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Hilarious professional
comedians, apprenticed under Second City alumni and Chicago Improv
techniques, will provide full-out, improv induced laughs! They will
work with your corporate groups and involve them in the Improv
experience with comedy and wit.
A clever way to enhance team dynamics through
entertainment and laughter. We have super Improv Leaders in Vancouver,
Victoria, Seattle, Calgary,
Edmonton, Winnipeg,
Toronto, Chicago
& Montreal.
Flat-out comedy, entreating teambuilding at its best!
Corporate
event planning
Improv fosters successful collaboration. In order to
succeed, participants must attend to their partners' communication
and accept and build upon each other's actions while remaining as
flexible as possible. As a result, everyone is empowered to
interactively discover his or her inherent creative potential.
Improv is fun. A common "side effect" of
most Improv experiences is laughter. It is widely accepted that
introducing humor into the training process enhances learning and
improves retention. Importantly, Improv introduces and supports a
brand of inclusive humor in which everyone feels welcomed. This can
be contrasted to the exclusive type of humor that marginalizes
individuals or groups and often has serious repercussions in the
workplace. At the conclusion of any Improv training, participants
feel lighter, healthier, and more productive.
Improv is about success. Because every idea is valued
and the rules insure creative collaboration, each person can have an
experience of creative mastery. Everyone must feel successful, or
it's not Improv.
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A
BRIEF HISTORY OF IMPROV
Even though many know about
Improv from the television show, Whose Line is it Anyway? its origins
date back to the Mid-1500's and the Commedia Dell'Arte. Groups of
roving comic performers traveled from town to town throughout Europe
for about 200 years. Instead of relying on a formal script, these
masked characters worked within a framework of "scenarios"
which served to help them with entrances and exits as well as
defining who would play a particular role. Otherwise, they were free
to improvise their own dialogue and action. In addition to playing
farce, their popular performances would satirize the authority
figures of the day.
In the mid-1920's Viola
Spolin, a recreational director, developed "games" to
introduce theater to immigrant children in inner city Chicago. Her
rationale was that children could not be told to "act."
Instead, she developed a number of structures that bypassed any
resistance a child might have. Her gift was in constructing these
games in such a way as to organically lead a child to perform a
theatrical task without being directly told what to do. She had an
uncanny ability to enable even the most self-conscious children to
make the right acting choice on their own. In the 1930's Spolin
adapted her games for the WPA, continuing to work with inner-city
children and adults in neighborhood theater projects. In reviewing
her work, the newspapers of the day marveled at her ability to take
an extremely diverse group and turn them into actors who actually
wrote their own plays.
In the early 1950's, Spolin's
son Paul Sills and David Shepherd formed a theater group which
expanded on some of Spolin's methods as well as developing a number
of new ones of their own. Among the participants in this early form
of comedy Improv were, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Ed Asner, and Sevren
Darden. This project gave birth to the Compass Theater that
eventually evolved into Second City. Alumni from these two groups are
the virtual founders of sketch comedy in America in the last half of
the twentieth century - Del Close, Shelly Berman, Stiller and Mera,
Alan Alda, David Steinberg, Robert Klein, Gilda Radner, John Belushi,
Joan Rivers and most of the cast of Saturday Night Live over the last
twenty years. These performers owe of much their inventiveness in
comedy to the Improv skills that originated in the slums of Chicago
in the 1920's.
Paralleling developments in
America, Keith Johnstone, an Englishman who eventually immigrated to
Canada, was developing his own theories about spontaneity and
creativity in theater. Feeling that theater had become too
pretentious and out of touch with the "common man,"
Johnston invented the Improv form known as Theatersports. He gave
Improv a sporting match quality adding the illusion of opposing
teams, tournament competition and judging from the audience. More
importantly, Johnstone addressed the concepts of blocking and status,
which are essential to Improv training today. Currently, Johnstone's
ideas can be experienced through numerous Theatersports group
performances all over the world.
Improv continues to develop in
many forms. Its spirit of spontaneity is essential for the creative
imperative. In addition to the arts, its principles and mechanisms
can be found in almost every successful innovative endeavor from
organizational development to scientific discovery. |
