"The most important improv lesson I ever learned is that the best scenes are played for the benefit and emotional experience of my scene partner. The audience just happens to be there, observing. A show becomes so much simpler and more fun and more real when I decide how I want to affect my scene partner and get to work doing it: do I want to make them laugh or cry? Do I want to calm them down or creep them out? I like having an emotional objective like this because then my success or failure is apparent in my performance and it unlocks my own emotional presence on stage: 'yes, I got what I wanted, lemme try that again but BIGGER!' or 'damn, this isn’t working, I guess I have to try again and do it differently.' The harder I try, the more active I become, the more creative I have to be at getting what I want. So, to summarize, I like to set a goal and place it in my scene partner’s heart. Who taught me this lesson? Everybody in my life who hurt me AND everybody in my life who healed me."
Check out Charlie Nicholson in Bodywork at Megawatt
