Reflections, Part I
I know I should start writing again, employers are hopefully coming to this website. It wouldn’t do well if I only had a few posts from a year ago. So here we go. This will be the first part of a reflection series to get me caught up.
I finished my architecture education, and in all honesty, I’m pretty happy with it. There’s a lot I wish I could have done, case in point, my independent study (I’ll write about that later). But despite that, I can hardly say I was idle during my college years, six years though they were (architecture school takes five years, and it took me a year to get in). In those years I traveled to small towns and big cities, New York and Chicago included. I went overseas to Rome and all over Italy, Spain, and other countries in between. I even went to the Burning Man festival, while getting course credit I might add. I worked a 20 to 40 hour a week job at IT Services at ISU for my entire time at college, allowing me the small pleasures of a pizza every week or so and some time at Ames’s fine watering holes. I met many good people, and was able to make good friends out of most of them. I was able to perform improv comedy for five and a half years, finding a second family in Grandma Mojo’s Moonshine Revival.
Perhaps that’s where this reflection should begin. I can trace a lot back to finding Grandma Mojo’s. It opened more doors up than I ever gave it credit for, an even today, I am still connected to the improv troupe, and many of the members remain my best friends.
It started my first semester at Iowa State. I had been a part of my speech team in high school, where I excelled at individual improv. When I arrived at ISU, I was looking for an opportunity to continue what I thought was improv comedy. Like many who come from high school improv, I counted myself among the followers of Whose Line and the rules of improvisation. What I found at Iowa State was something completely different than what I expected.
Like many things in my life, I didn’t get it right away. I suppose I should have noticed the trend, or maybe it was preparing me for what was to come later in life. I tried out in my first semester, without having seen a single show of Grandma Mojo’s. I had gone on to All State in high school. Surely I would make the team. I was wrong. All it took was a few minutes on the stage for me to realize that the rules that I thought existed were just words, and meaningless ones at that. And yet, even though they didn’t take me at the time (they had taken another talented young man by the name of Jared instead) I sensed there was something about the group that grooved with me. And so I spent the semester watching the Mojos, trying to understand what I missed the first time around. I never quite understood what changed, but the next time I tried out for the troupe, I got in, along with my good friend from high school, Steven Murray.
Something to note about Mojo’s is that it never stays the same. People come and go in the group constantly, as people join and graduate, and as the members change, so does the group itself, its dynamics, the games, the comedy. When I started, the group was very much on the edge. They had their own type of longform, something that went against the grain of Harolds and other organized forms. They called it Good Cheese. Its basis was loose, its progression even looser. What would start off a single suggestion would spawn any number of scenes, that could or could not be related. It was scatterbrained, messy, rough, and extremely fun. Over time, the Good Cheese got better and worse in turns, but it was always good. There is something truly beautiful about the simplicity of something well improvised.
We played many fun games, made many fun worlds. I met many people along the way, too many to simply name. I count them among the best people in the world. Funny and kind were the Mojos of every generation. Even at my hardest and darkest of times, they made me feel good and brought a smile to my face, all the way up to the current generation, who I was proud to be Papa Bear to.
The Mojos also started me down a road that has greatly defined me. Thanks especially to Caleb Woodley and Don Watts, I took my first theater classes. Thanks to this door opening, I was able to find a road I didn’t know would be open to me, that of set design and the power of theatrical aesthetics. It’s something I still wrestle with, and will talk about in a future post perhaps.
Over the years I came to learn alot from improvisation. How to react, how to think and move quickly, how to create on the fly. Most importantly, it got me out of my own head. That’s one of the big things, don’t let yourself get caught in your own head, cause when you do, it becomes a million times harder to just let things happen. You start to try to control things that can’t be controlled, and the improvisation fails. It’s amazing how much this can improve other skills, especially design. As architects and designers, we must learn to trust our gut instincts. Our eyes and our design sense are what we make our money on, it’s what sets us apart and allows us to create. To overthink it is to kill a good design as much as it kills a good improv scene.
As designers, we also have to understand that we are, unfortunately, slaves to the input that is the world around us. We create for the world, and therefore must be observant and aware of the world around us. Its constraints and its opportunities are what we have to listen to. Beyond that, though, we also must keep in mind that our creations are only conceptually limited to what we have in our imaginations. As desginers, we create the world. To put it into Mojo terms, we are reality benders, that’s our occupation.
More to come.
((To find out more about Grandma Mojo’s, visit their numerous networking sites: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube))
