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[…]
Character Exercises Hi everyone, these popped out of last Saturday’s character workshop. Some of them were originally learnt from Katy Schutte, from The Mayday’s, Music Box and Katy & Rach, so many thanks Katy. She’s teaching some workshops in London soon with The Maydays. I go into characters in various depths, but this time round[…]
Long-form, long-blog. Last Saturday’s workshop was awesome. One of those sessions where impro gets described as ‘magical’. The session was on long-form techniques, but was called Tall Tales for some reason. I think because I don’t like the term long-form. I like long-form, I just don’t like using those words to describe it. I can’t[…]
Improv books we can recommend We were chatting in the pub after a rehearsal of our new show (Imagine If You Will) and found that half the cast read loads of impro books, and half didn’t read any, with nobody really in the middle. Obviously the best way to learn impro is just to do[…]
Yes And I love the Yes And exercise. It’s such a core part of improv that I never regret doing it in a workshop and it’s great to always go back to as an exercise with a performing team. Yes And is at the heart of impro – I’m going to be on stage, listen[…]
Happy and Excited. It’s 4:43am and I’m still awake from the Hoopla Impro Party/Impro Jam. It made me happy and excited, and made me laugh lots. I loved it, proper love. Which got me thinking… When performing it’s probably best to pursue the things that make you happy and excited, ‘cos if you don’t feel[…]
Random things learnt from new shows in development Hello all, New Year has been really busy so far. Mainly because I’m now directing or producing a bunch of new shows, including Imagine If You Will (narrative impro inspired by The Hero’s Journey), Arthur (new short-form) and Zorbo Ironheart (youtube sketch show). Lots of random things[…]