Round and round

La Ronde for Improv and Writing

Those who have heard of Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde (or Reigen in the German) might think that this is going to be about sex. It’s not. Not really. While it’s true that La Ronde deals largely with themes of love and sex, it’s the form the play takes that interests me. In the play, there are ten scenes, each with two people. Every scene after the first carries over a character from the last scene and brings in a new character for them to act opposite.

The first scene is between a prostitute and a soldier, the second sees the soldier with a parlour maid, the third has the parlour maid and a young gentleman, and so on. The last scene sees the Count from scene 9 with the prostitute from scene 1, completing the circle. I assume that this is part of where the name, which refers to a circle dance, comes from.

It’s an interesting play that also deals with class politics and STDs and thus is a favourite for analysis in theatre studies. More importantly from my point of view, the structure is very simple, and the circular nature gives a feeling of closure to what could otherwise be a rather linear piece. This is interesting from both an improv and a writing perspective.

La Ronde as Improv format

Using the structure of La Ronde as a long-form improv format is not my idea; it’s been around for ages, probably originating in Cicago (like everything else). There are two versions that I’ve come across:

1. The straight version consists of two person scenes much as La Ronde did, looping round at the end to finish.
2. The free-form version begins with a fast version of the above, taking at most ten minutes, followed by a free-form series of scenes with any number of people in each, taking characters from the introductory round.

Both of these versions show us different sides of the same people. In the last two Jamprov sessions I’ve held in Bristol, we’ve tried both of these versions, though it was only when coming to research the format for this blog entry that I realised both are known formats; I was reinventing the wheel as needed.

The first time we tried out a La Ronde was with six people, and we did the straight version over about 15 minutes. The second session involved about ten people over about 30 minutes, including a final five minute free scene. While I was looking to see different sides of the same people, and we certainly got this in places, what the participants naturally do is to construct a more linear story.

This isn’t surprising, as without any steering that’s what comes most naturally to the majority of people. However, the problem that this introduced was that characters would spend their time discussing previous events to the point that in one scene the characters were discussing what happened to the people several scenes before. This lead to not having time (especially in the second session) to actually learn about the current characters very much.

The answer to this problem is most likely to coach towards unconnected scenes and then allow for the story element to be told in the free-form section.

Not much sex occurred in either.

La Ronde as Writing Exercise

As mentioned in my last post, I have been using La Ronde as a means to explore characters for a novel. The advantage of this approach are twofold: you get to explore the character from different angles, hence the exploration part; and the clear structure gives you a starting point to head off into the unknown.

So how well did it work? I’d give it a B+, as the advantages above really do exist, and I wrote about four interesting characters as depicted (well, you can tell their age and sex). However, not to the depth I would have liked. One reason for this is the fact that I wrote from the first-person perspective that I plan to use in the book. This made each scene more complicated as they all had to be three-person scenes, possibly with the protagonist hiding. The perspective also meant that I could not get inside the head of any of the other characters, which is what I was trying to do, so next time I’m going to use a third-person perspective, or perhaps a first-person perspective where that person is one of those two originally slated to be in the scene.

Another issue with this exercise is that if you are not careful it will just give you a love triangle. Nothing wrong with love triangles. Some of my best friends are in love-triangles (all lies sadly; no soap opera relationships that I know of), but when I showed the above picture of two men, a woman and a child to my flatmate, she immediately came up with a similar story to the one I wrote. That may be the particular combination of sexes and including a child, which I think I’ll mix up next time, but either way it’s something to bear in mind.