Day: Thursday Time: 5pm Class: I Need a Hero This was my 6th Maydays residential in Dorset.  Like most of the Maydays, I teach several days a week, but there is definitely something unique about Osho Leela.  I love to be out in the sticks, walking to my class across dewy grass, past last night’s...

Day: Saturday Time: 3:00 Class: Togetherness Creating improv with one other person is pretty cool. As you increase the number of people involved the stakes certainly become higher. The risks of a big group scene going wrong if you don’t work on group skills is high, but when it clicks it is a truly beautiful...

People I tend to enjoy the small moments of life more than the big moments, it’s in the small moments that I find genuine happiness. If I ever get to perform at sold out gig at the O2, I’d be most happy about the cheese and pickle sandwiches in the green room. For me Osho...

Day: Sunday Time: 10am Class: Deliciously Dramatic I love Osho Leela. It is a genuine highlight of my year. Getting to immerse myself in a bubble with awesome people who like messing about and making stuff up too! Besides being super fun it also means that the classes can go deeper than they do in...

Day: Saturday Time 3:00-6:30 Class: The Deconstruction In my humble opinion, the best way to really get your head around a subject or a concept is to teach it to someone else. You’re never more in the moment than when you’re teaching and that’s when you find things you didn’t think you were looking for....

Day: Saturday Time: 3pm Class: Dali Is My Teapot   The guy at the Newsagent who looks like the secret love child of Bez and Pinocchio and talks exclusively in clichés, that lady off the telly who pronounces all ‘e’s as ‘a’s, the lady you did temping with who had a laugh that echoed the...

Day: Saturday Time: 11.45am Class: Make it worse   I always relish the chance to teach with John Cremer as we usually manage to combine messing around with actually teaching something fun. I really love grounded scenes but sometimes I think people mistake grounded for ‘no fun’ or ‘a bit kitchen sink’ – it’s not. ...

Day: Sunday Time: 11:45 Class: The Pressure Cooker One of the benefits of teaching a residential improv festival is working with participants who are already in the zone when they walk in the room. There is a sparkle and an openness which means there is no need for warm ups. For this reason I ran...

Day: Thursday Time: 11:45 Class: Being Yourself “There will be times in this class where you will feel uncomfortable” I was somewhat hesitant about teaching this, a class that I’d experimented with in a drop in, as it had turned pretty intense at that time and the performance benefits aren’t immediately obvious. It involves some...

    Day: Saturday Time: 5:00 Class: Solo songs After 6 years of teaching at Osho Leela we have learnt a few lessons about what makes a successful class.  There are some classes that seem to deliver almost regardless of content and others that don’t seem to quite ‘hit’ in spite of ruthless planning.  As...

by Rhiannon Vivian Recently I read a positive review of the Inbetweeners new movie, which is cool because I love it. Then when I got to the end, the reviewer said: ‘In the auditorium it was all 20-30 something guys with old mates and sympathetic partners.’ Sympathetic partners? Is there no possibility their partners were enjoying...

Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce invited fellow Mayday Heather and me to run an improvisation workshop at their recent annual conference.  The theme of the day was “Adventure” and our session was titled “Dare to Improvise” 18 fairly nervous delegates appeared and for 17 of them it was their first time improvising. We set...

What do you do when you want to kick your life in the nuts and indulge your unending passion for improv? You book a 201 class at Upright Citizen’s Brigade, buy a flight to New York, pack your bags and shoot yourself 30,000 feet into the sky.On January 4 I landed in New York for what began as...

An Improv Blog About Acting For Improvisers Who Act And Actors Who Improvise This week I came back to Brighton and to the Theatre Royal with Buddy! The Buddy Holly Story and this has led me to think about whether or not improv skills apply to the acting world. I set about to try and...

The Maydays will be celebrating a decade this May. As we approach our 10th Birthday we present a series of blogs dedicated to the various side projects we are each involved in from improv to West End musicals to business improv. Katy Schutte and Joe Samuel are both members of the Maydays.  They worked with...

The Maydays will be celebrating a decade this May. As we approach our 10th Birthday we present a series of Blogs dedicated to the various side projects we are each involved in from improv to West end musicals to business improv. Heather Urquhart and Jules Munns are both members of the Maydays and improvise in...

The difference between schools of improv is sometimes becoming an ugly slanging match – so much so that we aren’t honouring each other or our art form enough. I like spirited debate but I can’t help but feel we would do better by celebrating the diversity of thought in our growing art form rather than...

by Katy Schutte It’s definitely worth spending a lot of time getting really, really good at improv.  Those 10,000 hours take a while though, so it’s nice to have a couple of tips.  Watching a lot of new improvisers I notice the same tells over and over again that broadcast them as such.  There’s already...

By Jason Delplanque Is there an ideal combination/balance of performers to do a show? Surely as improvisers we should be able to be adaptable and say “yes and”, and be able to perform with anyone, right? I’ve been struggling with this idea/theory for a long time. I look at double-acts, I appreciate they’re not improvisers...

by Rebecca MacMillan First: It’s Father’s Day this Sunday. You forgot? Don’t panic! Get your Dad a gift and help the Maydays by pledging on our Edinburgh Kickstarter project (we have 7 days to raise just less than a grand). Three ideas out of our many offers to pledgers: 1) Tickets to a Maydays show,...