Improv Acting & Comedy Workshops

What is the reality of your scene? What connects your character, story, and environment to the audience? Too often, improv scenes are overly complex or utterly pointless. In this series of workshops, players find that balance and play 3-dimensional characters and build coherent worlds, giving the improviser a solid base to make an emotional connection to the audience, and play improv scenes that matter. 6-12 hours, can be split into 3 separate workshops focusing on Character, Emotion, or World-Building.

*General-Intermediate

A great improv show is a symphony. It will have themes and movements and be assessed as a whole. With a structured form, you can have a small guarantee of what the audience will see, but with Freeform, you can discover your structure as you create it in collaboration with your team. In this intensive workshop, we will practice tools to make your Longform more fluid and dynamic. We will delve into themes that add theatricality and raise our improv to art, and hone our awareness of our creation. Everything your team has experienced can be channeled into strong, free, artistic improv. 10-16 hours, available for teams or groups of individuals.

*Advanced

Day 1 will focus on drawing inspiration from a variety of sources- verbal, physical, emotional, thematic, and others. We will use these inspirations to create interconnected scenes in a longform, following the will of the group mind and learning how to express those inspirations with free form transitions. After developing those skills the first day, we will learn and practice two forms that incorporate inspiration and interconnection between source and scene, The Living Room and The Armando. 10-16 hours.

*General-Intermediate

How do you save a bad scene? You don’t. Ever. In this workshop, we will practice techniques to confidently make a connected, meaningful scene, even if it gets off to a rocky start. This workshop has three objectives – develop awareness of the platform you are building, portray confidence acting alone, and dig in mid-scene to realize its full potential.

*Intermediate

In this fun 3-6 hour workshop, participants will practice creating full and dynamic characters, imbue them with history, and play them for the duration of a scene. This workshop is physical and mental, challenging the actor to inhabit the character in a variety of ways. Actors will practice several methods of finding character quickly and believably.

*General

How does the audience know it’s improvised? The suggestion. It’s also the way that the audience member interacts with the players to become part of the show. This workshop will teach skills in incorporation of audience suggestions in creative ways, from initiation through to the end of the scene. As well, you will learn how to deflect “bad” suggestions. Great for people looking to improve MC skills.

*General

*Amplified music and chalkboard/flipchart ideal but not required

Do we pay attention to touch? Is bodily sensation a part of your improv or are you just a talking head? In this workshop, we will get in touch with our bodies, get in touch with our partners, and add a new layer to our Improvisation.

Learn how to:
Allow physical touch to resonate in your own body
Let touch affect you and your character
Expand your awareness of touch and physical proximity

*Intermediate/Advanced

All good things must come to an end, but they should have a beginning and middle too. This workshop will reinforce the hallmarks of good group storytelling and narrative plot structure, allowing you to create longer, coherent stories. You will learn some short form games and be introduced to the La Ronde Longform. With longer workshops, the La Ronde can be performed at the end.

*General-Intermediate

You’ve learned the fundamentals of scenework and practiced a few longforms. Now, free yourself from the trappings of structure and let your team react to every shared impulse. Learn tricks to make your Longform more fluid and dynamic and recognize themes that appear naturally. All this can give added theatrical meaning to your improv. Everything you know and have experienced can be channeled into strong, free, artistic improv.

*Intermediate

Use callbacks, reincorporation, and patterns to be brilliant. When an audience member “gets it,” it is a cathartic moment, a surprise, a relief, a laugh. Recognition of a pattern is hard-wired into our human brains and we can use it on stage. Learn techniques to make patterns and use callbacks, tickle those hard to reach right frontal lobes, and delight your audiences.

*General

This amazing longform combines a sincere, beated narrative story with free floating inspiration. The Pretty Flower form consists of a main story (the bud) that inspires tangential scenes (the petals) which add characters to the next beats of the main story. Inspiration folds in on itself to create a beautiful and textured play. In this workshop, participants will learn the format and exercises to take back to their teams to practice and perform.

*Intermediate

Create your creation. The product of this workshop is a brand new improv form. With your team or any group of improvisers willing to step into the laboratory, we will discover the elements you love about improv, explore our goals for the actors, curate our audience experience, and design a show ready to perform that night!

*Advanced