Some delayed reports from my trip to Germany at the end of October follow. The visit was partly for leisure but also to return to some sources of inspiration and connection in the improv world.
Yesterday [and a month] I co-facilitated a lovely little impro playshop with Julia Pöhlmann in her home town. It was a little off the cuff and with a modest group size – just two wonderful students! – but it was great to work with beginners again after a while working with performers as coach or peer-practitioner.
While it evolves at each encounter, my teaching framework is becoming more and more solid. It’s really just an expression of what I reckon as the fundamentals of the art. It helps me make sense of why games are useful, and why some exercises seem in themselves sufficient to elicit good scenes, whereas others feel more like laser-focused techniques that attend to one thing well, but aren’t enough to equip a beginner to play through a scene.
It was also my first time teaching out of English! Well, i mostly spoke English but the scenes and some of the warmups were in German. It really kept me aware and conscious of how the scene felt, and i was happy that my sidecoaching appeared to fit what the scene genuinely needed. Julia did a great job translating my ideas and providing her own, ran great sessions and kept the temperature of the session really well.