Santa Barbara Improv Workshop

A bit late on the posting for this class, but the pictures are now available in the on-line album: all 140 of them! This shot was from the 1-Word Story warm up at the beginning of class.

The night started off with a fairly standard set of warm-ups: Character Introductions, Pass the Clap, and 1-Word Story. Scene work started with a pretty good set of Tag Out Stories, and I think all the groups kept their energy accelerating through their scenes.

Next was a series of Superhero scenes. I thought the Superhero names were very clever (Black-Eyed Susan, Mismatched Lingerie Man, and Mrs. Grumpy Pants being my favorites) and everyone took their superhero name endowment to heart really well.

A series of Panel of Experts scenes followed with the topics Beekeeping, Vacations, Glass, and Sororities/Fraternities. Pretty good characters, and we need to work on getting those characters to have interesting history with and feelings about each other.

Also that night, we tried to introduce a song that’s pretty new for most of the players – the 50’s Do-wop Song. Let’s just say that was a challenge for me as well as for all the players. What it pointed out (to me anyway) was that we’ve become rather accustomed to the Irish Drinking Song and need the challenge of a new piece to get us out of our complacency. We will revisit this song in later workshops and work out the kinks!

We ended the night on a Double Blind Freeze Tag. I like this version of Freeze Tag because it forces everyone into a scene, and forces everyone to call out a “freeze”. Both skills are needed to participate in the more traditional Freeze Tag.

And that was the night!