Improv

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,...

By Rebecca MacMillan I decided to write this blog after I thought I had lost my usual ‘performance shoes’ on the train following a boozy session to celebrate our first gig at Leicester Square Theatre. I was quite put out. They are just a pair of black flat ballet pumps, and most of the negative...

By John Cremer The comedian Russell Brand recently launched and hosted ‘Give It Up for Comic Relief’ an all-star gig to raise money for people in the UK affected by drug and alcohol addiction. As a recovering addict himself Russell is passionate about raising the awareness of abstinence based recovery from drug or alcohol addiction and speaks candidly about...

By Liz Peters One of the first things I say when teaching improv to beginners is don’t try and be funny. It’s among the biggest stumbling blocks you can give yourself. Not only will it take you away from listening to your scene partner and actually improvising together, the audience will sniff out your desperation...

by Rebecca MacMillan Following Jason’s blog entry on denial, here’s something on our second deadly sin of improv: inattentiveness. Originally we named this sin ‘not listening’ but inattentiveness was not only neater, but better represented what we meant by encompassing the non-auditory forms of this vice. Being inattentive is to be drawn in any way,...

by Jenny Rowe THIS IS A BLOG ABOUT FAILURE… …ironically, I failed to write it the first time, but I re-committed and added a ton of enthusiasm so now it’s here. So I suppose that’s an improv lesson right there. This is a slightly embarrassing foray into my improv journey, focusing on something I bring up with...

For the Fringe show I wanted to work on a few things. First of all the idea of ‘Soup and Sermon’ which we got from our time working with Jason Chin. So the idea that the preacher gets the non believers into the Church with the Soup and then they stay for the Sermon. With...

I was teaching a while ago when one of the students, started to look at me in a strange way, with an almost mystical look in his eye. When I asked why he told me that the excercise I was describing was almost exactly what he had been taught by his Aikido instructor a few...