Winging It: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of Trump In Winging It, literary scholar and cultural polymath Randy Fertel returns to the interrogation of improvisation he began with his earlier work Taste for Chaos (2015). In this new volume, Fertel explores the wider landscapes of popular culture and public affairs, ranging deftly from the unmediated experience in hook-up culture, psychedelic trips, Fred Astaire’s tap dancing, Frans Hals’s brush strokes, social media, and Hamilton‘s hip-hop to—last, though alas not least—the performative and demagogic posturing of Donald Trump. The gesture all improvisations share—I will create this on the fly, or as Trump has it, my gut knows more than many brains—defies rationality and elevates embodied emotions, instinct, and intuition, challenging our assumption that everything of value depends upon long study, tradition, and hard work. Claiming to be free of serious purpose, improvisation only pursues pleasure. Or so it says.

Life and faith are improvisational theater, and finding meaning is a work in progress. From first breath to the first day of school, from first dates to last rites, most of us struggle with the overwhelming desire to find meaning. How do we love well, stay authentic, build community, enjoy life, and live justly all at the same time? No one knows. God may have a plan, but God never gave us the script. This book will teach strategies to escape the oppressive voice of self-doubt, foster compassionate creativity, transform Christian faith into a meaningful life practice, and organize communities of faith based on the the principles of improvisational theater. Each chapter will focus on a skill or practice of improv, made relevant through autobiographical stories of and grounded in the Christian tradition. The end of each chapter will include brain exercises the average reader can do to strengthen the creative neural pathways required to master the improv skill for living.

Improv at Work: What the Business World Can Learn from Improvisational Comedy Improv at Work is an inspirational guide, designed to transform the stressed and struggling workplace into one of creativity, empowerment, and fun, similar to the environment surrounding improvisational comedy (aka, improv). Professionals with only a few years of work experience to the most competent leaders will draw inspiration from this book to optimize workplace communication, collaboration, and innovation. In today’s workplace, technology shortcuts and overscheduled calendars are hindering our ability to grow the crucial interpersonal skills necessary for high-performing and thriving businesses. If we want to realize the full potential of what’s possible in the workplace, we must avoid neglecting our own interpersonal skill development. This is where improv fits into the picture. Improv at Work will: Here’s what the workplace had to say about experiencing workshops based on Improv at Work: “Fantastic session — relevant, engaging, and fun!” “I think the muscles you helped us train are critical for success… The agenda, activities, and examples were well designed and executed.” “I found multiple ways to learn more about my colleagues and clients and have fun at the same time. I also found the Improv workshop to be an excellent way to be more…

This hybrid engineering manual and improv manual gives practical tips on how to boost design skills and design thinking with improv exercises. It pushes designers to trust their teams, take initiative, focus on the customer, and better transform abstract ideas into reality. Engineers, artists, makers, software developers, and entrepreneurs will find the most benefit from this guide, especially if they work in teams and strive to innovate. Teachers and trainers can also use this guide to supplement their lessons in design. First the guide details a number of selected engineering methods and skills that are both key to the design process and related to improv principles. These methods and skills all relate to the themes of teamwork, creativity and ideation, handling failure, empathy, and design representation. Then the guide details how to play over twenty-five fun and challenging games from the improv and art worlds that have direct applications to design skills. The connection between each game and a design skill is explicitly explained. Questions are also provided to give readers a chance to self-reflect on how a game might apply to them. The author draws on his own experience in engineering education and improv to compile this handy design…

Teaching Social Skills Through Sketch Comedy and Improv Games: A Social Theatre™ Approach for Kids and Teens including those with ASD, ADHD, and Anxiety. Introducing a Social Theatre™, this book provides guidance on how to deliver fun and transformative activities to develop social skills in teenagers and children. Drawing on ideas from Social Thinking®, CBT, mindfulness and assertiveness training this book develops games, skits and short plays which can be adapted to suit children and teenagers including those who are gifted, typical, and those with mild to moderate cognitive abilities. These activities will help participants become more assertive and flexible as well as improving confidence, focus and self-esteem. Social Theatre™ can be used in small groups, in class or throughout the school, as well as in group therapy sessions. It provides a new and inclusive way to teach social skills and collaborative learning and is especially useful for those with anxiety, ADHD and ASD.

The Improv Mindset: How to Make Improvisation Your Superpower for Success We improvise every day, but how many times do we get stuck in our heads overthinking?Now you can learn how to leverage the skills of improv for your life. Improv isn’t just for actors, comedians, and writers, but is one of today’s most powerful tools for success in business, social situations, public speaking, communication, becoming a more fearless person, and just plain having more fun in life. Being able to think quickly on your feet, be in the moment, and to roll with any sudden changes makes any person more confident. This book will break down these techniques with exercises you can practice both at home and put to use in real-life settings. You’ll learn: You don’t have to be born witty to apply these methods, you just have to be taught them and that’s what this book will do.

Applied Improvisation has become an important and growing field of exploration, research, and human cooperation. The book goes far beyond an introduction to alternative applications of Improvisational Comedy. It also delves into underlying theories that are usable in all human endeavors, from personal enrichment to every aspect of organizational development and cooperation. It includes working ideas, theory, structures, methodology, stories, notes, references, and practices, as well as exercises that can be used in any setting where learning and change are desired. This revised edition is also about tapping sources of creativity, in your gatherings and in your life. The material is intended to be used by individuals, within families, community development organizations, in government, in the military, in not-for-profit systems, religious gatherings, among business owners, executives, and companies, by corporate career-track leaders, trainers, educators, teachers, motivational presenters, and all others who understand how important it is to communicate effectively and easily, and to work cooperatively as we trudge our way through this ever increasingly complex, urgent, delicate, and small world. Revised edition: 2017

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….

The theatrical improvisation book with children: The Impro System in the school This book presents the practice of improvisation and its pedagogical possibilities in teaching theater with children in basic education, and broadens the alternatives for working with improvisation in not teaching fundamental in consonance with the language skills of theater described in the last version of the Comum National Curriculum Base. Objectively, Impro is a practice of theatrical improvisation in front of the public, developed by theater professor and English playwright Keith Johnstone, since the 1950s in contemporary times, which has the premise of a theater that works with spontaneity and imagination for a creative mind. Improper System is the nomenclature given by North American researcher Theresa Dudeck in relation to Johnstone’s teaching-learning work.

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…