We recently saw a show at the Alliance Theatre from the Second City acting group. It had an extremely long title (something about peaches dropping and rolling everywhere), but I'm not going to bother with that right now. Part of the show was scripted and part was all improv. Although the show was overall very enjoyable, the best part was definitely the improv. It was fun to see the actors make up hilarious situations on the spot.
The whole point of the grant Toby got is to figure out how to use what we are seeing in the theater in our own classrooms. Naturally, I had no idea what to do. I thought about using improv techniques to teach indirect characterization or to have students imagine a character from a book in a new situation while still retaining the character's traits.
Both of these ideas seemed profoundly lame.
Today, however, Randy from Dad's Garage came and spoke to us while we workshopped at ASC today, and he gave us several, useful ways we can incorporate improv in our classrooms. The one I'm most excited about is the story telling one word at a time. Here is an example:
Person 1: The
Person 2: cat
Person 1: ate
Person 2: some
Person 1: Doritos
Person 2: and
Person 1: then
Person 2: barfed
Person 1: it
Person 2: all
Person 1: up.
As you can see, it's not exactly great or intellectual story-telling, but it can help students think creatively and get them to think critically about how stories are told (and incorporate exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution in their own works). I'm leaving today hopeful and excited about using improv techniques in my own classroom.
