Every year, ComedySportz has a tournament where all of the city teams get together to play, take workshops and hang out. This workshop was part of ComedySportz Tournament 2009 and covers tips on coaching improvisers through bad habits, for both shortform and longform improv.
These notes came from a previous workshop I talked about, Truth, Emotion and Courage, but I thought the points were so relevant to coaching they merited their own post.
Workshop Notes
- Bad Habit #1 – Asking Questions:Â
- To discourage asking questions, don’t answer their question instead deal with the emotion that question makes you feel
- I don’t have to answer your question, just react to the fact that you asked a question
- Questions happen if you don’t have an emotional point of view
- Bad Habit #2 – Overplayed Premise:
- Examples: “teaching scenes’ or ambivalent sidekick
- Can’t stop doing all those scenes but when you are in a scene, if something (an object) becomes more important than your relationship, destroy the object
- In what we do, the audience wants to see what’s going on with the two people on stage
- Make “high tempo†moves: add emotion, POV, give gift to scene partner (in sense of what the scene is about)
- One final note: The moment you know how you feel about your scene partner, you have a scene
