Improvisation for Actors: Why Freezing Is Not a Verdict

The most useful sentence in this course

“Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic.”

Keith Johnstone ran the Royal Court studio through the 1960s. In 1964 he read Joseph Wolpe on the treatment of phobias, and it reorganised his teaching. Here is the passage in full. Every version you will find online has been cut.

My view is that we have a universal phobia of being looked at on a stage, and that this responds very well to ‘progressive desensitisation’ of the type that Wolpe advocates. Many teachers seem to me to be trying to get their students to conceal fear, which always leaves some traces — a heaviness, an extra tension, a lack of spontaneity. I try to dissipate the fear by a method analogous to Wolpe's, but which I really got from Anthony Stirling. The one finding of Wolpe which I immediately incorporated into my work was the discovery that if the healing process is interrupted by a recurrence of the total fear — maybe a patient being treated for a phobia of birds suddenly finds himself surrounded by fluttering pigeons — then the treatment has to be started again at the bottom of the hierarchy. I therefore constantly return to the very first stages of the work to try to pull in those students who remain in a terrified state, and who therefore make hardly any progress. Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic, and this completely changes the teacher's relationship with them.

Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Faber and Faber, 1979 — from “Notes on Myself”

Note the clause almost everyone cuts.

And this completely changes the teacher's relationship with them. Without it the line is a slogan. With it, it is an argument about how you should be taught.

The reframe is not “be kinder to nervous students”. It is that the diagnosis was wrong, and a wrong diagnosis produces the wrong treatment.

One correction, and it makes the story better.

It is usually written that Johnstone got his method from Wolpe. He is more careful than that, and more generous. The method, he says, came from Anthony Stirling. What he took from Wolpe was one finding. An interruption of total fear sends the treatment back to the bottom of the hierarchy.

He is explicit about the date, too. “When (in 1964) I read of Wolpe's work in curing phobias, I saw a clear relationship with the ideas I'd got from Stirling, and with the way I was developing them.”

What you assumeI freeze, therefore I am not talented at this.

What it actually isYou are frightened, and fear responds to starting lower and climbing.

That distinction gives you something practical you can use on a class rather than on yourself. A room that throws terrified beginners straight into high-exposure games is doing the pigeon thing. On Johnstone's own reasoning that does not build tolerance — it sends people back to the bottom. A good class starts low and climbs, and returns to the bottom whenever somebody is stuck there. If a class you are in does the opposite, the problem is the class.

The same move, twenty years earlier

Modern improv was invented for immigrant children who did not share a language.

Almost nobody tells this story, and it changes what the discipline looks like.

Viola Spolin studied from 1923 to 1926 under the sociologist Neva Boyd. Boyd's training school was inside Hull House, Jane Addams's settlement house on Chicago's near west side. Folk games, storytelling, dance, group work. Boyd's principle was that play does something no other behaviour does.

Play involves social values, as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control, and imagination.

Neva Boyd, sociologist, Hull House — Spolin's teacher

In 1939 Spolin became a drama supervisor for the WPA Recreational Project in Chicago. She worked with children and recent immigrants in poor neighbourhoods, and her students frequently had no language in common. So she built exercises that could be taught by doing rather than by explaining.

The games emerged out of necessity. I didn't sit at home and dream them up.

Viola Spolin, on where theatre games came from

And she made Johnstone's move before he did.

From Improvisation for the Theater, published by Northwestern University Press in 1963 — sixteen years before Impro:

“Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become ‘stage-worthy.’” And, more precisely: acting can be taught to the average as well as the talented, if the teaching makes the techniques intuitive enough that they become the student's own.

Two people, two countries, no contact between them, arriving at the same conclusion: the thing standing between a person and this work is not talent.

They really did not know about each other. Johnstone is reported to have first encountered Spolin's book in 1966, when an audience member lent it to him. That was a decade into his own work at the Royal Court. We have it from a well-informed secondary account rather than a page we read ourselves, so treat the date as reported rather than certain. The independence of the two traditions is not in doubt — they even use different words for it, improv in America and impro in Britain and Canada.

Two actors facing each other across a table, one relaxed and one deferential

Status, which is the most immediately useful thing in this chapter for anyone working on camera.

A correction to our own thesis

Two lineages, and both of them drifted toward comedy.

We were going to tell you that Chicago produced comedy and Johnstone produced actor training, and that actors get sent to the wrong one. We checked it properly. It is not that clean, and the true version is more interesting.

Lineage oneChicago

1923Spolin trains under Neva Boyd at Hull House.
1939Builds the games for immigrant children on a WPA project.
1955Her son Paul Sills co-founds the Compass Players.
1959The Second City opens. Spolin runs its workshops until 1965.
1963Improvisation for the Theater — a university press, subtitled a handbook for teachers and directors.
1967Del Close and The Committee perform the first Harold.
1990UCB founded, out of Chicago, in New York.

Lineage twoJohnstone

1956Commissioned as a playwright at the Royal Court by George Devine and Tony Richardson.
1964Reads Wolpe. Concludes that blocked students are phobic rather than untalented.
1966Leaves the Court after ten years, latterly an Associate Director.
1967Co-founds The Theatre Machine, touring Europe.
1975Teaching at the University of Calgary, where he stays until 1995.
1977Co-founds Loose Moose. Theatresports follows, modelled on professional wrestling.
1979Impro published by Faber and Faber.

Look at where each one ends up. Spolin's games were invented for immigrant children and published by a university press as a handbook for teachers; within two decades her son had turned them into a nightclub revue. Johnstone's work was developed at the Royal Court to loosen up writers and actors; within twenty years he had turned it into a scored competition modelled on professional wrestling, which spread to six continents. Neither lineage stayed where it started, and they drifted in the same direction.

So the real problem is not that one tradition is serious and the other is frivolous.

It is that both are now taught, in both countries, almost entirely by comedy schools to people who want to be funny. The actor-training use that both founders originally had in mind survives mainly in books rather than in classrooms.

Which is a better reason to read Impro than to sign up for anything.

And the comedy tradition's own manual agrees with us.

Del Close taught at Second City and later co-founded iO with Charna Halpern. Truth in Comedy, the 1994 manual he wrote with Halpern and Kim Johnson, is the foundational text of American long-form. Its central claim is not about jokes.

The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention.

Halpern, Close & Johnson, Truth in Comedy, Meriwether, 1994

And the warning that follows from it: “When players worry that a scene isn't funny, they may resort to jokes. This usually guarantees the scene won't be funny.” The comedy tradition's own handbook says the route to comedy is not comedy. That is worth knowing before you decide you cannot do this.

One thing to know about the Harold before you go looking for it. It is the dominant long-form structure: an opening, then three rounds of three scenes with group games between them, converging at the end. It was first performed in 1967, and named as a joke after a line in A Hard Day's Night. But it is explicitly not a story form. Practitioners describe it as emphasising patterns, themes and group discoveries rather than plot. An actor who goes to a Harold class looking for narrative craft is in the wrong room, and that is nobody's fault.

We should also say that at least one experienced Spolin practitioner draws this line somewhere else entirely. He groups Johnstone's methods with “yes, and” as head-led popular improv, against Spolin's games. The argument about who is the serious one is live, and we are not pretending to have settled it.

Real studies, read honestly

What the research actually shows, and what it cannot.

There is peer-reviewed evidence here and almost nobody in the acting world cites it. There are also design limitations, and the same people who ran the studies are the ones who point them out.

2019 — The Arts in Psychotherapy 63:111–117A ten-week improv programme in schools

Sample

268 middle and high school students.

Found

Increases in social skills, hope, creative self-efficacy, comfort performing for others and willingness to make mistakes. Students who screened positive for social phobia at the start reported reduced social anxiety afterwards.

The limit

A single-group pre/post design with no control group, and the anxiety finding applies to the sub-group who screened positive, not to all 268.

2020 — Thinking Skills and Creativity 35:100632Two randomised experiments, twenty minutes each

Sample

74 and 131 participants, randomly assigned. The authors call these the largest randomised improv experiments to date.

Control

Not nothing — matched social tasks. Discussing a friend or a film in the first study, scripted social tasks in the second. So improv was tested against other social interaction.

Found

Divergent thinking improved in both. The authors write that improv can boost positive affect and increase uncertainty tolerance “relative to other social interactions”.

The limit

Affect and uncertainty tolerance moved in the second experiment only. This is the strongest study in the field and it is still twenty minutes in a lab.

2023 — The Arts in Psychotherapy 82:101985Fourteen Detroit public schools

Sample

350 students at week one, 339 at week ten, across grades 8–12. 249 paired surveys, a 71% retention rate.

Found

Social anxiety and intolerance of uncertainty both fell. Greater reduction in uncertainty intolerance went with greater reduction in social anxiety.

The limit

Again no control group. The authors state it themselves: a replication with a control group is needed to rule out confounds and “specifically attribute change to improv training”.

Two corrections to how this research is usually reported, including in our own brief.

You will see it written that “improv training reduces social anxiety through better tolerance of uncertainty”. That sentence is from a university press release, not from the paper, and the word doing the work is through. It asserts a causal mechanism that a study with no control group cannot establish, and whose own authors decline to claim it.

And a smaller one: the 2019 study is often reported as finding increased social self-efficacy. It is creative self-efficacy. Those are different measures and the substitution has been copied from source to source.

Here is the honest sentence. Participation was associated with these changes. The designs mostly cannot separate improv from the passage of time, or from simply spending ten weeks in an organised social activity. That is still worth knowing, and it is not a proof.

One thing the field says about itself is worth quoting, because it is unusually candid. Research on improv's benefits, the 2020 authors write, has “generally lacked the rigor of randomized experiments”. They write that as the reason for running the randomised experiments that follow — so quote it as a motive, not as a verdict.

Why this matters to somebody auditioning

Auditioning is almost entirely an exercise in tolerating uncertainty.

Which is the one thing improv has published evidence for improving, and it is a better reason to do it than anything the field usually offers.

Intolerance of uncertainty is not a folk concept. It is an established construct in clinical psychology. Since Carleton's 2016 review it has been treated as a transdiagnostic factor — something that runs across anxiety and depression rather than belonging to one diagnosis.

You cannot predict the roomWho is in it, how they behave, whether anyone reacts, whether the camera operator is also the casting director.

You cannot predict the readerPace, volume, whether they give you anything at all.

You cannot predict the redirectIt may not come. It may come and reverse your whole reading. You get four seconds to absorb it.

You cannot predict the outcomeOr, in most cases, ever find out why.

The usual claimImprov makes you quicker and funnier in the room.

The evidenced oneIt may make not-knowing less frightening.

And that is the thing auditioning actually demands. In improv training, as the 2023 paper puts it, “repeated uncertainty is coupled with a non-judgmental, trusting and mutually supportive environment” — which is a description of graded exposure, in a rehearsal room, by accident.

And here is the argument we find genuinely striking, labelled as ours. In 1964 Johnstone took a mechanism out of behaviour therapy and applied it to actor training. From roughly 2019 onward, researchers working in the other direction measured improv training and found it associated with reduced intolerance of uncertainty by what looks like the same mechanism — repeated exposure in a supportive setting, graded through the structure of the exercises.

Johnstone borrowed it from therapy; therapy came back and measured something that looks a great deal like it. Each link in that chain is sourced. The chain itself is our construction, none of the researchers cites Johnstone, and the studies cannot carry a causal claim. We think it is true and we are telling you it is an argument rather than a finding.

The most misunderstood idea in the subject

“Yes, and” does not mean agreeing with everything.

This misconception does real damage, because it makes actors think improv is incompatible with conflict — and scenes are made of conflict.

Johnstone's vocabulary is simple. Anything an actor does is an offer, and each offer can be accepted or blocked. The distinction that matters is not agreement.

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.

Keith Johnstone, Impro, p. 115

Develop the action. That is the whole test.

Your character can refuse, argue, walk out, say no, lie, threaten and slam a door, and none of that is blocking, because the action develops. Blocking is cancelling your partner's reality — denying that the thing they established exists at all.

A scene in which everybody agrees is not good improv. It is usually not a scene.

Two more of his lines are worth having, because they name the emotional truth of it. “Blocking is a form of aggression.” And, more forgivingly: “The motto of scared improvisers is ‘when in doubt, say NO’.” Blocking is what frightened people do. Which brings you straight back to the first section.

A definition we could not stand up, and cut. The line most often quoted here is “a block is anything that prevents the action from developing, or that wipes out your partner's premise”. We could find it on exactly one website and nowhere else, and the version circulating in summaries — including in our own brief — had silently deleted the second half, which is the half that carries the meaning. It is very probably genuine. We are using the page-referenced quote above instead.

The best tool here for camera work

Status, which is happening whether you play it or not.

Readers of Impro routinely name the status chapter as the best thing in the book. For a screen actor it is also the most immediately usable.

Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless’.

Keith Johnstone, Impro — opening of the Status chapter

And here is the observation that makes it useful rather than merely true.

Normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there's a conflict. In reality status transactions continue all the time.

Johnstone, same chapter

Then the finding from the studio floor. This is the one that should make you want to try it. “As soon as I introduced the status work at the Studio, we found that people will play one status while convinced that they are playing the opposite.”

It is observablePosture, eyeline, stillness, who speaks first, who fills a silence. All of it survives a chest-up frame.

It is relationalStatus only exists between two people, which is where every casting director in this Academy says your attention should be.

It is playable as an actionTo raise mine. To lower theirs. To let them win this one. Those are things you can actually do, unlike a feeling.

It is the cousin of gestusBrecht's term from the techniques chapter — behaviour that reveals social position. Same observation, different tradition.

The five-minute version.

Take any scene and play it twice. Once playing high status, once low, with nothing else changed — same lines, same objective, same blocking.

You get two completely different scenes, it costs nothing, and it requires no comic ability whatsoever.

Spontaneity, and the trap of being clever

The more obvious you are, the more original you appear.

Johnstone's account of why students freeze is not about a shortage of ideas. It is the opposite, and it is very hard to argue with.

The student hesitates not because he doesn't have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that arrive uninvited.

Keith Johnstone, Impro, on the “…oh… aahh… um…” that follows every request for an idea

Which turns the instruction inside out.

If you have not gone blank — if you have in fact rejected something — then the useful note is not think of something. It is say the thing you already thought of and dismissed.

That is genuinely actionable, and it is the exact opposite of what a frozen person believes they need.

The three realisations he takes students through.

He puts them in his own numbered form, and the ordering is the argument. “That we struggle against our imaginations, especially when we try to be imaginative; that we are not responsible for the content of our imaginations; and that we are not, as we are taught to think, our ‘personalities’, but that the imagination is our true self.”

The personal source of all of it is in the opening pages of the book.

I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did… In the end I was reluctant to attempt anything for fear of failure, and my first thoughts never seemed good enough.

Keith Johnstone, Impro, “Notes on Myself”

What you are doingWeighing ideas, discarding the first one, hunting for a better one.

What he says that costs“An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He's not making any decisions… He's accepting his first thoughts.”

This is the antidote to the clever-choice trap the bold-choices chapter describes from the casting side. The improviser has to realise that the more obvious he is, the more original he appears. It feels like failure and it usually is not — because your obvious is not anybody else's obvious, and you are the only person who finds it obvious.

What improv is for, if you do scripted work

Mike Leigh builds entire films this way. He also hates the word.

If you want a single answer to “why would a screen actor learn this”, it is here — because in Leigh's process, improvisation is not a warm-up. It is the writing.

You agree to it knowing nothing

Actors commit before there is a subject. On Vera Drake, Leigh says, the only actor who knew the premise was Imelda Staunton.

You build a character one-to-one, from a real person

Not playing them — using them as a starting point. Leigh: “I usually pick somebody as the jumping off point for the character. There is some root, some reality so that the actor's got something to work from.” Then you invent outward, in enormous detail, for months.

The characters meet, in character, without you knowing who is coming

This is the part that sounds invented and is not. The costume designer Lindy Hemming, who has worked on his films for decades, describes it exactly.

“People do open a door, in Mike's rehearsals, and really don't know who or what is going to be on the other side.”

It gets structured, distilled, and written

Leigh: “We do that by improvising and then pinning it down and distilling it and then finally writing it through rehearsal.” He builds each scene in the location, because he cannot write it without seeing the room.

And then nobody improvises

By the time the camera turns over, the dialogue is fixed. Lesley Manville: “When we shoot we're not improvising. Once we're filming it, the dialogue is absolutely set.”

He is blunt about this, and the quote is the correction the whole subject needs.

He was asked directly whether he is still improvising by the time he shoots.

Certainly not… I don't like shooting improvisation, actually, I mean I don't like improvisation as such. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Mike Leigh, interviewed by Bette Gordon, BOMB, Winter 1994

He adds: “By the time the camera rolls — there is only one camera — it is absolutely precise.” He has also said he wishes he had credited himself as writer earlier rather than as deviser. The improvisation produced writing.

Which is the answer to the question everybody asks.

Improvisation here is a method of preparation, not a performance style. It produces precision rather than looseness. And Manville is clear that the words are still the actors' own: “All of the dialogue, all of the words, actually come from the actors as well.”

Her other line is the honest cost of it: “You have to give yourself up to it, though. Leave your ego at home.”

And it is not comfortable, which is worth saying. David Thewlis described the rules on Naked. They are strict, and you are not allowed to come out of character unless Leigh says so. He recalls an improvisation in which he had a sharpened screwdriver and thought about stopping it. His character would have used it, and Leigh did not know he had it. Years later he said he could barely remember most parts he had played since. He still remembered a great deal about that character's life.

Leigh is unromantic about it from his side too: “I hate the rehearsals because it's donkeywork and you haven't got anything to show at the end of the day.” We found no actor on record calling the process abusive or saying they regretted it. We did find people saying it was very hard, and we would rather report that than imply either a scandal or an idyll.

In the room, and on tape

Should you improvise in an audition?

Serve the text first. Then, if you want, offer something extra — as an addition, never as a substitute.

Do the scene as writtenRewriting the writer's lines is named as a mistake more consistently than almost anything else in casting advice.

Then add, if you addA tag at the end, or a separate take. Something they can use or ignore without losing the take they asked for.

Commercial is differentImprovised takes are often actively welcomed in commercial casting. Read the brief, and when in doubt ask.

A quote we removed, and why we are telling you. Our brief attributed a line to a casting director named Kate Moody, saying she is a fan of actors improvising a bit at the end of a take. We went looking for the source. We could not establish that this person exists — no credits, no interview, no article anywhere carrying the quote.

There is a real commercial casting director named Kirkland Moody, who does talk about improv. But he says something different and narrower. Improv matters, he says, as “just having the willingness to play and not get stuck in your one way of doing something”. That is a fair thing to quote, and it is not the same claim, so we are not stretching it into one.

What improv is notA licence to replace the words you were sent.

What it isThe thing that keeps you alive inside them.

Which is the counterintuitive point about self-tapes. A tape is the least spontaneous thing an actor does: no partner responding freshly, no adjustment, repeated takes, total control. So improv gives you exactly what that environment strips out — the habit of responding rather than executing. The over-taping research describes what happens without it: twenty takes, and the humanity ironed out of all of them.

What to do, and where

Practise, and where to actually go.

Most of this needs one other person, and that is the single cheapest thing you can arrange.

With a partner

Status swap, and yes-and twice.

One scene played high then low. Then build a story alternating sentences, accepting everything — and then again, letting the characters disagree while still developing the action.

The pointThe difference between those two runs is the whole blocking section, felt rather than read.

Alone

Say the first thing, and watch status.

Speak or write without premeditation and refuse to edit. Then watch real conversations and name who is raising and lowering status.

The pointSolo work is a poor substitute here, but status observation is free, endless, and feeds character work directly.

Every time

Give the obvious answer on purpose.

Take any prompt and deliberately say the first, plainest thing. Notice how strongly you want to improve on it.

The pointThat resistance is the thing the whole discipline is aimed at, and you can feel it in about ten seconds.

Where to train, honestly.

In the UK the Chicago tradition is institutionalised and the Johnstone tradition mostly is not. The Free Association and Hoopla are the large schools, and both teach the American long-form vocabulary. The Johnstone line survives through individual practitioners, and through Improbable. Their Lifegame is a Johnstone form they developed with him directly.

The drama schools teach it onceRADA lists improvisation as a first-year class; LAMDA lists it alongside Laban, Hagen and Meisner in year one. In both, it is a foundation that later gets absorbed rather than a through-line.

And they teach it in Chicago's vocabularyRADA's own short-course page sells “the power of ‘yes, and’” and growth in confidence — not status, blocking or spontaneity. That is a small piece of evidence for everything above, from the most prestigious address in British actor training.

The American schools are a comedy pipeline, and say soIn 2020 NBC created formal Saturday Night Live scholarships with Second City, The Groundlings, The PIT and UCB, each offering direct entry to submit an audition tape or sketch packet. That is a real, documented route — into American sketch comedy.

One practical caution about the biggest name. UCB is a for-profit company. Performers at its theatres are not paid, core courses run to several hundred dollars each, and reaching the point of auditioning for a house team costs somewhere around two and a half thousand dollars in classes. Its co-founder has been quoted saying he does not see performing there as labour.

That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to be clear about what you are buying. It is craft and a comedy network, rather than access to dramatic casting.

And a closing thought from an unlikely place. Hoopla is a comedy school, and it publishes a history of the two traditions. It concludes that treating them as rivals is like deciding to run using only one of your feet. That is a comedy school arguing against the comedy-versus-craft binary, and it is more generous than the version we started with.

Where the sources genuinely disagree

The contradictions, laid out.

Six real disputes, and we have taken a position on each, with the reasoning set out above.

Is improv a comedy skill?

The public formSecond City, UCB, Theatresports. All of it is comedy, all of it is competitive or commercial.

Both foundersSpolin built it for immigrant children on a relief programme. Johnstone built it to loosen up writers at the Royal Court. Neither started with jokes.

Are the two traditions really different?

Yes, in originIndependently invented, different countries, different vocabulary — improv and impro.

Not in destinationSpolin's games became a nightclub revue. Johnstone's became a scored competition modelled on wrestling. Both drifted.

Does “yes, and” mean agreeing?

The slogan says soAnd beginners are taught it that way for a reason — they block reflexively.

JohnstoneBad improvisers block action; good improvisers develop it. Your character can refuse, argue and leave.

Is freezing a talent problem?

The universal fearAnd the reason a lot of actors avoid the whole subject.

Johnstone, 1964See them as phobic rather than untalented, and return to the bottom of the ladder whenever somebody is stuck there.

Does improv work?

Widely claimedConfidence, creativity, presence, being better in the room.

The evidenceDivergent thinking, positive affect, uncertainty tolerance and social anxiety. Not better acting — nobody has tested that.

Is the evidence strong?

Real and peer-reviewedThree studies, one of them randomised with matched social controls.

And limitedTwo of the three have no control group, and their own authors say a controlled replication is needed before attributing change to improv.

Three attributions we removed from our brief. The line “improv not as a comedy game, but as a rigorous theatrical discipline” is not Johnstone — it is an improv archive's editorial blurb about his book. “Every social interaction involves status shifts” is not his sentence either; it is a summariser's compression, and his own wording above is better. And “be obvious rather than original” is not attested anywhere as his phrasing.

This is the fifth chapter in which a striking quotation turned out to be a blog's own prose with a famous name attached. If a line's only trail leads to a book-summary site, it is usually the summariser's sentence.

A young actor hesitating at the edge of a studio group before joining in

You are not bad at this. You are at the bottom of a ladder.

Find one other person. Play one scene twice, once high status and once low, and change nothing else. Then say the first thing that comes into your head and refuse to improve on it.

Nobody has to be funny, nobody is watching, and it is the only exercise in this course with published evidence that it makes uncertainty easier to bear.

Taking a redirect

Being bad at improv is not a verdict on your talent. Keith Johnstone worked out why in 1964.

“Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic.”

One correction, and it makes the story better.

Modern improv was invented for immigrant children who did not share a language.

Two lineages, and both of them drifted toward comedy.

And the comedy tradition's own manual agrees with us.

What the research actually shows, and what it cannot.

Auditioning is almost entirely an exercise in tolerating uncertainty.

“Yes, and” does not mean agreeing with everything.

Status, which is happening whether you play it or not.

The more obvious you are, the more original you appear.

The three realisations he takes students through.

Mike Leigh builds entire films this way. He also hates the word.

He is blunt about this, and the quote is the correction the whole subject needs.

Should you improvise in an audition?

Practise, and where to actually go.

Where to train, honestly.

The contradictions, laid out.

Is improv a comedy skill?

Are the two traditions really different?

Does “yes, and” mean agreeing?

Is freezing a talent problem?

Does improv work?

Is the evidence strong?

You are not bad at this. You are at the bottom of a ladder.

Audition technique

Emotion and sense memory