All this month we are speaking to AndAlso Improv, a company that is in Brighton and is ran by Heather and Jules. They host many improv classes, host shows, with plans for a theatre in Brighton in the future! They also run an Improv retreat which is also happening this month! Today we find out all about the retreat plus all about Brighton’s Improv scene.

Hello Jules and Heather how are you both? How is 2024 been so far!

First word: tired. Our kids are three and one, and the younger has given up sleeping. Oh, and we are in the first year of this new business. BUT it’s a happy-grateful kind of tired. Neither of us is very good at sitting still.

Now since we last spoke, it looks like a lot has happened! We last spoke to you when you were part of the Nursery and now you are the Directors of &Also – tell us all about this exciting new venture!

AndAlso is our new company – it pulls together the online classes we started during parental leave, the Maydays classes in Brighton and some of the other things that we started with the Nursery many moons ago. So we’re in the lovely position of having done this for a long time and also (there’s the name) starting from scratch. Everything is still as fresh and new as the coming Spring.

It is also set up in Brighton – it is becoming quite a great hub for improv down there isn’t it?

For sure! The Maydays have our 20th anniversary this year – two decades years since the first drop in class, and it still runs every week, just with a different name. Those many years have created a community of fantastic improvisers and now there are a bunch of regular jams and performing troupes. It’s very active for quite a small city.  

What makes Brighton unique for improv compared to London?

It’s big enough to feel buzzy and vibrant, but small enough to feel like we’re all a part of the same thing. There’s a lot of variety, and people are very supportive. Pretty much the whole improv crowd knows each other, which you could never get in London.

What have been your highlights so far at &Also?

Our residentials. They brought together people who had only met as faces on a screen, scattered across the world. Turns out people can be wildly different heights from what you imagined. 

Oh, and this is not very sexy, but writing our new syllabuses. It’s a really good exercise to nail down what you believe in and how you want to teach it. It will never be finished, but we are proud of it, and how the teachers and students have responded to it. 

If we are going to talk about improv we HAVE To also discuss the retreat that is happening this month! tell us all about it!

We take a different theme each time, and this time it’s called ‘You and Not-You’. The idea is that we have habits in improv, and they are often the thing that made us take it up in the first place, and the reason people want to play with us, but we also want to stretch ourselves and expand into new ways of playing. So how do we do both without one jepordising the other? Just like the name of the company, it’s not a choice, it’s one AndAlso the other. 

What are your plans for the rest of the year?

Well, we have our new show residency at Daltons on Brighton seafront, another retreat, two Summer Intensives, two more terms and all being well, a new training centre to open. Oh yeah, and the inaugural Brighton Improv Festival this September – maybe now you can see why we’re tired.

If people want to find out more where can they find you on social media?

We’re on Facebook and Instagram as AndAlsoImprov. Not twitter though. Either we or the platform itself are too old, not sure which. 

Finally in three words describe &Also

Paradox. Explosion. Heart.