This week was the last lesson of musical improv and it was sad to see it go but I think at the same time it has given me ideas for the future. This weeks lesson was a bit different to the others that we have had because we focussed more on getting ready for the showcase and running through the games and structure of what we are going to do for the show which we had the evening after.

We started with a round of warm ups to get our voices in tune and to get ready for a night of improv. We then went through all the games that we have played over the past seven weeks – everything thing from the do ron rons to the hoe downs. We had a go at all of these are they were great fun to do and it felt like we were all working well as a team.

We finished off the evening with a musical about a farm – it was good fun and had a lot of different stories that tied nicely together at the end. On the Wednesday night we had our performance and did a bit of all of games and structures that we had learnt in the course. It was fun to do the short form games on stage and it was fun to hear the laughter when the audience realised what you were doing for rhymes. Here are just a few of my highlights from the showcase:

+ The hoedown about puppets I managed to bring in Sooty and it got a big laugh. My verse was something like:

I do not like my job it is very bland, 
All I do is move puppets by putting them on my hand, 
I need a new job but I don’t know what to do,
I guess at the moment I will have to stick with Sooty, Sweep and Sue.

+ Me and Helen had to do a love song about two people in the audience called Ivan and Terry who only met yesterday and were on a first date – we got a lot of laughs for incorporating their names into the songs and by taking the mickey of their jobs and throwing improvised money at the audience.

+ In the musical at the end which was about Greggs, Careston produced a really high energy chorus for the opening number that was fun to be a part of.

+ Luke wanted to sing a certain song in his scene and pretty much forced Phil to play a song which made the audience laugh. It became a very fun song that made all the people that weren’t in the scene jump in and become a machine.

It was a fun night and a great eight weeks and I hope to do some more musical improv in the near future.

Case Study – Phil Lunn

This week there was only one person that I wanted to use as a case study and that was Phil Lunn, my musical teacher for the past 2 months. I have learnt so much from him about structure and how to do musical improvisation that it has heightened my love for the style even more then it was before.

It has been such a privilege to learn from someone so skilled and I definitely want to do the advance course in the future. I feel that these eight weeks have started to direct me in a route of deciding what I want to do in the future with my improv and I am already coming up with ideas to do a solo set intertwined with musical improv to try and bring my guitar and music playing into a show.

I feel all these new objectives would not of been possible or even come to mind if it wasn’t for being taught by Phil. Just from learning the game formats and the music structures I feel that it is opening my eyes as to what I want to become and what I want to do.