"Improv" Books

[JRC]

Leaping off of Danny Mora's post (http://www.chicagoimprov.org/showthread.php?t=15989), what books on another topic have you found to be relatable to improvisation? I know that when I read "Zen and the Art of Archery" while I was taking classes it greatly influenced me. On the flip side (production of shows) I did find "How I Made A Hundred Movies and Never Lost a Dime" by Roger Corman a great help.

[Rory_Pizzashow]

Although I have gotten away from it, in a previous life, my pre-show mental warm up consisted of opening Joyce's Finnegans Wake to a random page and reading for about 15 minutes.
I suppose over the run of a show (provided it's an open run), you could start on the first page and go to the last page and perhaps get the narrative. But reading in your head and reading aloud opens up the little gaps and spaces for play. It activates those liminal and tangental 2nd & 3rd choices.
Joyce wrote in Ulysses that "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." That's always stuck with me as well as the strange, if not gimmicky, way that the last sentences of Finnegans continue on into the first sentences of Finnegans. Del would likely have enjoyed the beginning being the end (being the beginning).
So in my case it's not the content that stokes my play, but the style or the execution.

Oh and porn. Lots of porn.

[joest]

Most good acting books. Method, Stanislavski, Chekov...
All very much applicable. Try counting change in your pockets...

But yea, "The Inner Game of Tennis" is still my #1 recommendation.

[fritopi]

Originally Posted by joest

"The Inner Game of Tennis" is still my #1 recommendation.

This book allowed me to have so much more fun doing improv because I wasn't kicking myself for making stupid moves anymore.

On that note, Phil Jackson's "Sacred Hoops" is also something that is applicable to improv. Probably because of his Zen approach to basketball.

[DrBuddha]

I always get something from science books that can translate into improv. Recent favorites have included Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and James Gleick's biography of Isaac Newton.

Also, watching basketball games. Any team, at any level. They make moves, based on the situation immediately before. Everything affects everything else. They have to coordinate across a team without being able to take a moment and make a plan. It's beautiful.

[DrBuddha]

Also! "The Road to Mars" by Eric Idle is a sci-fi fantasy book that made me think about comedy in a different way than I had been.

[IrishMercutio]

One of the books that has been a huge influence on everything I do would be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His ideas about quality blew me away. (funny how so many books people mention have to do with zen).
Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut as well. His ideas of Foma, I feel, work well with Improv.
Also the book, The Empty Space is a good way to look at what makes any kind of Theatre engaging. I keep him as a reference for how to avoid "bad" Improv/theatre.

[Carl...]

Screenplay by Syd Field helped me look at a scene in improv just a little differently in that a scene is sort of a small narrative where a lot of the relationship needs to be implied and conveyed in a subtle way, and how there should be some modicum of change within or between the players while they share the stage. The book makes the case that good screenwriters should know how to say a lot with very little (show don;t tell), and good improvisors, I think, should know how to gift their fellow improvisor with a lot from very little as well--be it through emotion, physicality, and heir choice of words.

This thread is fascinating, by the way!

[BenCapraro]

Huxley's The Door's of Perception made me see things differently. It documents how his experiments with psychedelics caused him to view the world without the filters that he had learned to apply to all incoming information. He began to notice beauty in the details of things that he would ordinarily not notice because of the assumptions he usually made about all the things he encountered.

[jsukow]

"Buddhism Plain and Simple" by Steve Hagen