When I first started an improv group with my friends we’d turn up (quite often to someone’s living room) spend half an hour chatting, spend another 10 minutes deciding what games to play and then the rest of the time doing games that we thought were fun.
We didn’t improve or grow as improvisers, we didn’t learn anything new and as the weeks past we started getting irritated with each other. Sound familiar?
Getting irritated with your friends isn’t fun. And we lived on an improv island! Hours away from from any other improv courses so if we wanted to improvise and perform then we had to make it happen ourselves.
When I was about 14/15 I did a course at school called Junior Sports Leadership Award. (I loved school and pretty much signed up for everything going, Sign Language Club, Peer Mentoring, teaching tennis to year 2’s…) And on this course I learnt how to lesson plan and then did my volunteer hours teaching the school drama club.
So I started doing lesson plans for me and my friends. We began focusing on areas that we wanted to develop, one week we’d focus on characterisation, the next monologues, another week would be staging. We had more fun, we learned and we developed. And we started performing and getting really good numbers in the audience.
Eventually that group ended so I created We Are Improv and begun running courses and teaching. By this point I was automatically writing lesson plans for each course and had begun to intuitively know how long each exercise should last, what we should be focusing on and how to make the lessons fun!
It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking because we’re improvisers we can improvise our lessons but this makes them less fun, less effective and can ultimately leave you and your fellow improvisers feeling frustrated.
I’ve decided to run a free workshop teaching you how to write your own lesson plans! I want to share what I’ve learnt to help more people share the improv joy.
So if you have your own group but need a hand with getting organised, help finding your own style and a bit of guidance.
Or if you’re desperate to bring improv to your town and find some people to play with.
Or even if you’re already teaching and feel like you could do with a few extra hints and tips. This is the course for you!
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been improvising for years or your pretty new this workshop will give you hints, tips and a lesson plan template that you can take away and use.
I’d love to see you on the free Zoom course, all the details are below!
Thursday 15th July
19:30 - 20:30 BSM
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