There is an interesting discussion occurring on IRC about the career path/artistic journey of long time improvisers.

An improviser with about six years of experience is seeing the generational shift that many of us notice a few years in: the folks we came up with are dropping out or moving up.  Here in Chicago I see the folks I went through iO with moving onto Tourco at Second City, headlining weekends at Comedysportz or simply gone. Everyone seems to have gone up or out and I feel left alone in the middle ground. Not successful as I imagined, but still in love with improv and trying to figure out what to do with that.

This also seems a pretty normal place for most of us to end up. There are not enough slots on headlining teams at iO or Second City Touring Companies for everyone who completes training and loves improv. If you don’t quit and you don’t find yourself successful in the structure of a theater, what do you do?

The refrain from experienced artists is always the same: Don’t worry about what others think. Don’t compromise. Define success for yourself and worry about that.

Of course the simplest distinctions are often the hardest to inhabit and defining success for yourself takes a lot of life experience to do.  If you love improv, like I do, then you difficulty is compounded by the art’s distinctively collaborative nature.

Define success on your own terms…in an art form where focusing solely on yourself often leads to failure artistically.

This is also a strongly aspirational art form; few people enter it without starting from their exposure to a popular mass media “Final” product. Few experienced improvisers that I know have a hard final goal of TV stardom, but even fewer – experienced or not – would be unhappy with such a result.

How do we measure our own progress? Why are we working and training and performing? What is success?

For those of us past being a student but not climbing the ladder of an established theater, this question is hard to answer.

Let me know your answer to this question. I will think on it myself and get back to you guys in a few days.