Opinions

New Year’s resolutions always come with a lingering feeling of dread. Lovely they may be in theory, but we know they will soon be broken. It’s just a matter of time until we are, again, the abject failure that we were last year. Like meeting a character in…

Meditate for the first time and your brain might well go something like this: “OK, just do nothing. This should be easy. Try a harder one, Mr. meditation teacher! I’m always wanting to do nothing. Here we go: nothing! I’m doing so well at doing nothing!…

I am a big believer in the idea of abundance. I don’t want to go all Tony Robbins or anything but having an abundance mindset has always served me well. At the very least, it has certainly served me as an improviser. Or…

I don’t travel to improv festivals very much anymore, mostly cos of having two very energetic kids. That and setting up a new company with some pretty ambitious goals. I never did as much as Heather, but whenever I did, regular as clockwork, I would have a crisis…

One of the first questions people ask when they find out I am an improviser is ‘What happens if you can’t think of anything to say?’ As if saying things is the most important part. And it’s true: some improvisers tend to conflate how much dialogue…

This week is Animal Week at AndAlso (that means all our drop-in classes will have this theme). So to celebrate, here’s a list of 5 animals that are like improvisers. Both as performers and as characters. Peacocks  (or ‘Peapocks’ as my 2-year-old Iggy calls them) As…

If you ask an improviser to define status, I suspect many would struggle to pin it down. But I’m also willing to bet that most of them could show you status in a heartbeat. Because status, like stories and songs, is everywhere. It happens all the time in every…

Confession: I’m a very emotional person. Watching my 2 year old son trying to blow seeds off a dandelion makes me squeal in delight. Trying to insert a signature into a PDF will make me fly into a rage. A grey haired sweet old dog shuffling slowly along in the…

Hands up if you have heard something like this in an improv class: ‘Say the first thing that comes into your head.’ ‘Go with your gut.’ ‘You know the answer.’ ‘Just see what happens.’ (The last one is even the subtitle of our level one syllabus.) How many hands are…

Game is a word that gets used a lot in improvisation. A lot. And being a wordy kind of guy, I am always cautious of words that get overused.; they get rough around the edges, lose their function. I like my words precise. Let’s start by defining the four most…

A couple of weeks ago, perhaps unsurprisingly, I was teaching a Harold class. New-ish to it, the class had just worked their way through the form. It had been fun, but difficult. Memories were stretched, brains overloaded. And as we finished, haltingly, unsure if the question was allowed, a…