15th October 2013

Improvisation exercises and skills...

The exercises we did today in class were all about improvisation and learning theories on improv.

Keith Johnstone is a British playwright  actor and theatre director who specialises in Improvisational theatre. We were learning the techniques he uses in his plays and the way he acts. 

The exercises we tried out today were mainly in groups of 2. They consisted of one person 

starting a scene without talking and the other person reacting to their pose and back and forth until there was a storyline happening without speaking to one another. After this we got into a different group of 2 and one person would start off a dialogue by saying something, and the other would answer with ' Yes...and' this allowed the dialogue to develop and a storyline to happen and eventually allowed action to be introduced. Another improvisation exercise we focused on was very similar to that one, but instead of always answering with ' Yes...and' we answered with ' Yes..but' which allowed conflict to be involved, which I think personally helps develop a dialogue and emotion to improvising  and it allowed other ideas to be introduced instead of just sticking to the same subject with 'Yes...and' 

An exercise the whole class did at towards the end of the lesson was called ' Party quirks' it was a really interesting and fun improvisational game to play, as the whole class was involved and one person was holding a party, and the person who's party it was let one person in one at a time and each person in the class had been given a task to portray to Heta who was holding the party and the rest of the class. Everyones task was different and Heta managed to figure out most of them quite easily apart from 2 people's tasks! It was a great improvisation game as it allowed each person to portray their task in different ways and we could portray it in anyway we can, it also gave us some structure instead of being asked to act like whatever we want and other people had to guess.

How I feel…
I am starting to enjoy improvisation much more than I have done in the past as our class are constantly learning new skills for improvisation. I find walking around the drama studio in different ways i.e; weather change, getting into character, really helps my improv skills as I am using my imagination and how I would walk if the weather was boiling hot or freezing cold. It is opening up my imagination much more and improvisation is all about imagination. 

I am also learning to let go and not to let my inhibitions take over and just go with the improvisation.