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Kristina Martinez, 2019 FIST champion, is on WIT ensemble Uncle Gorgeous. She has toured the country with her duo with Neil Baron, Goodison. She was a former artistic director of Atlas Improv Company in Madison, Wisconsin. She is now a coach of many teams in DC. She’s an influencer, you could say, in the improv community.
Kristina sat down with Puss and Kooch to talk about running an improv theater in the Midwest, doing what she likes doing, and giving herself permission to have fun.
Kristina Martinez on Heavy Flo with Puss and Kooch
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear everything Kristina has to say, listen to her podcast episode.
Getting comfortable in your craft
When I started doing improv, I always wondered, “Oh jeez, what’s everybody going to think when I say, ‘I do improv,’ or, ‘I own an improv theater.'” But I forgot that nobody really thinks about that. And when I get on stage, for whatever reason, I then give myself permission to not think about what everybody thinks.
I think I did that out of survival when I first started doing improv. I just had to turn that part of my brain off and not think about what other people are seeing while I’m improvising. But then the more I did improv, the more I realized no one cares at all what this looks like or if I do improv or what that means to them. And if they do, it doesn’t matter.
Improv is just fun. It’s what I’m choosing to do all the time. But it took a long time for me to figure that out.
Was there something that made that idea click for you?
When I started at Atlas, it was a boys’ club. I love all those boys, but it was a boys’ club, and it was also very white. I tried really hard to play like everybody else. I tried really hard to play like this 6’2″, mega-strong, physical player. I thought if I made choices like him, I’d get all these laughs because he was killing it. And it just didn’t make sense. That’s not me, and that’s not my vibe. I can’t manufacture his vibe.
Especially when theater leadership started stepping down and I was put in charge of the company, that’s when I realized I had to do me. Otherwise, I was going to get exhausted.
We’ll be really sad for a second. I used to have such a hard time running the theater. We would do shows and then do notes, and then I’d get in my car and just drive around Lake Mendota and cry. I was trying so hard to be the perfect artistic director and the perfect improviser and the perfect scene partner. But I was doing it all under what I thought was supposed to work without letting myself listen to me. And that was a huge struggle to get over.
How long did it take you to get over feeling like that?
How many drives around Lake Mendota? It was probably a big, long month. Also, being an AD, I felt like I needed to keep the theater going because 12 other people loved doing improv, and that’s what they wanted to do every weekend. If I didn’t keep the doors open, I was taking away something that 12 other people loved.
I felt that way without also thinking, “Oh yeah, I love this, too. How can I love this and still make this work as a business?”
I think a lot of me coming through and doing improv is like, “How do I marry both the aspect of considering your audience and considering what improv looks like as a business?” Because it is a business and also your art. How do you still have your own style while still thinking about it as an audience?
How did you get to that point? And what did that look like for you as an AD?
It was doing a lot of stuff alone. I was doing corporate trainings, and I would go out to businesses. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. I would take time off of my nine-to-five job and go into these corporate offices and say, “We’re gonna do improv because your manager hired me for team-building, adaptability, innovation…”
You would ideally have somebody come with you, and two people would teach improv to these groups of people. But everybody else had a nine-to-five, for the most part. So I would do it by myself, and I think that’s where I realized I was driving myself to these businesses and making $300 for two hours. That was going back into the theater. And that was pretty boss.
That was cool if I thought about the fact that I was doing something I really love. I was working with these people for two hours, and maybe one person in that group would smile and actually like what I was saying. And I got paid. It paid rent or the electricity bill for the month. That was pretty cool.
I think that’s when I realized I needed to stop having these expectations of other people and recognize that I have value in what I do. I think that was a big turning point for me.
The challenges of being a woman in charge
Everybody says this, but if you’re a woman in a position of power, you’re a bitch. That was my entire management tenure. I had so many people fight me.
I love doing improv, so I think it makes sense to get emotional about it. And I’m super sensitive. I’m a very emotional person. The second somebody would disagree with me, I would cry. I didn’t know how to handle all that pressure. And then they would just be like, “Well, you’re crying. I can’t talk to you now.”
I went to a therapist, and she told me to get a pet because that’s a good place to put your energy. That’s how I ended up getting a cat. But my therapist also said, “If you saw your friend crying, what would your initial reaction be?” And I said I would comfort them. So she said, “Okay, yeah, surround yourself with friends.”
That’s when I realized improv should be a thing I do with friends and not with people who don’t believe in me or don’t want to comfort me or don’t empathize with the pressure of running a business while going to grad school, while going through life changes and stuff.
So it was really hard to run Atlas for a little bit. And then when it got really, really good is when we moved. But I left it to some very capable people, and they’re amazing. Going back to visit is like going back home again.
Choosing DC for its improv community (and its dogs)
Neil and I looked at a few different cities when we were moving. We wanted to get out of the Midwest because it’s so stinking cold. It’s freezing all the time. Climate change is real.
We looked at Denver, Austin, and DC. Neil has some family in DC, and I have a really, really, really dear friend from middle school here. We chose DC because we liked all the people walking their dogs and the fact that there are trees in the city. Really, that’s why.
I also felt like I could see myself on the improv stages here, more than I could in those other cities—not to knock those other cities because they have very vibrant improv communities.
What does that mean when you say you can’t see yourself on that stage?
Like if there are shows with all dudes in them. Or the choices some of those teams in other cities were making on stage felt selfish and not collaborative. I thought those other cities had great communities. I just didn’t know what it would look like there. The DC community felt more accessible, even in terms of space. You could get to all the different theaters easily.
Started from the bottom, now she’s here
At Atlas Improv when I was artistic director, you had to start in a Level 1 class. You just had to. People would email me and tell me about their improv experience, but unless they were an iO house team coach or something, they had to start at Level 1. Because all your resume tells me is that you wanted to pay money to take classes. It doesn’t tell me you know how to do improv.
It sounds kind of mean, but anybody can pay money to take improv classes. And improv is such a weird art form. You’re very rarely held back because you can always pay more money to take more classes.
Also, you learn the improv theater’s philosophy if you start at Level 1. Every improv theater is different, and that’s what makes it such an amazing art form. In Madison, people would say, “Why don’t you go down to Chicago?” But I wasn’t in Chicago, goddammit. I was in Madison. And Madison has its own improv style.
So we thought we were going to have to start from the beginning here, and we were totally willing. I didn’t even think for a second to call anybody at WIT and say, “Hey, this is who I am. Here’s my improv resume.” Because I used to get those emails, and they didn’t tell me anything. If your improv theater has a very strong philosophy, then you guard it a little bit more.
How have you felt that your style has meshed with DC’s style?
I think it helps to have that Midwest humble still, to realize everybody’s put a lot of time into the community. I’ve put a lot of time into my community. I think everybody is really nice here. I don’t know that a lot of people know I was an AD of a theater for five years and that I’d done improv for eight years before moving here. In my head, I feel like I should just prove that onstage.
I am a totally different player than what I was in Madison. Because short-form improv is telling the audience what the hoop is, and then you jump through the hoop, and then you burn the hoop down, and the audience enjoys that. It’s like, “Look at me. I know how to play this short-form game, but now I’m gonna not play it. That’s the joy in it.” With long-form improv, the team knows what the hoop is, but the audience only kind of knows what it looks. You’re just jumping through one hoop, which is the form.
Doing short-form improv, there are a lot of chances to be “right.” I used to be very good at doing the games correctly. At some point, I think Neil influenced me to look at how much fun it was to mess games up on purpose. There’s joy in messing those things up. So doing more short-form, I was able to mess stuff up more.
But I was very good at knowing when to be a “good girl” and knowing when to be a “bad girl” in Madison. And more often than not, I was a good girl because I was playing with people who were just coming into the scene a lot more.
I think I have more pizzazz here than I did in Madison. I think I’m a little more self-centered in how I play. And that’s because the audiences here like that. In Madison, we played with each other, for each other. We had to figure out how to play in a way that was going to be helpful for the Level 1 player out there who was our only audience member.
We did really, solidly good improv. Here, people want to see you poke. So I think it’s different. I don’t know if it’s better. Talk to me in five years.
Kristina Martinez’s coaching philosophy
I say to people that my job is to make improvisers really tap into what’s fun to them and make sure they hit that every practice session and that they have a chance to do it every show.
Improv is weird. We do something really vulnerable with people and trust them. I have a hard time trusting people in general in real life. So on stage, it’s like, “Uh, fuck no.” But I try to push that because I think it’s something that needs to happen for really good improv.
When you talk to people about what they like best about improv, a lot of people say, “I like it when they break or when they recognize that they’re not saying what they’re supposed to be saying or they’re put on the spot and they say something totally unexpected.”
I like that, too. But I think that comes from making yourself an individual player. I see that manufactured a lot. I see people get on stage and say, “This is improv. So, I’m a monkey, and you’re a whale. Oh, I can’t believe I said that.” But you know you said that.
So, you’ve never done that before in a show? In the middle of a dogshit scene, you’ve never just started laughing because you’re like, “Haha, audience, I think this is bananas!”
I’ve done it, but it feels bad. I hate that. But everybody in a dogshit show has their own survival mechanisms. I’ve seen players get super physical, but that’s not going to save the show. I’ve seen other players endow really heavily or turn scenes into dramas. But those aren’t saving shows.
This is maybe the outside-of-DC perspective, but in DC, I don’t see people thinking about improv or talking about improv in a way that benefits them for their future practices or shows. I think DC folks like to be told what to think. And I think DC folks like to devour books and podcasts, but then they don’t know what to do with all that. And a lot of DC folks are too new to understand what all of that is anyway. So I don’t think it’s really helpful.
I always told Level 1 students not to read any improv books. They’re not going to know what to do with all that information. If you want to be a good carpenter and you’re taking a carpentry class, you’re not going to go home and watch a bunch of YouTube videos. You’re going to trust the class and then hopefully be able to build something at the end of that class.
I think when you get all that information, you don’t know how to think about it. And when you’re in Level 1 or 2, the whole purpose is for you to fail and have fun failing. But we overlook that. We’re like, “No, here are skills. Make these skills happen.” We don’t celebrate the failure of those skills. I mean, you have to do thousands of shows before you get it. I’m maybe—maybe—just getting it.
Playing with different people
I think mash-ups are great because you’re kind of forced to play with different people. It forces you to think about your own choices. When improvisers are on teams and trust our teammates, we then get too comfortable. Then we don’t put ourselves in positions of playing with people who are newer or playing with people we don’t know.
With mash-ups, you start asking yourself why you made certain choices and if you would have made those choices if you were playing with people you trust. It’s interesting. It’s a nice way of reminding yourself of your habits. I talk over people a lot in mash-up shows, for example. But I think that also comes from being a minority woman and making sure I’m being heard.
I love your confidence in that because I sometimes feel the opposite. I feel like I step back sometimes as a minority woman.
I tell myself in my head, “You’ve gotta do this, Martinez. No one else is gonna do it, so you’ve gotta do it.” It’s like a booster for me. Because in regular shows, I think I sit back.
When I joined Love Onion, I felt like my role on the team was to make sense of stuff and do edits and play support and walk on with justification. In mash-up shows, that’s all out the window. I want to be big and make bold choices.
I think that’s the little Kristina in me still, asking myself what other people’s expectations of me are and how I can prove that. I want all my scene partners to give me an A+ at the end of every show because I did the right thing. And that’s a thing I have to get out of my head about. I should just be out there mucking around, not doing all the things I think people want me to do.
Kristina’s advice for the improv world
I think in improv, we’re all about trust and support onstage. But I think offstage, we need to foster each other more and bring up people who aren’t getting recognized. That could be in any sort of dimension.
I think right now, being in the position that I’m in, I was very lucky—and I worked really hard—to have stage time and have a lot of people see me and see my style of improv. I think it’s important for me to approach people who are just starting out and tell them to keep doing it. There are so many improvisers who have opinions who don’t deserve them. It’s all improv. Why can’t we just be nice to each other?
I can get in this mental state where I’m super negative and super judging and very critical. But I have to remind myself that somebody told me I was doing a good job. So as a coach or as a teacher, why can’t we be more supportive? And why can’t we support people when they’re doing the thing that brings them joy, versus, “Oh, you didn’t do the edit fast enough.” Those are important notes, but let’s make sure we’re ending on a positive page.
That’s a huge deal to me. Shoutout to my early improv teachers. I wanted so badly for them to like me and what I did onstage. When I got their approval, it felt worth it. Why not just do that more?
Also, why can’t you do it for yourself? That’s another thing. If it feels like you had a shitty show, be proud of the one thing that made you happy so you’re not in your head about it.
And go out with your teammates. Please, be social with them. It can do wonders to be social with people and then get on stage with them. You just like them more.
Thanks for getting wet with Puss and Kooch
Tune in next week for an interview with former DC improviser Caroline Yates!
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