So we come to week 6 of improv. The final week. In this week’s class we focused on scenes and straight improv but not before we did some warm up exercises!

 

Starting off we did “ninja” where we killed each other with random tools and making random sounds and movements, I can tell you one thing I wouldn’t want to be killed by any of that lot! We then did biippidy bippidy bop (I am open to correction on that spelling!) this was a lot of fun! It ended up with a lot of pleading looks to Neil and him having a couple of tough decisions to make!

 

Three line dialogue was back this week! Lots of stories including me not putting the bins out and calling my housemate a crazy lady. It was at this point I realised I was ALWAYS angry in my scenes…..hmmm a trend there perhaps?

 

The night was all about open scenes. This essentially meant getting one word suggestions from the “audience” and making scenes around that word. Sounds easy right? Eh no…. For one of our first ones, me and my partner got lampshade. It ended up with me yelling at him that I was leaving him in the middle of a light shop…..again angry…. Hmmm….

 

Probably one of my favourite scenes was the place suggestion scene. We were in a hospital for this. I was a doctor with my partner as a janitor. Seems easy enough. Add in stressed as the emotion, Chinese as the first accent, Dutch as the second accent and ecstatic as the last emotion and it becomes a jumble mess! It was great fun though….I am not entirely sure we got the accents right though….a strong hint of Dublin in them both…

 

 

 

One of the scenes which was the strangest for me was one where my partner and I just started the scene on the same level (if you remember my blog on status?); we were both teaching a class on speeding. Again I was the angry one in this!

 

 

Doing straight scenes was a scary experience, taking a word from the audience and working with it was a terrifying idea and a large part of me had to seriously fight to not give in to the flight mechanism going off in my brain! Once I got into my stride I really enjoyed them a lot.

 

So improv is over, sniff sniff. I actually am a little sad that the course is over. I have really enjoyed doing the course and we had a really nice bunch of people in the class too which always helps! I decided to do the course for many reasons, which included gaining confidence and in some small way gaining some knowledge, I think, in fact I know I have gotten so much more out of it. I am looking into doing the level 2 improv course, as John Cremer says, “The scariest part of doing improv is the 10 minutes before your first ever class starts. After that, you’re addicted”. I think I am well and truly addicted at this stage!

 

Tis confession time now, every week Neil has very kindly sent me the videos you have watching in my posts but today as it’s my last one I have decided to include a video of him and some members from his own improv group Laughalot Improv. So as you can see Neil doesn’t just talk the talk….

 

So the question remains, would you like to unlock your potential? Would you like to gain confidence and so much more? Well Neil is running another Level 1 Improv course from July 30th and he still has some places left, all the details can be found here. I really really recommend you do it. You won’t regret it!