It’s not just me who has had their life changed by improv, many people have and we are going to hear their stories!

Today we hear from Jane an improviser who is part of London based team ABOB whose redundancy from her job took her on a path of discovery…

Improv came into my life many many years ago when I listened to Whose Line is it Anyway when it was still just a show on Radio 4. I’m old, something I’ve realised, but still without enough of a sense of my own mortality, due to doing improv. I’m associating with and meeting lots of people at least ten years younger than myself or simply half my age. I need to start a group for the middle aged yet I wonder if I’d find them too old for me due to my own increasing level of immaturity. But then, as improvisors, they might be devolving too.

I first started doing improv in the summer of 2014. I’d started drama therapy in January and by March I was a totally different person. Back then, I was unemployed and unemployable (still am).  My redundancy money from the Civil Service was all gone and I had no wish or ability to return to the workforce. Spending more than twenty years in a job I hated which caused my very soul to shrivel up and die will do that to a person. So I came up with my latest impractical and wishing-on-a-dream idea which was to become a storyteller? Like that would pay the bills? I was already attempting writing and was slowly developing in that area. The Storyteller brainchild was some sort of notion in which the audience would walk between various locations like a walking tour only with a fictitious story … ? Whatever my ill thought out idea was I had none of the skills to actually make this happen, what with being a socially anxious depressive with no actual confidence, a state of being that encapsulated my entire life up to that moment. I dredged up an old notion that drama therapy would be ideal for me and googled ‘drama therapy, London’. I probably did include the comma in the search box. I tend to be very formal with my internet searches. Again, it’s my age.

Right at the top of the whajamacallits was ‘Making Moves’. And I did something I had never done before – I took the plunge to do a class, an activity, which would involve me having to interact with other people, strangers at that. I was desperate, depressed and broke and a future ahead of me which, if I didn’t do something different, would just be a repeat of the first forty-five years of my life, and if that happened then I might as well just kill myself. I wasn’t doing anything I wanted to do, thanks to fear, and probably laziness, but mainly due to depression. I was incapable of taking any productive steps toward the future I wanted (I’ve since done a lot of personal development and trained as a life coach so I do tend to talk like that – ‘taking productive steps toward the future I want’. It’s okay, I know what I sound like – someone who does a lot of ‘personal development’. I even mean it, what with it giving me a life and everything.).

So I booked for both the Intro evening and the twelve week course with Making Moves and after a baffling and bewildering Intro evening I was glad that I had done it, and surprised that I’d been able, but then everyone on the course was in the same deficient boat as me and we shared many a terrified look throughout the evening. After the twelve week course with the utterly brilliant Claire Schrader I found I’d developed real confidence – again, because of all the ‘personal development’ and the ‘life coaching’ I have to call it ‘authentic’ confidence and mean it. I immediately signed up for another Making Moves course – Improv! Get a load of me, spending money on myself where I actually need it. (I still do, so I’m still broke.) And I loved it. I did the Improv 2 course with Claire and then all her other courses. The following year I signed up with Hoopla’s Beginners course.

That was a huge thing for me to do, to join in with a group of people who weren’t coming at Improv, or anything for that matter, from a therapeutic angle. No one broke down in tears during these classes. And although everyone naturally stood round in a circle at the beginning of each class, there was no passing round of the candle as each of us told the others about ourselves – so no opportunity for tears there either. If anyone had for some reason cried I would have found it perfectly normal and nowadays recommend folks to go ahead and cry in public, if for no other reason just to see how others respond.

Attending that first Hoopla class was my first time meeting people who weren’t work colleagues, or family, or people I had to meet for some reason or other, you know how sometimes you’re just forced to meet people? Thanks to Claire I was able to socialise – I really couldn’t before. Crippling shyness since I was a tot meant I’d never learned actual social skills. I couldn’t have fallen for a better art form or been in safer hands at Hoopla nor been in better company – Improv folk are the kindest and friendliest folk.

My love for Improv grew. I felt like I was becoming a ‘real’ person, someone who did things, and who wasn’t afraid of life. And it was funny! I was sometimes funny, and everyone else was funny and there was always laughter, people, always laughter.

So the impact of joining the improv community has been one of the biggest and most important things in my entire life. I’ve only recently become aware that I am capable of connecting to people. I owe that to Dave Razowsky. On the first day of a week long workshop he said something that triggered me. Dave was asking/shouting questions and I kept insisting I didn’t feel anything and I didn’t know how I was feeling in that exact moment. It wasn’t until the end of the week that I was able to process that moment and I had the epiphany that I had been, and was able to connect to people. I was so happy! And exhausted. So improv is still very therapeutic for me, even though that’s not the number one reason to keep doing improv courses.

Improv is also costing me a lot – a lot – of money. I’m writing this in LA, don’t you know! After doing the IO week long intensive in London, I decided I just had to – I just had to, I tell you – actually come to LA for five weeks and do Improv here. I would never ever have entertained such a thing just a few years ago. Being alone, in a strange city … It’s been grand! And I’m seeing so much improv. Free improv is the best, not because it’s free, but because I get to see The Heydays, The Reckoning, The Cook County, Opening Night, Red Door and Dummy every week.

Thanks to the magic of Improv I’m thinking of doing a magic course – Not really. That’s just another option I now have should I want to thanks to, well, thanks to the drama therapy, and the improv which I feel has kept up what got started back then. Improv has continued to help me with my confidence, to allow me to be ‘seen’ which was apparently a thing for me, as I considered myself an invisible lump for forty-five years. I get to keep challenging myself, working my brain and learning about myself.

Improv lives up to its ‘cult’ status as I just cannot stop taking courses. It dominates a good chunk of my time and that’s fine with me. My priority is still my writing and I know improv has loosened me up and influenced how I approach a project.

I consider myself very fortunate to be a part of Abob – so kind and patient with me, I feel – and am hoping to perform in a 2-prov or two. Which would be appropriate. For 2-prov.