Hi, I’m running Improv as a part of NTW TEAM from Nov 6^th, and have been attending a different Improvisation course in Bristol run by the lovely Tristan Hancock in order to get a bit of a refresh. 

Week 4, Thursday 25^th October

This week seems to be a lot quicker sum up, and I think it’s good that as the session go on we are able to spend more time on fewer exercises. We began by doing a scene from Chekhov’s The Bear, which threw us all a bit, as it seemed against the nature of Improv to be using a text. But it was an excellent opportunity to apply some of the methods we had already learnt, and as always Tristan side-coached us through the scene, offering advice where appropriate. Next we repeated the scene but this time instead of using the words we used gibberish. At first this seemed ridiculous, but there was a notable change for a few people whose emotional focus was greatly improved as they were no longer lost in the text, trying to get the speech right, and were instead committing to the scene and giving their attention to the other actor onstage. It is definitely a method I work recommend for releasing the emotional connection of a scene.

After this we moved onto work on Status, something that I have been itching to do for quite some time. Tristan began by taking us through all the different signs that low status and high people exhibit. Generally low status characters touch their face a lot, maybe fiddle with their hair, only make brief eye-contact with somebody else, have a closed in body posture, arms or legs crossed, very breathy, lots of ‘ers’ interrupting their speech. High status characters on the other hand maintain eye-contact, have open legs and good posture, dominate conversations and may use an elongated ‘er’ at the beginning or the end of a sentence in order to hold the attention of the others around them. After all this had been demonstrated, we split into groups of three and took turns acting out a scene of a child coming home late to his parents. For this we chose a number in our head between 1 and 3, and Tristan would then tell us, 1 is high status, 2 is low status and 3 is middle, and we would act accordingly. I found that the relationships between people were instantly more defined that in previous scenes, we could almost always tell who was above who, and also the content of the scene was far more flowing as everyone knew who they were and how they related to the others. Another aspect that I noticed was that the relationships are constantly changing, a character playing high status may have to temporarily dip their status in order to react to the others in the scene, and to continue the action.

            That is all for this week, all I can say is that there is so much I can’t put into words, it is true that the best way to learn Improv is to actually do it.

Peace out,

Charlie.