Stumbled across this blog, Hackers and Improviser, a few days ago. It’s about Hacking… and improvising.
Well, the computer-y stuff is lost on m, but he has some really great workshop notes.
Here’s a warm-up that rather tickled my fancy. Taken from a Mark Chalfant and Molly Woods workshop;
- Cosby warmup: we all did short two-person scenes where everyone had to do their worst Bill Cosby impression. You could do this with any impression, the point of it was to get everyone used to taking risks and embracing failure.
This is much better than what I usually do, which is tell students ‘you’re just going to have to get used to looking like an idiot’.
Anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff there. Check it out.
June 6, 2007 at 5:49 pm
That’s adapted from a Joe Bill exercise where he makes people do scenes doing impressions of someone they can’t do impressions of.
June 7, 2007 at 1:04 am
I think that’s a better idea.
Thanks to The Simpsons and Family Guy, the Bill Cosby impression has become almost as codified as the William Shatner.
It might be better to go with something a little fresher.
December 5, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I recently did this with a group of very experienced improvisors who were really comfortable doing impressions, so to make it harder, I made them come up with impressions they were scared of doing — but that caused everyone to draw a blank. So if doing this with a group of fearless folks you might want to bring a list of “hard to do” impressions as a backup.