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Workshops

I teach a variety of improv workshops — contact me for more information.

Building Meaningful Stage Pictures

Break out of the improv semicircle!

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The "stage picture" — how the actors are arranged onstage — has a powerful effect on the audience.  The audience may not hear every word of dialog, but they know what they see.  That stage picture makes an audience *feel* the story, the relationships, and the dynamics unfolding onstage.

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This two-hour workshop will give you the tools you need to improvise dynamic and engaging stage pictures.  Make story choices inspired by your stage picture.  Make stage pictures that support your story.  Make scenes that the audience won’t dare look away from.
 

Improvised Shakespeare:

Imagery and Language

Let's improvise in the style of William Shakespeare! Improvised Shakespeare is a great go-to genre for short-form and long-form, and it gives you the tools to make *any* scene more poetic and theatrical. Even if you don't know your Hamlets from your Horatios, this three-hour workshop will get you up to speed as we trade subtext for dialog, knock down the fourth wall, and fill our scenes with poetry.

Introduction to Narrative Longform

How do you improvise full-length plays? This three-hour workshop gives players interested in taking their first steps into narrative longform a great starting point with the art form.  Learn the fundamentals of narrative dramaturgy, story spine, heroes, and the one weird trick to make the scenes flow together.

Genre Studies:

Improvised Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft.  Even if you don't know the name, you know his influence.  His world of "cosmic horror" echoes in work ranging from Stephen King's It to the first season of True Detective.  He generates terror from a fictional world of secret knowledge, creeping madness, and a sense that humanity itself is terrifyingly insignificant.  This workshop teaches you how to improvise in this style.  You'll learn how to handle his narrative voice, story structure, and sense of overwhelming scale — and in the process, you'll learn about 'breaking' traditional narrative improv to accommodate unique genres.

Improvising Objectives

“What’s my motivation?”

 

We all know that character objectives — what they want, what they need, what they'll move mountains to pursue — is the engine that runs storytelling.  But in improv, developing and pursuing objectives can be hard to do, whether you're in an hourlong narrative or a three-minute scene.  This workshop provides the tools for discovering your character's objective, using it to power an engaging narrative, and resolving it to create a satisfying sense of narrative closure: the skills that transform a series of events into a fun and meaningful story.

Narrating Improv

This workshop is an introduction to the wonderful world of improv narration.  Narration is a perfect shortcut to world-building, it’s a great way to set up fun and exciting scenes, and it’s invaluable for rescuing narratives that go off-course.  You can narrate rollicking comedies with lots of back-and-forth between the narrator and players.  You can narrate intense drama where the narration fills in the gaps of whatever the techs and the stage imps can’t quite do.  And even if you never do a show format with a proper narrator, you can use the tools of narration to create better scenes — and this workshop shows you how to do it.

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