At Edinburgh Fringe this year, there was a show that I saw that amazed me in it’s creativity, imagination, weirdness and uniqueness. It was one of those shows that I walked away from excited to write an article about because from an improv point of view there was so much that improvisers can take away from it. The show was so good, it went into my number one spot for my favourite show at the Fringe. You can read the review here. Today we look at lessons I took away that all improvisers can learn from.

Facial Expressions

One thing that I took away from this show is that facial expressions can play a key part in how you interact with an audience. So many improvisers do not use their facial expressions enough to connote emotion or expression.

In this show, Luke managed to get audience members to participate in the show just by doing looks. This simple technique created a lot of comedy and all it took was looking at the audience with his eyes expanded and different facial expressions with the crowd.

Accepting Everything

Due to the persona of Luke in this show and the bizarre world that he creates, he is so good at making the audience believe that everything he says is true and real in this reality that they just accept what is happening. For example, a toilet roll placed on his head is a long plaited pony tail that the audience pull away from him to help him escape. Due to the nature of the show and the way that he makes the audience believe what is happening that is why it works so well.

In improv, we can sometimes doubt what we are saying on stage and at times you can lose the audience but if you believe everything that you are saying and really own being a weird suggestion such as a Doctor for sick Pineapples, or a King of the Lampshades, people will believe it and go along with it and enter this world with you.

Audience Interaction

One thing this show highly relied on was audience participation and the way that Luke approached this was very clever and right as the audience entered the room the fun began.

The last thing I took away from this show from an improvisers perspective is think about how you are interacting with the audience and are there are ways you can do it differently. A lot of your audience may be new to improv so the most important thing is to create a safe environment, the way Luke did this was by making himself look like the clown the whole time and not making the audience member the ‘joke’. When the audience member felt safe it was their own decisions to act more silly and again it is all to do with the safe environment created.