Santa Barbara Improv Workshop

There are few people I know who can authoritatively write about the difference between improv and comedy. John Kinde has just the right skill set, and a great article to prove it.
John has an interesting background, and it includes teaching improv. Right now he’s living in Las Vegas, but for several years he lived and [...]

Ben Whitehouse over at the Improvoker has written an interesting article about comedy in improv. He discusses the difference between going for a quick gag in a scene vs. building up a truthful scene that is funny in a complex, emotional way. The sort of difference you’d find between fast food and a complex, gourmet [...]

Okay, this is a very silly entry about a personal bias in my own scene work. I found this blog posting which has pictures of some rather creative sandwiches.
It doesn’t take many workshops to learn of my tendency to start a scene by miming the making of a sandwich. From now on, I will have [...]

I have been slowly transitioning from Blogger hosting the Santa Barbara Improv blog to this WordPress blog which is directly hosted at the www.sbimprov.com site. The techno-details are of interest to very few of you, but the important impact is that I plan on retiring the Blogger site and only updating this one. If you [...]

Hiya all – I’m back! Borneo was fabulous, very different than I expected, but easy, inexpensive, quite interesting, beautiful, and the food was fantastic. I was mainly in Malaysia and Brunei, and I can recommend it to just about anyone as a great vacation spot.
I got back in time to sit in on Victoria’s class [...]

For the next few weeks, Victoria will be teaching the workshop. I’m on vacation until Thanksgiving (I’ll be traveling in Malaysia) and this coming Wednesday November 1 the class is canceled. But the following Wednesdays will see Victoria shaking things up.
Also, while I’m gone, this blog won’t be updated much (or at all). I’ll be [...]

We are canceling the class for Wednesday, November 1, 2006. The entire facility is being used for a rummage sale and they don’t have an alternate space available. I wasn’t able to find us another location (within budget and time constraints), so we’ll cancel for this week.
Sorry about any inconvenience.

Last Tuesday morning (3:00 am), we had a very weird power surge at my home which blew out all of our computers. Although I was able to get access to the internet, the photos I had for a couple of blog posts were stuck on those systems.
Just a couple of hours ago, we finally got [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Bill Arnett at iO Chicago wrote up another interesting post, this time about “the right way to do a scene”. His point: there really isn’t a right way to do a scene. There are plenty of things you can do wrong, but there isn’t some absolute best way for a [...]

I want to direct you to series of posts by Ben Whitehouse in his blog Improvoker (which is a great name). He’s going through a UCB (Upright Citizen Brigade) class in New York: Improv 201. At this point, there are only two entries, but the class is focusing on long form work and “finding the [...]