Ensemble!: Using the Power of Improv and Play to Forge Connections in a Lonely World Drawing on a combined expertise in improvisational theatre and psychiatry, author team Dan O’Connor and Dr. Jeff Katzman show readers how improv skills are the perfect antidote to loneliness and isolation. I know what you’re thinking: Hold on…improv? Like getting on a stage in front of an audience? What if that’s not my thing? Don’t worry: this isn’t a book about becoming an improv theater expert, and it’s not really a book about performing. It’s a book about loneliness–about our feelings of disconnection and isolation, ones that we may have been experiencing since long before the pandemic. More importantly, it’s a book about becoming unlonely–by borrowing from the collaborative and creative tools of improv. Authors of Life Unscripted Jeff Katzman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, and Dan O’Connor, multifaceted actor, writer, and director, have created a process they call Ensembling that helps us build an ensemble of relationships in our lives and more deeply enjoy the groups we already belong to. This is a process of becoming a little vulnerable with each other, and of embracing the moment in which we find ourselves….

Drama Menu at a Distance: 80 Socially Distanced or Online Theatre Games ‘For however long we must keep our distance, we will continue to create, to reinvent, to strive and to feed our creativity. At a time where performers are needed more than ever, training the next generation of performers must go on!’ Glyn Trefor-Jones, from his IntroductionDrama Menu is the revolutionary, hugely popular concept that has transformed the planning and delivery of drama classes for teachers and workshop leaders around the world. Choose an Appetiser or two, a Starter, a Main Course and a Dessert – and voilà! –…

Improvise to Success! 16 Simple But Powerful Principles From Improv Comedy That Will Take You to Personal and Professional Success! Face it: the world is amazingly unpredictable. No matter how prepared you are, or how well you plan, things will go wrong, surprises will happen, and people will do unexpected things. The key to achieving success while maintaining your sanity is to learn how to improvise and flow with whatever life sends your way! Whether you are an improv performer, a fan of improv comedy, or have never even seen improv before, you will immensely benefit from learning how to “flow in the moment” with anything that happens to you. Everyone, including you, is improvising every second of every day. Life is not scripted. No matter how much you want things to turn out exactly as planned, life usually has other plans. Life, after all, is the ultimate improvisation. People who master the ability to improvise can: * Direct their activities so they are always moving forward towards what they want (no matter what happens) * Stay calm and relaxed no matter how intense things get * Make the most of any situation * Flow with what happens – to…

The Improv Comedy Musician: The Ultimate Guide to Playing Music with an Improv Group Learn musical improv from Laura Hall of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”Are you a musician who performs with an improv comedy group? If so, this book is for you! You’ll also greatly benefit if you are a music director, improv team leader, improv teacher or coach, improv actor or singer, or just a hardcore Whose Line fan. This book is an opportunity for me to share knowledge gained from my years of improv experience. You’ll learn how I do what I do on Whose Line is it Anyway (plus get some insider stories about the show!) And you’ll get tips and pointers on how to play for live improv shows, play in different styles, accompany improvised songs, know how to approach long and short form, improvise musicals, be a valuable team player, and lots more.

Improv Nonsense: All The Posts This is a book about long-form improv, the art of making up comedy scenes as you go (meaning no script) on a stage. Improv Nonsense was a critically acclaimed blog about long-form improv, written by Will Hines, a teacher and performer from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. The blog ranged from Will’s off-the-cuff musings like “New students sure do like to use the name ‘Janice’” to long, detailed essays like “Why are there fewer women then men on improv teams?.” It was sharp, opinionated, made no effort to include the newcomer, interesting, friendly, helpful and often completely wrong. Six years of posts, almost 600 pages of stuff. This book can be obtained in digital format for less than €10

This practical guide presents a wide array of games and exercises designed to develop the players observation, imagination, presentation and self-confidence. This long-awaited new edition has been fully revised and extended, now including example workshops and an index of games to help instructors get the most out of the exercises in rehearsals, workshops and classes. Christine Poulter shares what she has learned from her students over the years, and opens up the language of the book to the worlds of youth work, healthcare, the prison service, ‘customer care’, management training, and secondary school education. This is an essential resource for directors, drama teachers, and students of Drama, Theatre and Performance at all levels. It will also be useful to anyone looking to improve their presentation skills.

John Abbott, author of The Improvisation Book, explains how theatre directors at every level can use improvisation in the rehearsal room. Foreword by Mark Rylance. ‘Improvisation can be used as part of the creative process of rehearsing a play. It can be a fabulous tool for exploration and discovery. It can strengthen the actor’s commitment to their character. And it can create an environment of confidence and spontaneity.’ Packed with useful exercises and improvisation scenarios, and examples from a wide variety of plays, Improvisation in Rehearsal reveals how improvisation enriches and enlivens the creation of characters, back-stories, relationships, shared histories and emotional lives. The book also demonstrates how improvisation can be used as a powerful tool in the foundation of a strong company, and when searching for the hidden depths and dynamics in a scene. Building on his own experience as an actor, director and teacher, Abbott writes with clarity and an infectious enthusiasm which will motivate directors to try the techniques for themselves. As Mark Rylance says in his Foreword, this book ‘will inspire and delight its readers’.

The Uses of Drama : Acting As a Social and Educational Force: An Anthology Aristotle, Barrault, Brecht, Chambers, Laban, Mariwitz, Stanislavski… this book contains personal selection of writings on the theatre, ranging in time from Aristotle to Brook. Included are such aspects as drama as therapy, drama in education and the search for new drama.

Janet Coleman brilliantly recreates the time, the place, the personalities, and the neurotic magic whereby the Compass made theater history in America. The Compass began in a storefront theater near the University of Chicago campus in the summer of 1955 and lasted only a few years before its players—including David Shepherd, Paul Sills, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Barbara Harris, and Shelley Berman—moved on. Out of this group was born a new form: improvisational theater and a radically new kind of comedian. “They did not plan to be funny or to change the course of comedy,” writes Coleman. “But that is what happened.”

The Improvisation Game: Discovering the Secrets of Spontaneous Performance Packed with exercises and practical techniques, The Improvisation Game explores how improvisation can be used both to create performance and as an end in itself. It reveals the techniques, structures, and methods used by key practitioners in the field of improvised drama, music, and dance—among them are Keith Johnstone, Max Stafford-Clark, Phelim McDermott, Tim Etchells, John Wright, and Robert Lepage.