Improv Review

September 19th - Day Two from 8:00 - 11:00
The theater classes are still working on Improv this week. They have learned a variety of games that were to be reviewed/played after writing a Journal entry about what makes a good Improver. (i.e. thinks on their feet, adjusts to the situation, projects, enunciates, etc.)

The first class appeared to have lost a few members, therefore they didn't appear to be seated as far apart this week. They still stretched over more space in comparison with 2nd hour. At the top of the hour a couple of students handed the teacher forms. These forms are used by all of the athletic teams on campus to ensure that athletes are passing all of their classes. Mr. Milisch talked about requiring it of the theater students, apparently when he looked up their grades they were all honor role students so it doesn't appear to be an issue.

After writing blind lines (lines to be pulled out and said during the game of freeze) and journal entries the first order of business was to get warmed up and ready. Since the first hour class is larger they split into two circles and played a couple of warm up games including Zip Zap Zop, a rock paper scissors type of game with finding a matching partner (this one was new to me), and another game I was unfamiliar with.

Once the class had warmed up the rest of the improv review continued. The students played freeze with blind lines, bus stop, worst ever, genres, party game, and a few more. The teacher had to purposely freeze some of the scenes and call people in to play because they were not moving themselves along. The scenes for freeze are apparently (I found out a different time via a student) supposed to be at least a minute long. The students seem to really enjoy Bus Stop. The teacher goes first and as he phrased it "I'll go first and someone has to come up and creep me out". Some of the students might push appropriateness for school but the overarching rules of Improv (for his classroom purposes) are no touching, keep it school appropriate, and accept what your other says.

I wondered about how to get students involved. The first hour class in particular had a lot of students that stayed seated and did not join the rest up on stage. I don't know if I should have gone down to them and try to get them engaged or what? I did ask my teacher about what I should do and he was like "yeah yeah that'd be good" which still left me wondering.

to be continued......