#improvexercise

A 2-person scene will play out based on a suggestion. These scenes shouldn’t be very long about 3 minutes or less. When the scene is over it will be played out again, but this time possibly with a different emotion, genre, speed, character, physicality, etc. When doing this exercise it depends on what you are working on but the 3 scenes can be a pacing exercise where you have the scene played normal, fast, and slow. Or  an emotions exercise where they play 2 different emotions after the 1st scene or it can be a mixture depending on what specific skill set you are working on.

Side note: While doing this exercise players should avoid saying “but” to negate or change the scene.

In this exercise you will play into your own honest reality. So in the scene the focus is to react honestly and to give the honest answer that you would say in your day to day life if in said scenario. Trying to be funny is not important as we are looking to build our base realities to be honest and find truthfulness and uniqueness in our own honest realities. 

As soon as players veer away from what thy have already created the instructor or coach should reel players in to explore what already exist. This is “Yes And-ing” while exploring and adding details without creating unnecessary information or overloading the scene. A scene can start as simple as Player 1 saying “ It sure is dark outside” but now the next line of dialogue from Player 2 must keep the scene going down a path where “It being dark outside” matters by exploring what it means and adding information to the scene possibly by exploring what it means to them or their scene partner or framing what it means. A line of dialogue like “ I’m terrified of the dark will you protect me” or “ The dark will make it much easier to sneak out of the house” any line of dialogue that moves the idea of it “Being Dark Outside” forward. After that we want to continue only following the information that is already creating and expand on it. Similar to repeating the last thing said, we are just taking the little bit of information in the scene and not changing or veering away from it, but more so hyper focusing on it for a brief moment to keep the scene tight on details. For another example if “It sure is dark outside” a bad or so-so line of dialogue to respond with might be “The baby is finally asleep now” this makes sense, but takes us away from the “Dark” and completely realigns the scene to be about a baby. A better line of dialogue in the same vein might be “ That’s good, the baby only sleeps when it’s dark”. With this line of dialogue we still keep the scene about “The Dark”, but add the detail of it being why the baby is asleep, the dark still has value and we have added or explored what it being dark means. This exercise is to keep scenes extremely tight and put value into every word and detail we hear and say.

The UCB Improv Manual 

A series of scenes that can be connected or not connected. We may or may not see 2ndor 3rdbeats for scenes.  Tag outs and callbacks are welcome.