I’ll be teaching an improv performance class at Upstairs Gallery in June and July. This class is going to be awesome. I decided for this class that I should have an application process. I’m accepting applications until Sunday, then coming up with the roster by Tuesday.

Keep in mind that if I get enough people, I may open a second class on Sundays. So if you can’t make the Saturday class, but could make a Sunday one, please apply and note that in the application.

Feel free to send me a message via facebook or gmail (ircmullaney in both places) if you have a question.

Most improv training is focused on scenes. If you can do a good scene, you can do a good show, the thought goes. I’d like to suggest that the opposite is also true, or maybe more true, if you can do a good show, the scenes take care of themselves. When you learn how to take a character or an idea or a game and follow it through multiple scenes, you learn how better to play with characters, ideas and games within a scene.

This is how I’ll be approaching my upcoming performance workshop. We won’t start by working on openings, or breaking our form down into pieces. We will start by putting it all together. In the very first day, you will be doing 20-30 minute improvisations with your classmates. We will start with a narrow focus, a simple structure to be sure, but it will gradually expand over the weeks until we have a full form which follows games, explores themes, has group games and finds connections.

These won’t be Harolds. They won’t be that formal, but they will have many things in common with Harolds. And if you do this performance workshop, you will learn tools that will work in any kind of improv performance.

The latest episode of Improv Resource Center Podcast is up. I interview Megan Johns, a teacher at The Annoyance and a member of the New Colony. We talk about improv newbies, hybrid improv classes, and using improv to write plays. Megan’s latest show with the New Colony is 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche which runs through the end of July.

Each show will be about 80-90% improvised, but at least once per show we will drop in a scene from a great play (or TV series or film). For each show we will have a selection of scenes we have prepared to choose from, so we won’t even know for sure which scene we will be doing on a given night.

Read more at KevinMullaney.com.

I think that this whole thing about getting the who, what, where out in the first few lines is a scene killer. It may be this necessary building block for newbies, but when two moderately experienced improvisors are worrying about that stuff at the opening moments of a scene, it can be dreadful to watch and dreadful to do. 

One solution that I’ve advocated for years is just do something, anything at the beginning of the scene. Don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, don’t make the scene about that activity. Just do that thing so that your scene partner can join you and you can blow past the who, what and where. Start talking about anything else. This tends to work reasonably well.

But when you can do that, there is a whole different set of muscles to work on. They are acting muscles. You should be able to answer a bunch of questions in the beginning moments of a scene. How do I feel? What is my partners behavior? How do they feel? Do I like it? How do I feel in response? What do I want from my partner (in terms of behavior)? I like scenes where there is a whole dialog between the players not in words, but in behavior and emotional responses.

I wish a lot more of my scenes started that way, where I can ignore the who, what and where and simply concentrate on the how. How is my scene partner behaving? How do I feel in response? How far away from me are they? How fast is the tempo of this scene? How is my body shaped? How am I using the stage and the architecture of the space? When I focus on these things, the why comes automatically and the who, what and where just tumble out on their own, as if there were there all along.

I’m learning to play guitar. It is a tough, slow process. If I have a new chord to learn, it takes a lot of repetitions before that chord becomes second nature. I have to practice that shape with my fingers many times. I have to practice changing from chords that I already know to the chord I’m learning. The goal is to play that chord as quickly and as easily as I might say a phrase or sing a melody. But it doesn’t come with one lesson or with one or two practice sessions. It takes many sessions over many days and weeks and sometimes months for me to learn to play a chord with that kind of ease.

Sometimes I think we expect improv to work differently. (more…)

Here is a brand new episode of the Improv Resource Center Podcast. Armando Diaz, founder of the Magnet Theater, talks about connecting with your scene partner, initiations, using improv to write and how to teach better. Subscribe on iTunes.