Environment and Object Work Notes These are notes from a Monday workshop a couple of weeks ago. We were doing various exercises to help improvisers build believable environments and objects in scenes. Here they are: Passing the object Everyone sat in a circle. One person mimes an object, and passes it on the next. The[…]
Meisner for Improvisers Notes from our Meisner workshop. We also use a lot of Meisner technique in our Level 3 Scenes Course. The Meisner technique was developed by Sanford Meisner in New York. For the purpose of this workshop I introduced the following concepts from his book: Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances Repetition Calling emotions[…]
Spontaneity These are some notes from one of our Monday classes a couple of weeks ago. Spontaneity pops up as one of the themes in impro with everything we do, but it’s good to do a workshop solely on it every now and again too. In ‘real life’ not being spontaneous is quite often a[…]
Genre There is an earlier blog post that covers our Saturday workshops in more detail, so these are very random additional notes. Yet again Genre workshops never fail to amaze me. People totally new to impro end up improvising entire stories very rapidly when doing a genre. It’s like a decent genre supplies some ready[…]
Focus These workshop notes are from a Thursday a few weeks ago, some interesting exercises on improvising with loads of people on stage. Quite often multiple person scenes can descend into chaos, so I thought we’d do a whole workshop on them. Some of the important points that came out were: 1. Listen. 2. Be[…]
New Short Form Games Sizzling Arthur show last night at the improv theatre, we put loads of new games in and it turned out really fun. It looks like the group is going the way of putting on a totally new batch of games every month. There’s quite a large repeat audience at The Miller[…]
New Ways to Play Yes Let’s Last Monday’s workshop at The Rag Factory was on ‘Saying Yes’. By just concentrating on ‘Saying Yes’ all night there was loads of fun and laughs, it really is one of the core things of impro. It also had the effect that scenes tended to have more action in,[…]
Relationships and Emotions We did this exercise at the class last night. Many thanks to Guy Fletcher for originally teaching it to me, I think he modified it after learning it at The Magnet Theatre in New York, and we modified it further last night, and so the impro feedback loop continues. It takes a[…]
Yes and mistakes! Maria Peters (Music Box, Arthur, 8 bit and more), a great improviser and friend of mine recently went to New York and saw loads of shows at The Upright Citizens Brigade. She thought they were awesome and said that people were queuing round the block to get in. I asked her what[…]
Pulling Back the Curtain of Discovery This exercises is from the Narrative workshop a few Saturdays ago. The aim of the day was naturally improvising exciting captivating stories that make sense without worrying about narrative. Naturally – tends to come from improvisers being intuitive, playful and discovering rather than thinking or trying to get it[…]
Mask Workshop Notes Two blogs in one day, this has never happened before. We did some full Mask work a couple of Saturdays ago at The Bedford. I was using full face masks from Trestle Theatre company. They’re really excellent actually, I’d recommend buying some if you want a set to play with. I teach[…]
Saturday’s improv lesson was lots of fun, thanks for everyone who came along. I had a really fun group of brave improvisers who seemed up for anything, which enabled the group to try out some new things and experiment. It’s really gratifying as a director to be able to say “I’ve got this idea, I’ve[…]