Hi, I'm Charlie and from November I'll be running Improv with NTW TEAM, and as part of my preparation I have been attending an Improvisation course in Bristol run by Tristan Hancock, so it seemed like a good thing to blog about as these are the same skills we shall be covering.

Week 1:  Thursday 4^th October

Arriving at the church we would be rehearsing in, I was feeling pleasantly optimistic about the course, unusually unnervous, but most of all knackered. Hit hard with a case of man flu. But I bought myself a pint of milk and some chocolate, which helped perked me up. But what got me going most of all was Tristan’s energy and warmth throughout the session, and everybody commented on how wonderful it made the whole experience. The best impression I can give of Tristan is a stern bohemian, who is both benevolent, and also willing to don his “fascist” hat, as he liked to refer to it, and be direct and straight to the point. There’s no tip-toing around failure here. If you are doing something which he believes is not right (which as the teacher he is quite right to assert) then he’ll stop what you’re doing and tell you. At the same time, he encourages you to be free and open, and makes the space feel like a safe place to try and to then fail. That’s what we’re here to do after all.  

            So, the sessions went roughly like this: everyone met, had a bit of chit chat, then Tristan gave us a fairly lengthy talk about Improv and effectively set down the rules, which I greatly appreciated as it made everything clear. We began with word association, and we were encouraged to be as obscene and weird as we liked (after all, can’t a person associate any word to any other word in their head?). The essence here was: there is no right answer, just endless possibilities. I believe we then moved onto speaking Gibberish, and we’re shown the rough rules to this. This is much harder to explain through writing, but the basis of gibberish is to capture the emotion and nuances of another language, and not to worry about the words. Then we played the notorious Improv game ‘And then…’ where stories are created by building on each successive suggestion. What most enjoyed about this was about how strict Tristan was about the rules to the game, which sounds like a bad thing, but really helped to create enjoyable stories. We this first as pairs around the room, then a few pairs acted to the audience. After this we played a nice silly game (which I won’t explain as it is far more complicated that it sounds). We finished the session by having everyone create an entire scene, with each member going onto the stage one by one and adding to the story already there. This was definitely a bit messy and confusing, but was a nice way to end the session by showing us what we could achieve and highlighting the things we had yet to improve on.

            Phew. Now we did all that in three hours. Which sounds like a long time, but it went so quickly. I absolutely saw the importance in giving people lots of time to play and try new things. If you rush through exercises, especially at the beginning, then no one gets a chance to experiment, or have fun, or fail, or learn.

            Well, week 2 will be up soon, and hopefully I shall see some of you in November.

Peace out,

Charlie Hammond.