Episode #2 of the IRC Podcast is up and ready to go. My guest this week is Jill Bernard from HUGE Theater and Comedy Sportz in Minneapolis. She shares some exercises she uses in her classes. She describes a warm up called Loser Ball which teaches students to embrace failures. Next she talks about an ...
My intent with this series of posts was to go through all the principles from Dale Carnegie‘s book and discuss how each one might apply to the improv world. But as I have been thinking about this topic, I have been tempted to wander down a different path. I may still return to the original ...
Yesterday I published my first podcast and added it to iTunes. It’s called the Improv Resource Center Podcast and it will live over on my other website (the Improv Resource Center). I’ve been wanting to create a podcast for some time, but I wasn’t sure what shape it would take until a few weeks ago. ...
Lately I’ve been listening to some improv podcasts from New York and enjoying them quite a bit. I’ve sampled two so far, the UCB Theatre Podcast and Improvised New York. Both are available through iTunes. The UCB Theatre Podcast is the official podcast promoting the Upright Citizens Brigade’s New York theater. ...
I thought this might be a semi-regular, fun entry for the blog. About a year and half ago, I started an improv wiki on my other site. It’s grown quite a bit with well over 1000 pages now for groups, performers, shows, concepts and more. If you are an improvisor, please create an account and ...
Recently, I finished a fascinating book called, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller. In it, Miller makes the case that many of the things that make us human are the result of sexual selection, not natural selection. Our capacity for language, music, art, kindness, intelligence and ...
Last week a friend of mine called. He was someone I used to coach in Chicago. He now lives in Minneapolis and wanted some advice about coaching a group who wanted to learn the Invocation. It’s an improv exercise that is sometimes used as an opening for improv forms like Harold. We talked for an ...
The Chris Gethard Show is a talk show featuring some of my friends in New York. It runs once a month, Saturday at midnight at the UCB Theatre. I don’t know much about it, but it penetrated my brain this week when I noticed a link that Chris posted on facebook. I next heard a ...
I recently read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie for the first time. It’s the kind of book that I’ve avoided most of my life. Self help books, especially ones with a strong slant towards the business world, usually don’t excite me. However, it had been recommended to me by a ...
A common concept in improvised scene work is that at the top of the scene, we should be trying to discover the first unusual thing about the situation or relationship and then use that to create a game for the scene. A few questions were recently posed on my message board about the first unusual ...