreneur. Says he’s a millionaire. 
J: His wife, a pretty grey mouse. Has worked in the family business for decades without pay. Always cuddles up to her husband. 
K: B’s and J’s youngest daughter. Art student. Thinks her family is rubbish. Her father pays her to take photos at the Christmas party and she does it because she needs the money. 
O: B’s and J’s son. Depressed and hypersensitive. He is expected to attend the party. He likes V. 
P: Develops wallpaper patterns. Lonely, shy. She likes O. 
A: Makes the sales. B’s mistress, would like him to get a divorce or the wife to leave him. Has prepared a Christmas carol. 
V: Company accountant. Had previously told her boyfriend, who is meanwhile her ex-boyfriend, that balance sheets had been manipulated.
S: V’s ex-boyfriend. She broke up with him when he lost his job and he is not invited to the party, but comes anyway. 
M: The company’s cleaning lady. She was invited to the party, but if there’s any dirt or mess, she feels responsible for cleaning it up and thinks it’s the most important thing to do at that moment. Knows everything, sees everything. 
R: B’s and J’s third child. The black sheep of the family. Rejected by her father after several failed drug rehabs. Her mother didn’t dare say anything. Then spent two years in India studying Eastern wisdom teachings and came back a mature adult.

The acting style the actors use here is a very naturalistic one, the image that emerges is very close to real life behaviour, although, of course, still much more concise and dense. If you watch the video carefully you might be able to detect the goal-orientational trajectories that have their origin in the role descriptions: Everybody is up to something, all the actors follow rules they have extracted from their short descriptions and all of them build their behaviour from them. And that his how, slowly and by not unconsiderable degrees of redundancy (you might be able to recognize the redundancy as well), the characters, their stories and their conflicts evolve into a full, classical one-act plot. This plot seems to have happened by chance but it is actually built as a multi-agent sequence of actions which builds from the application of rules in the self-steering processes of high-skill acting.

Company Christmas Party Role Description by Anne Frütel is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC0 1.0 Universal.