A smart, witty and accessible guide to the rewarding and joyful practice of improvisation. An asset to students and teachers of improvisation in schools, drama schools, higher education and theatre groups, both professional and amateur. It will also be of benefit to organisations and individual readers who want to discover how improv stimulates creativity and confidence in all areas of life. The Improv Book opens up this exciting discipline to a wider audience.

“This is what we can say about what an improvisation is: a story that we tell ourselves as when we were children. » “- Stéphane Volle: since an improvisation is a beautiful, simple story written by players, the question is: how to write or how to tell a beautiful, simple story? – Pierre Martineau: the only answer that comes to mind is: starting from emotions! Because a story is told with the stomach, with the guts; a good story anyway. » These interviews with Pierre Martineau, historic Master of Ceremonies of the National Improvisation League in Montreal, are the way to know and understand the spirit which animated the creators of this game and this concept: the theatrical improvisation match. They are essential to fully understand not only the usefulness of the rules, the importance of the framework: “why do we do this or that”; but above all the “how”: how to improvise, that is to say how to “tell beautiful stories together”.

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

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 content of this book is the product of a research process: the object of study is the actor and his creative process for the construction of the character. It is determined that it is during the rehearsal period when the actor lives his creative process, and it is the improvisation the tool that is used to achieve the objective, in particular of the actor when creating his character, and in general of all the other actors and specialists in stage languages, together with the director, to achieve stage dramaturgy as a whole. In these pages the reader will find a methodological proposal that will favor the creation of the character through improvisation, in which he will search, find and define the actions of his character, allowing him the internal and external characterization of the role. We know that this book will be useful to all those who dedicate themselves to the performing arts, professionally or as amateurs, to students and acting teachers; but also, we invite readers in general to learn about the creative mechanisms that an actor faces to build his character.

BOOKLET 74. OUR PERVERSION “Stage narration seduced so many playwrights in Mexico during the last ten years that the difficult thing, for some time now, is finding a text with dialogue. Even more so, with a well-written one. The copy that you have in your hands, reader, is one of those unusual cases,” says Alejandro Ricaño in the presentation of the work, whose characters are two employees of a corporation who “spend their workdays tallying numbers to evade taxes, while they plan that one sleeps with the wife of the other.”

THEATER REHEARSAL BOOKLET 47. BODIES IN PERFORMANCE. IMPROVISATION AND COMPOSITION PRACTICES What are the ways of constructing knowledge in the arts of the body? asks Narciso Telles in this essay, whose research, as an artist-teacher, hasbeen directed at the processes and poetics of acting and improvisation in the theater, particularly when it comes to “poetically and politically confronting the issues of our time.” Narciso Telles is an actor, director and researcher at the Study and Research Group on Creation and Training in Performing Arts at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (GEAC/UFU), Brazil.

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.”

Process: An Improviser’s Journey Process: An Improviser’s Journey is an invaluable resource for mastering improv. Author, teacher, and improviser Michael Gellman was given a mission by famed improv coach Del Close: “[T]o create improvised one-act plays of literary quality from scratch.” Already steeped in the world of improvisation, he took it upon himself to do this, in the form of a class for other improvisers in which they would build the skills necessary to execute such a seemingly tall order. Scruggs and Gellman’s book, modeled after Stanislavski’s timeless An Actor Prepares, follows a fictional young actor taking Gellman’s real-life class. Scruggs and Gellman introduce readers to Geoff, who has just moved to Chicago to pursue acting. He undergoes the standard trials of audition and rejection before he takes the advice of a fellow actor and turns to improv classes at Second City. At first, Geoff thinks improvisation is about laughs and loosening up, but he soon learns that it is a powerful tool as well as an end in itself. Through Geoff’s eyes, the book introduces readers to key tenets of improvisation: concentration, visualization, focus, object work, being in the moment, and the crucial “yes, and.” His experiences with the…

With academic erudition and supported by extensive experience as a repentista, the author proposes a study of the improvisation of the décimas following a method that allows us to appreciate both the beauty and the poetic complexity in this stanza frequently used in popular Ibero-American poetry. As Díaz-Pimienta points out, improvisation is “an art so complex and so unknown that it should be tempting to researchers.” This volume is an original and necessary proposal to address new studies of the improvised décima, as well as an invitation to the reader to discover poetic findings in ancient forms that continue to be sung throughout the pan-Hispanic territories, from the expert hand of a born researcher.