Week Two of Improv Practice — April 16, 2024

Location: 27 Pearse Street

Focus: Grounded Conversations

Pre Meeting:

Aaron - warmups.

Tonight, we’re going to focus on building Base Scenes. We’ll work on using tag-outs to build on the base scene and then return to it.

We’ll start doing some exercises with grounded scenes.  Having normal conversations.

Grounded aren’t necessarily serious…

• but we aren’t going for a joke. Funny stuff will naturally happen but we’re not looking for it.
• And also, in these scenes, our focus isn’t to heighten but to build the scene and the characters through the conversation.

So, we’ll start with some exercises and then we’ll work on some base scenes with walk-ons and tag outs.

First Exercise: Only Numbers

• Line up.
• No suggestion.
• They do a scene where they only say numbers, in order, to each other.

So the person in this row initiates with an emotion and says, “One" or “One, two, three”, whatever.

And the other person responds to the emotion and says the next series of numbers.

And then back and forth.

No repeating numbers. If someone goes "Eight?" you don't respond with

"Eight." You respond with “Nine."

Character 1, have an emotion. Character 2, respond to that emotion.

We’ll go to about 30 or 40…And we’ll go through so everyone does both roles.

Exercise 2: Grounded Scenes

1. Two people on stage.
2. Count down from 5 while they pick a position and set themselves.
3. Someone off-stage selects a location.
4. The two onstage start a grounded scene.
5. The where will be given, but you will provide the characters and the relationship.
6. After about 3-4 minutes, we’ll give a signal, and anyone can end the scene with. If one of you on stage has an idea, great, but anyone off stage, if you have an idea, run with it.