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Watch this scene, starring Scott Beckett as "Mr. Johnson" and Jonathan Nelson as "Jeeves."

Improvisation: Making it up as you go along. A group of players gets on stage without previously rehearsed lines or blocking and acts out. The audience understands that this show is constructed from nothing before their eyes. In these aspects, improvisational performance differentiates itself from any other performance medium. Improvisation then is at its best […]

The surprise inherent to improvisation is made even more satisfying when we’re specific in-the-moment. If we are too cautiously vague or too ungrounded in grasping for hilarity, then we deny the scene, our partners and the audience the power inherent in the specificity of The Details that allows a world to form from the nothing on […]

We want active emotions in our scenes, so we need active details to react to.  If the doll your character is afraid of is actually on stage with you, then rather than just talking about how you're afraid of dolls, you can actually act afraid because that doll is actively making you afraid in-the-moment.  If you endow […]

Personal Engagement:   If you were all by yourself on stage, how would you feel about who you are, where you are and/or what you’re doing? Finding an emotion and an active scene element to feel that emotion toward can be the continued catalyst for a successful scene. If I say, “I love cats,” I’m […]

Heightening Through Tag-Outs: A “tag out” allows the audience to see how a character from a previous scene will react to another character/scenario/etc. We want to execute tag-outs in service of heightening the emotional stakes. TAG OUTS –To perform a tag out, a player enters a scene in progress and literally tags the player that […]