I don’t know whether its because I am an only child, an aquarius trait or just my personality, but i don’t like feeling left out.  So when i turned up to imrpov practise with my troupe Punderstandanbly and there were people with no place to go because their lesson had been cancelled with no notification, i felt it was only right to invite them along and do something about it – improvise a lesson last minute. Now, i am a organised person, its mainly because if i dont keep my life strutured it comes out in my sleep and i sleep walk and always wake up through it (i used to keep a sleep walk / dream diary website but I will tell you more about THAT on a rainy day…) One of my mates at university used to be fascinated how i can juggle so much at one go.

I mean, even now i do – I work in TV as an Editor and Motion Graphics Designer, write articles for this site whenever I get a  spare moment (bluetooth portable small travel keyboards – lifesavers), do improv shows and everything in between. Anyway back to the improv…

For our troupe meeting, I had a few game ideas but nothing set in stone, just something to do if we needed it but now i had offered to do a sort of lesson and had to think fast. Our improv troupe do Short Form in a Long Form style, so I thought because we had new troupe members, that the best thing to do was fpcus on the short form games – all members who wanted to train with the lesson they were attending could jump in anywhere and the new troupe members could have fun settling in.

In the small time I had to plan a lessoon (5 minutes to be precise) I flashed through all the games and warm ups i found useful and tried to theme them to be all about a similar topic – i decided to use games that are focussed topic – Character and Emotion. They are two things that get left out a lot on improv and felt they are good topics to focus on.

We started with a warm up name game that I remembered being quite a fun game I learnt with Carleen a while ago. You are all superheroes and you have to say what your special power is and then assign a special power to the person to your left and then they have to come up with a name for their Superhero!

I then decided to do a game that I found really fun in Katy Schuttes drop in that I find a great way to get into character. You get someone to go into the middle of the circle and then people shout adjectives and a job profession and then you have to do an impersonation of what that would be like. This is a great game to get into the role of characters,

One of our troupe, Punderstandably favourite improv warm up games to play is a rapping one that our former member Kevin brought with him from America. The game hasa rhythm   that you have to follow and you start with a one syllable name and then have to go round the circle rapping to the same theme. So If the name was Bob the end of each persons rhyme would be slob, cob, fob etc

Before we started anything tonight I had a coffee with Caroline and was talking about how sometimes it’s hard to jump into a scene and tag someone out in long form – to help her develop in this I thought the best game to play was two versions of Freeze Tag – the normal version and the blind version where you have your back to the scene and freeze the scene and nominate who jumps in.  The game is a great way to practise both jumping into a scene and when to edit it just by hearing narration.

Before we went into the next stage of the lesson I thought it was time to bring up the energy and did a game that I have done with Steve before. You start with a really boring sentence like “it’s really cold” and the person next to you mimics what you have done but heighten the emotion and physicality. This means that when it goes round the circle it creates a fun and dramatic effect to the mundane sentence.

After doing a few warm up games we went on to do the mini game where you change it to all questions and then all statements. After doing a few rounds of these we made it really difficult by making it no s t or e allowed in words. It was a good way to warm the brain muscles up.

We then went onto a few games that were more focussed on the scene. The first game that we played was emotional rollercoaster, although we decided that when you get given an emotion you have to heighten it to its absolute limit to see how crazy the scene could get! It was a fun way to play the game and really see how crazy you can play a situation on stage.

After playing Rollercoaster themed game we went onto new choice, making it that anything like movements as well as something someone said could be changed when the bell rang. It was good fun and nice to see how extreme again we could take a scene.

We finished off the session with a game that I sort of did to dedicate to my case study this week as it was something that we used to end a lot on in Newcastle and I remember how excited my case study was when they were first introduced to it – The Eastenders version of Zip Zap Zop.

I went into The Nursery this  week to just have a first meeting of the summer with my group Punderstandably and ended up teaching a lesson completely by accident. It was a really fun experience and felt quite rewarding at the end. Even though it wasn’t a proper lesson it was still good fun and felt rewarding at the end when the stragglers that had come to a cancelled lesson came up to me and said thank you for a really fun night.

Case Study – Bev Fox & Ian McLaughlin 

When thinking about a case study for this week there was only two names that came to mind and that person was Bev Fox  and Ian McLaughlin of The Suggestibles. If you are new to the site then let me introduce you to Bev and Ian. I got into Improv comedy in October 2015 when I had to move to Newcastle for my job, i decided initially to take a course in improv comedy for a feature for this site and ended up loving it so much that nearly 2 years later, i am still acting the clown both on stage and in life.

This week when I saw that people had attended a cancelled class and I offered to make up a lesson plan last minute there was one thought that came to mind “what would Bev  and Ian do?” I thought about all the lessons that bed and Ian would teach us initially and tried to think of the fun and the skill they were constantly emphasising on us. I knew freeze tag was a must but I also remember in the early days emotion was a huge area that they both focussed on. I had a quick scan over my mind of lessons that I had done with Bev and Ian and chose the ones that I knew they would do in a similar situation.

I may not talk about the Newcastle scene a lot anymore since moving to London but I owe a lot to them and even to this day when I find myself in a random situation in improv I always think of Bev and Ian in the back of my mind. They are sort of like little improv mind bugs in the back of mind that whenever I face a scene or a game they prod my mind with their thoughts and what they would suggest. I owe a lot to Bev and Ian and  they will always be my Obi Wans of Improv – 300 miles away but always a projection in my mind.