Santa Barbara Improv Workshop

I want to thank Mikki for snapping pictures through this class. I had a pretty good set to chose from.
We had a particularly good night, and it was nice change to have an experienced set of players. I love having new folks come into the workshop, but it’s also good to have a small, [...]

I just got word that players from Caught in the Act will be performing at Laughingstock 3: Rumble in the Comedy Jungle this Friday, September 1 at 6:00 pm. That’s scheduled to be a Free-For-All, so we’ll be mixed in with other players. At this point, the players from SB Improv will be Jim, [...]

The Ventura Area Theater Sports group is hosting their annual Improvathon this Labor Day Weekend at their Livery Theatre. This year the event is called Laughingstock III: Rumble in the Comedy Jungle. They host an extended weekend of improv shows and events, hosting groups from around California, and this year at least one group from [...]

The term Yes And is a short hand reference to the concepts of Acceptance and Addition. These are core concepts of improv; actually the core concepts of improv.
In an improvised scene, the players are building everything from scratch: setting, plot, and characters. It is critical that when one player defines some component of a scene [...]

I brought the camera … really, I did!
It was broken … no, really … ask Andy
Rats!
So, no pictures this week. Really unfortunate because there was some great physical work. I think just about everyone came up with interesting characters for the Class Picture scenes, and several had great physical traits. And, Emotional Zone kept everyone [...]

David Razowky has a great little article discussing what to do when a scene has spun out of control. To summarize:

Make sure each line of dialog starts with “You …”, keeping the focus on each other
Be honest when confused or lost
Tell your partner how you feel about them
Slow the scene down – allow silences and [...]

Last Saturday’s Caught in the Act show was great fun. We had 5 players for this one: Andy, Jim, Mike, Patrick, and myself (Alan). We got 18 games into the hour and half show.
We always video tape the shows for the players to review and so here are a few images I was able to [...]

Well, no photos from this class; I forgot the camera. Ah well, next time.
We had 5 new players show up this week. They came with a variety of stage experience but not much improv. That made for a pretty fun class, although with 16 people in the workshop right now, our range of experience [...]

Another large class, this time about 16 people. And, the camera became a group tool that anyone could pickup and use to snap a shot or two. So, we had a pretty good selection from the class.
Early on, we went through an exercise of hitch-hiker, and this is a shot of Metro, Patricia, and Scott.
I [...]

Okay, generally I focus on Improv as performance, typically comedy improv.
However, this just caught my fancy, and I felt like it needed to be shared. It involves an additional (or more correctly, an occasional) pastime of mine.
The public announcement is so well written, I’m going to be lifting direct quotes from the webpage:
The Fallen Fruit [...]