Harold and Modernism

Tee hee, get it? Harold and Maude? Harold and Moderinism? Get it?

I am too cute.

I was talking to a friend at lunch, he was talking about Del Close and his impact on Improv Olympic and how it has affected the artform.

The discussion was generally about how Del Close had a vision, he created a form called “Harold” and this form was a fairly rigid structure. Basically for those not in the know, it was 3 scenes, a “game” scene, a revisit of sorts to the first 3 scenes, a “game” scene and then a final revisit to the first scenes again. Some have described “Seinfeld” as Harold, as the golf bill Kramer hits in the first scene, winds up in the mouth of the whale George has to save in the last, tying all the scenes together.

So Del is the improv guru, the one that dreamt up Harold and the one that taught it to countless students. Charna started IO to showcase Harold and that’s what the students were taught and 99% of the time, that is what students did.

Since the loss of Del (and even before), the variations on Harold started to wane, to differ, the form changed, evolved, for better or for worse. And now that Del is not teaching it, and even the teachers that are were not trained by Del, Harold may be getting lost in translation.

And immediately when he started talking about this, I thought of our good buddy Mies Van der Rohe. Mies and Del are nothing alike and were nothing alike, but what is happening to improv is what happened to Mies and his “international style”.

When Mies arrived here and started teaching at IIT, he taught so many students HIS way. How he thought a building should be built and that’s how his students built them. Skidmore Owings and Merrill are probably the best known firm in Chi to build this way. Big black glass box, that is Mies’ way.

But with the loss of Mies, what people started building were cheap imitations, without the elegance, the attention to detail and suddenly you look up and there’s big ugly glass boxes, and big ugly Harolds clutter the stage.

Sprawl is the word I’m looking for, on the streets and on the stage. Mies’ ideas were rebelled against by the postmodernists, who put fun and ornament back on the buildings. Right now I see no one rebelling against Harold, everyone is still clinging too tightly to the ways of the past.

Who will be improv’s Phillip Johnson?

And more importantly, who will win Survivor on Sunday?