This weekend was the last Saturday of training as a Beginner, but i have enjoyed the lessons so much that I have signed up to the Improvers which starts this Wednesday, so this set of blogs is going to continue! This week in lessons it was focussing on bringing all the elements we have learnt over the past couple of weeks together to create scenes. We learnt that scenes can be created in a variety of ways and to test this we did a game where the a scene was played out and the players could only use questions to answer each other. The next time they could only answer each other with statements no questions, the next time was where no word could contain the letter S and the last game was to answer in only one word. This was really helpful to do to understand the different expressions and emotions that can be brought out doing this.

Last night we celebrated the end of the Beginners lessons by going to see our teachers, Ian and Bev perform in their own Improv group that takes Newcastle by storm every time they perform.

The Suggestibles

The Suggestibles have been rocking the Newcastle scene for 10 years and are made up of a variety of players with the core team being Ian McLaughlin, Bev Fox, Carl Kennedy and Alex Ross.

Until last night I had not seen them perform and it was a fantastic show and I recommend that anytime you come to Newcastle you see if they are performing. It was great to see our tutors on stage and really showing us the high quality that they perform at and it was a great eye opener and also a bit like a drug – it made you want more and to inhale even more of the improv world and jump back into learning more.

At the end of the second half, the group performed a improvised musical which ended up being about hypnotherapy, this is when I was introduced to a whole different world of improv i never knew existed. In previous articles, I have wrote about Noise Next Door who do include music within their shows however this was a completely different ball game. It wasn’t just a song it was a whole story and musical piece of theatre made up completely on the spot.

As soon as the musical started I could feel my eyes widen and my mouth stretch out into a permanent smile, no i wasn’t drunk it was the whole format, it completely mesmerised me. It had everything you would want from a musical – humour, great songs, an interesting story and a reference back to songs that were nearer the beginning. As you have probably guess from the blog that I write, I am a huge fan of both music and comedy and when they come together and create some magical it tends to be a really big deal to me.

The fact that music can be used in improv at that level has really made me want to explore the next level of imrpv and makes me interested to see what happens in the next stages!.