Clown Exercises If You Love Me You Would Smile Two actors face each other. Actor One says: “If you love me, you would smile.” Actor Two says: “I do love you, but I can’t smile.” while Actor Two tries not to laugh or smile. They repeat the lines until Actor Two finally smiles or laughs[…]
Beyond Impro Improv seems to be quite a good start for people jumping into the world of performing. Some people stick with improv for performance, and others use it to go into other areas of performing. Also as an improviser it’s helpful to expand horizons and learn new things, and then bring them back to[…]
Clown and Improv I recently did a Clown course with a lovely chap called Mick Barnfather a couple of weeks ago. If you’ve seen me recently you probably know that already, as I tend to start every sentence with “I just did a clown course with Mick Barnfather”. I found it exceptionally helpful; especially as[…]
Reactions bring improv to life These notes come from the Being Altered and Emotions workshops I ran a couple of Mondays ago. Sometimes you can watch people improvise and everything seems to be going ‘right’ – they are listening, saying yes to each other, building platforms, taking on characters, but for some reason the impro[…]
The Secret Of Improv: Be in a Good Mood OK! I admit it! For the past two weeks/months/years I’ve been taking improv way to seriously. I’ve also been spending way too much on facebook and twitter, reading about improv. In fact sometimes it feels like improv these days lives on facebook rather that on a[…]
Improvising believable relationships Characters on stage go from two separate people in separate worlds to a relationship when they have emotional connection, history, feelings, status between each other, knowledge of each other, behaviour and games where they are affected by each other. ‘Brothers’ is just a word on stage, it’s everything else that makes it[…]
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[…]