This week there was not one but TWO Punders shows – I couldn’t make it to one of them (although I heard they aced it) so instead I will talk about the one I COULD make and that was on the Saturday at the Hoopla Impro Pre-Party.

Due to the time of the year and having two shows this week a lot of people couldn’t make the show on the Saturday so myself and James decided to go it alone and try some Short Form Twoprov. We obviously chose games that were two players so that they would work but we also decided that to make it fun we should have a special guest. Stuart Moses aka Improv London Podcast, has always been our awesome tech guy for our shows and I thought that because he is actually a great improviser it would be lovely to have him on stage with us and boy he did not fail to make us proud.

We wanted to test what would happen if we put him into one of our most complicated games without any rehearsal time to see how he would cope. The Pre-Party is a great place to try out new things and also we felt that he was such a great improviser that he would be up for the challenge and luckily he was.

Last week on this site I was discussing that sometimes the most simplest games can work in front of an audience (for example The Two Ronnies) so we decided to try New Choice with a Rhyming twist to see how it was reacted to by an audience. It did not disappoint it completely Two Ronni-ed our audience and worked brilliantly. It got laughs in the right places and Stuart who was doing the New Choice change got the aim of the game and made it work fantastically. It went down a storm and went to my number one spot of games to play in front of an audience.

The other two games that we played were ones that we have played before and went down a storm. We got such a great response and it is the first time in a while that i have walked out of a show with more then one stranger coming up to me saying ‘I loved your set.’ I was feeling ill but felt like a rock star.

In rehearsal this week it was all about focusing on our main show in November, we had a vote on a polling website the other day to find out what games we all wanted to play in the show and have narrowed it down to 10 games. This week was all about playing the games and to see where we can make a different game to maybe what the audience has seen before.

We love remixing games even if we have a different spin on it already as it makes us fresh and unique and that is what we love about it. We have already put a completely different spin on a game we originally created. It is madness – but fun at the same time!

This week was a great one for improv.

Case Study – Improv London

I didn’t really want to go into depth about the second game of our set until I got to our case study because it really does highlight just how much fun Stuart Moses is as an improviser. We decided to put him in Mirrors as the straight man who basically keeps the scene steady and moving forward. We threw Stuart into this with no training what so ever and wanted to see how well it worked.

We are so lucky to have Stuart as our regular tech guy at shows so it is not as if we were throwing him into the game completely blind, however he had never played it before. We are the only improv group that plays it on the London scene and was introduced to us by our old teammate Ben. It is a really difficult game to master and even though we have played it a lot we are still sometimes trying to find our feet with it.

Stuart is a very good improviser and I don’t think it is because he has been doing it for a long time I also think it is because he learns a lot on his way. In his spare time, just how I write this site, Stuart hosts and records Improv London and talks to some of the best improvisers on the scene. I find from interviewing acts for this site that I learn so much new stuff and I am sure it is the same from Stuart. It is so evident the amount of information he has absorbed and is sort of like an chameleon  in the fact that you can put him into pretty much any scene and he will adapt to the scenario very well. It was a pleasure to have Stuart as an honoury Punder and to be honest, he always will be. If we had Blue Peter ‘Punder’ badges he would be the first to get one.