The texture of your aura dictates the emotional response that deploying your aura will elicit from the audience. Without modification, most peopleâs auras elicit laughter, which makes comedy the most natural fit for improvised theater. However, more is possible. Some improvisers are capable of transmuting their auras to elicit a variety of emotional responses from an audience, such as excitement, sadness, and fear. We colloquially refer to these improvisers as âgood actorsâ.
Most improvisers can telegraph an emotion. They can frown to convey that their character is sad, and raise their arms to convey that their character is excited. This is enough for the audience to get the gist, and to give the scene what it needs to work, but it is not transmutation. A performer telegraphing their characterâs sadness makes audiences laugh. A performer transmuting their aura to sadness, really embodying the emotion, makes audiences cry.
A transmuter is a powerful but challenging addition to a team. Having a solid transmuter on a team can make the enhancers look lazy or unrefined, or other specializations look detached. Alternatively, transmuters can raise the level of play of their entire team. Thereâs something contagious about a transmuted aura. Itâs like ICE-9, any aura it touches is bent towards its quality. Musical accompanists take this to a new levelâ they can transmute the auras of everyone onstage, if theyâre bold enough.
Early on, you had trouble learning âgameâ. To you, either a character is connecting with the audience or it isnât, and sometimes people tried to explain to you that your character that wasnât working was âoff gameâ. Game makes the most sense to you when itâs about a part of a characters behavior, but you feel limited by scenes where everybody seems to be repeating a whole long hard-to-remember formula over and over again for the whole scene.
An all-transmuter show is a strange beast. It can be very affectingâ well-portrayed human behavior always is, but without an emitter to boost the critical elements of the show, or a manipulator to layer on an overarching structure, the show is in danger of feeling directionless. It also takes a certain kind of audience to be receptive to it. Most improv audiences are used to majority-enhancer shows, and so might leave wondering what exactly they just watched.