List of most comedy fringe festivals ordered by start date Friend of mine asked for them, I happened to have a list, so thought it might be useful for all. Exeter Comedy Festival    January Leicester Comedy Festival    February Sheffield Student Comedy Festival    February Adelaide Fringe    February Laughter Lines Comedy Festival, Leeds    March Udderbelly Festival    April[…]

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A brief history of rough theatre In the 16th century bands of Commedia dell’Arte actors traveled Europe, performing in market places, outdoor festivals and carnivals. Their show was fun, fast and noisy and incorporated mask, music, singing, acting, acrobatics, improvisation, script, satire, impressions and comedy. The audience shouted out, interacted and were part of the[…]

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Presence Workshop Notes These are from this week’s Monday night workshop on Presence. Largely influenced by a combination of Patsy Rodenburg’s book Presence and Keith Johnstone’s chapter on Being There, with a bit of John Wright’s Why is that so Funny thrown in. Patsy’s book goes more into theory so I won’t write about that[…]

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Impro or Improv? This could be the biggest impro (or improv) geek out known to man! I know at least 2 people who might find this interesting, so I’m going to write it. Some people say Impro. Some people say Improv. In London it used to be largely Impro, but now there’s a growing trend[…]

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Circle of Expectation These are from the Monday night ‘Being Obvious’ workshop from a few weeks ago. I seem to be specialising at the moment in taking basic Keith Johnstone exercises and then expanding them and modifying them. At some point I’ll tell him and he’ll be like “WHATTTTTT??? HOW DARE YOU! YOU MUST DIE[…]

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Improv in one class Most of this popped out of my last Thursday and Saturday workshops. The Saturday theme was ‘Making Things Happen’, which I might change in the future to ‘Letting Things Happen’, and then actually defines most of what we do in improv. If I had only one class to teach to someone[…]

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Rhiannon Vivian

Secret objectives A few Saturdays ago I was running an impro workshop on ‘Keeping it Real’ – how to improvise scenes that were realistic featuring real humans on the stage. One thing we found very helpful was the use of playing secret objectives in scenes, especially ones that were connected to the other actor. We[…]

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Hoopla improv workshop hands in air

Approval and disapproval I’ve been thinking lots about the concepts of approval and disapproval recently and their effect on improvisers. Inspired a bit by Viola Spolin’s book. At the start of the workshop I got everyone to go round the circle saying their name. It sounds simple but lots of people mutter it, or pass it[…]

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RH Main Stage

New character exercise Well, I say new, it’s from Viola Spolin’s book which was from the 1950s or early 60s, but I found it really effective on Saturday and in fact one of the most complete character exercises I’ve led. 1. Get four actors up on stage, in a line facing the audience. 2. Point[…]

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Maria Peters Edinburgh bw

How to take a show to Edinburgh This is based on a chat I had with various people at The Miller a couple of weeks ago. There were some people from various Edinburgh shows, including me, Fat Kitten, Fingers on Buzzards, The Couch and Do Not Adjust Your Stage, and various people interested in taking[…]

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Listening Workshop Notes I lead at a listening/seeing improv class at our Rag Factory class this week, where I tried to put all my favourite listening games and seeing exercises into one workshop. I think listening and seeing are one of the most important and core skills of improvisation. If you aren’t listening or seeing[…]

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Scenes Workshop Hoopla

Game of the Scene The term “Game of the Scene” pops up loads in impro and seems a topic of hot debate. There seems to be varying descriptions of what it is, online and in workshops. So I ran a workshop on it before August, and another one last night, an improv investigation. So here[…]

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