Tag Archives: instruction

Feb 25

Emotional Heights/Depths exercise

Emotional Heights/Depths: Committed emotion should be an improviser’s base at all times. We need to be able to exhibit the highest highs and lowest lows on stage so we need to practice emotion at the extremes to become comfortable in that space.

EMOTION TO 11 – Teacher gives students an emotion. The class gives a suggestion of what to emote to. Around a circle, students engage in that emotional perspective toward that suggestion, ramping up from 1-10 to 11. You’ll need to be attentive in this one since people tend to hit walls here. They really need to go bonkers and forget to make sense in what they’re saying. If someone really clams up, offer to do it with them, alongside them. Use your judgment to know when to push and when to let it go.
Progression:
• Give big, round, easy emotions, “happy, sad, fear, anger”
• Push people, gently “more, bigger” to discover and emote. Don’t be mean. Do it with them if they struggle.
Lessons:
• Exude the emotion physically – 11 in sadness is rolling on the floor and weeping
• Push it past comfortable – being vulnerable enough to share big emotions can be hard, but we have to trust each other and the safe place to “go big” in practice. Support each other with applause.
• Being bored or unaffected is hard to heighten – care

Feb 25

Emotional Context exercise

Emotional Context: Committed emotion is all the “what” and “why” a scene needs. What’s extra fun is that, when we do have emotion, that emotion can add/change the meaning of our words and heighten the depth of our scenes.

EMOTIONAL NURSERY RHYME – Around a circle, a player recites a common nursery rhyme with an emotional filter. The next player does the same nursery rhyme, further heightening the same emotion or trying on a new emotion. Repeat with different nursery rhymes.
Variations:
• Song lyrics
• Old salts / sayings
Lessons:
• The details gain weight with our emotional perspectives
• Acting is emoting – understanding a motivation can be hard and grueling. Committing to an emotion without regard to “sense” is easy and fun.

Feb 25

Emotional Character Development exercise

Emotional Character Development: We don’t need it “all figured out” the moment we step on stage. Make one choice and then build other choices on top of that choice.

We can start with emotion and build the details of our character around that. Or, we can start with a detail and build an emotional character from there.

CHARACTER WALK – students walk around the space as themselves. Teacher gives prompts for them to make choices from (see Progression below). Teacher asks additional questions to flesh out the characters. Teacher has students reset, returning to walk around the space as themselves again. And repeat.
Progression:
• Have players change elements of their personal walk to see how it affects the way they feel
• Change your rate – speed up, slow down
• Change your size – is your walk big or small?
• Walk with a different body part forward
• Change your spine
• Be an animal
• Walk like someone you know
• Ask the class to try on a different:
• Emotion
• Posture/Physicality
• Desire (I want…)
• Perspective (I like…, I hate…)
• Environment
• Action
• Ask questions to flesh out the character. Basically “if this, then what”; for example, how do you feel about the action you’re doing, or how does that desire affect your walk?
• Ask students to speak in their character’s voice – calling out students individually to contribute
• Tell students to acknowledge each other’s presence to discover their ‘status’
Lessons:
• Don’t let starting a scene be intimating – all you need to start is one choice

Feb 25

Emotional Matching exercise

Emotional Matching: If we agree, we can just be; we don’t have to explain or defend. Have fun just being emotional together, trusting that your commitment to the same emotion is all the context for your relationship that’s needed.

EMOTIONAL CHAIR PASS – It’s like hitchhiker, but just two people, and the suggestion is an emotion, not a character. Set up two chairs on the stage and the rest of the class in an audience. One person sits and expresses an emotion to the audience. When someone in the audience thinks they know what it is, they get up, take the other chair and match it, then sit in it for a sec. You call “scene,” the first person sits, and the second one repeats the activity with a new emotion. Someone gets up, matches, sits there for a second, feels it, then sits. Repeat.
Variations:
• After 3 or so, start asking, during the “sitting in it” portion, the same Character Walk questions: What kind of person sits like this? Where are they?
• Allow students to acknowledge each other. Eventually they’ll be drawn to exchange some lines, encourage that. You will have tricked them into doing a matching scene.
Lessons:
• If we agree, we can just be; we don’t have to explain or defend.
• Trust that your commitment to the same emotion is all the context for your relationship that’s needed.

Feb 25

Emotional Scene exercises

Emotional Scenes: “How we feel about who we are, where we are and what we’re doing,” and “How we feel about who our scene is, where they are and what they’re doing” should be our focus in improv scenes. Let “How we feel” trump all else, especially plot and “sense.”

Suggested Exercises:

“I [FEELING] YOU.” “I KNOW.” – Players form two “lay-up” style lines on either side of the stage. Players at the front of each line decide on an emotion inside their heads. Player from the stage left line comes out and says “I [blank] you” (i.e. “I love you”). Player from the stage right line comes out and says “I know” filtered through the emotion they chose ahead of time (i.e. they chose “sad” so they say “I know” very depressed). Have both player repeat their lines 3 or 4 times, heightening their emotions each time.
Variations:
• Linguistically “I ____ You” can get a little weird (i.e. “I happy you”), so feel free to change it to make it fit. Like “you make me happy,” actually “You make me _____” will probably fit better for most things.
Lessons:
• Feel a certain way, direct that feeling at the person with you, assume things about your relationship, heighten
• As they go, there’ll be a few that seem really natural. If you see it happen, some cool points to make are “didn’t you start making a story in your head about who they are? Our audience does the same thing, they see all kinds of connections” or “when we talk about relationship this is all it is, how people relate to each other, how they feel about each other.”

ANNOYANCE-STYLE SCENE STARTS – Have the class form a line across the back of the stage. Call out one name. That person should immediately take the stage and “take care of themselves” with a choice about their emotion, posture, environment, activity, etc. The moment you call that name, another improviser should be coming out on stage as well. That person must also “take care of themselves” with a choice. Players expand on their choices, most importantly establishing and heightening their emotional perspective. Run through this several times until you are confident everyone will take care of themselves right out of the gate and, eventually if not immediately, get to emotion.
Lessons:
• If I’m picking my nose, what does that say about my age? If I’m forty-five and picking my nose, where am I? If I’m forty-five and picking my nose in a restaurant, am I embarrassed?
• A scene needs information. But expand on what you’ve already got. Commit to it.
• You don’t need motivation to have a feeling

Feb 24

Magic Clay mime warm-up

MAGIC CLAY – Around a circle, a player builds a mimed object “out of clay” and then hands the object to another player who interacts with it as and then molds the “clay” into a brand new object. And repeat.
Variations:
• Weaponized Reactions – form a weapon out of the magic clay, attack another player with it. That player should react to the attack and die if called for.
• Weaponized Retractions – form a weapon out of the magic clay, attack another player with it but, before you attack, decide not to and put your weapon away. The key is to feel your desire to attack and then to feel the change of heart.

Feb 24

Mime exercises

Mime: Weight, volume and tension are the key characteristics of a mimed object that help players and the audience “see” the object. If nothing else, be deliberate – your commitment to engaging the environment will enable the audience to accept any weird ass thing you do.

Suggested Exercises:

INVISIBLE TUG OF WAR – Everybody has a tug of war but the rope is invisible, the rules are that the rope must look real, can’t stretch or be elastic. Have a little miming moment: “Feel the rope” etc. We aren’t playing by actual tug of war rules; the point is to have a scene where we look like we are. We aren’t on opposing teams; we’re all on the same “doesn’t this look like a real tug of war?” team.

 

BUILD A ROOM – With everyone else watching from the audience, a player enters a room through a door (push in?, pull out?, doorknob height?, door weight?), creates one mimed object somewhere in the space, and then leaves through the door. A second player enters, interacts with the first player’s object, creates their own new object, and then leaves. A third player enters, interacts with the first player’s object, interacts with the second player’s object, creates their own new object, and then leaves. Etcetera.
Lessons:
• With practice, mime work becomes instinct – So practice. When you’re engaged in an everyday action (brushing teeth, doing dishes, etc.) be conscious of your movements and the objects’ characteristics. Then try to mime those activities without the objects.
• Really picture what you’re creating
• If something’s not clear to you, don’t avoid it, feel the responsibility to make it clearer for everyone else

 

DO WHAT YOU DO WHERE YOU DO IT – Have a player engage in a mimed activity they are very familiar with in a space imagined based on their actual house/work/etc. Players from the audience get to ask questions that the player has to respond to in mime (“what’s on TV?”/ “what’s in the corner?”/ “Is it dirty or clean?”).
Lessons:
• Leveraging your personal life will make being specific easy

 

DO SOMETHING TOGETHER APART – Three people up at a time and silently do an action for a couple minutes: Fix your space ship, save your favorite zoo animal, build an instrument from scratch, etc. The activities are mimed and there should be little to no interaction between the players – like they are in their own world, like a split screen.
Lessons:
• As long as you commit, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing – three players can all be doing very different things and those activities won’t be in conflict as long as the players don’t address the conflict. Don’t know how to fix a carburetor? Fake it with commitment and everyone will believe you do.

Feb 24

Separating Speech And Action exercises

You Are Not What You Do: Let your miming inspire a scene but do not let it dictate the scene. When you and a friend engage an activity, how much dialogue goes to discussing that activity? Do you talk about doing the dishes while doing the dishes? Mime gives us something to do so we’re more than talking heads, but it shouldn’t confine us.

Suggested Exercises:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING – Players form two “lay-up” lines. One player mimes an action. The other player asks, “What are you doing?” The asked player says something unrelated to what they are actually doing. The asking player engages in this new activity. Then the first player now asks the second player, “What are you doing?”
Lessons:
• Separate mind and body – we need to be able to engage our bodies in an activity/environment without confining our mind to dealing with that activity/environment

 

MIMED SEQUENCE / DIALOGUE SEQUENCE – Two players on stage are given a suggestion of location. Each player, in mime – without interacting or trying to tell a story – must define five objects in the space. Then have players go back to their starting positions. Tell them to go through their sequence of mimed interactions now with dialogue and reacting to one another, BUT without talking about what they are doing.
Progression:
• Players will struggle not to talk about what they’re doing; stage coach quickly to get them re-centered if they go too far down that rabbit hole.
• Players will stop engaging environment and devolve to talking heads once they reach the end of their sequences; encourage them to keep engaged, developing new environmental elements while building on dialogue
Lessons:
• Activities gain weight in conjunction with the dialogue – don’t undermine subtext by making it explicit; let the audience make connections between what’s being done and what’s being said.
• A stage picture makes scenes more interesting – simply moving around the space and engaging in the environment – even if nothing is explicitly addresses or explicitly drives the scene – will make players engaged in dialogue more interesting to watch.
• Engage environment, rest your tongue – if we have something to do, we don’t have to rely so hard on our words

Feb 24

Sounds & Atmosphere exercises

Beyond Objects: Environment is about more than objects. What sounds fill the space? Ambient noises? Loud music? A series of unexpected explosions?

What about the atmosphere? Is it hot? Raining? Low gravity?

Suggested Exercises:

SOUNDSCAPE – Sit players in a circle, give them a location and have them build out the noises of that location. It’s basically one vignette in a Bat opening. Emphasize fleshing out the space. Remind them to share the air.
Variation:
• Let them create an environment without a suggestion, building on their contributed sounds
Lessons:
• Experience the cacophony – push them to explore all the different types of sound: words, mechanics, organics, ambiance, etc.

 

BIOSPHERE (a tweak of SPACE JUMP) – A short form game focused on exploring Atmosphere.  One player enters stage, miming their reaction to an atmosphere (temp, precipitation, pressure, etc.) – ex: shivering and saying, “It’s so cold in the arctic zone.”  A second player enters and changes which room of the Biosphere the two players are in – ex: trying to cover her head while saying, “Stupid rain forest area.”  Player One must immediately accept Player Two’s new reality.  A third player enters and establishes a brand new atmosphere for all three players to accept and react to.  Repeat with a fourth and fifth player.  Then have the fifth player leave stage to return the remaining players to the fourth atmosphere/environment.  Then the fourth player leaves, returning the scene to the third atmosphere.  Repeat until the initial player is back in the initial atmosphere/environment.

Lessons:

  • Atmosphere is the least utilized active element in improv – Do yourself the favor of engaging in it.
  • Explore the options – push them to explore all the different types of atmosphere: temp, precipitation, pressure, dust, fog, etc.
  • Feel it, just don’t speak to it – feel the drops of rain, become crippled by the cold, sweat in the heat, etc.
  • Silence is fun – Whether as Player One engaging environment in the first scene or Player Four joining the chorus, put more focus on embodying your reactions than explaining them.
  • Again, enthusiastic acceptance of another player’s contribution is improv’s superpower. Immediately accept whatever world you’re brought to and the audience will love you for it.
  • More people on stage necessitates more agreement – You can’t have four or more people on stage all with different perspectives/characters; it just gets too messy. Encourage players to agree to each other’s perspectives and mirror each other’s physicality to minimize the amount of “stuff” on stage and to focus the scene.
  • MORE PHYSICAL THE BETTER – players having to justify their physical position/pose moving through and back through the scenes is part of the fun.
    • In the sequence’s assent, it’s fun to transpose players’ physical positions into new worlds. Ex: Shielding your eyes in the Desert Zone becomes waving away mosquitoes in the Jungle Zone.
    • In transitioning back through the Sequence, a scene that had fallen into the doldrums is sparked back up when players leap to their previous stage positions in the Volcano Zone.
    • In the sequence’s assent, a scene of characters running around in eruption-fearing panic in the Volcano Zone transitioned into a scene of characters prancing around trying to catch Unicorn Butterflies in the Magical Zone. In transitioning back through the sequence, characters closely studying Unicorn Butterflies trapped in their fists become characters hunched over a lave-spewing volcano as if surrounding a trashcan fire, blowing in their cupped hands for the warmth (“I thought it would be hotter.”)