(note: this is just me collecting together things I’ve already written)
When I’m teaching improv to beginners. These are the exercises I like to use (depending on the time available).
Teaching YesAnd
(the Saturday Morning game)
Sometimes I’ll follow this up with, yesand story, Yesand experts, then maybe arms experts.
Meeting the Monster (a variant on word at a time).
Ding! (Maybe I will have used this as a warm up).
Then finally,
A great exercise I learnt from Patti Stiles to practice mime and playfulness
-Player one enters. Sets up the location in as much detail as possible using mime. Leaves.
-Player two enters. Causes as much mischief as they can in the mimed environment. Leaves.
-Player one enters again, discovers mess.
You can then have player one try to fix things, and then leave again. Then have Player Two come back in again, only to have player one come in and discover them.
It’s a lot of fun, and really gets people paying attention to their own and other people’s mime.
I’ve been up to my neck in improv of late. Not only am I rehearsing full time for a devised/improvised show (more on which later no doubt), but I recently had the good fortune to attend a series of workshops with Patti Stiles, who is absolutely lovely.
I’ll be going through my notes over the next few weeks. But here’s one thing that stuck in my mind;
I often have the problem of not knowing how to act in situations where I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. For instance, I don’t want to enter a scene if I can’t work out exactly what someone is miming. Patti’s advice was to come in with a strong emotional response, eg walk in and gasp, or laugh, or cry. Which seems to me like a very useful little tip.
In unrelated news. Some Story Robot fan art from Saki Miyamoto!
