GAME in NARRATIVE IMPROV
with Tamar Broadbent
Description:
Bring more comedy into your improvised stories by learning how to find and play funny patterns and endow your characters with comedic points of view!
We all love narrative improv! We take the audience on a journey and leave them feeling satisfied, knowing what’s happened to the wonderful characters we’ve just invented for them. But sometimes in narrative, we focus so hard on the story that we neglect perfect opportunities to play game along the way. We are left with ‘lulls’ – patches of silence, where we are recapping extraneous plot details, when we could be invoking raucous laughter.
But it doesn’t have to be like this! Narrative and game can go hand in hand to make your already brilliant show pack an extra punch.
Drawing on my decade-long experience of performing and teaching improv, I will guide you through the principles of game and POV and show you how you can bring these techniques into your shows. You’ll find you can do so without taking away from the story you’re telling, and that it will in fact enhance the narrative, leaving the audience feeling extra thrilled at having seen a spectacle that tells them a story and delivers on the laughs throughout.
Day 1
On the first day, we will look at what ‘game’ is and how to discover it organically in improv scenes. We will practice using POV to give our characters a comedic engine, and also how it can be used to play game. We will look at the difference between character and POV, and you will end this day with an understanding of how to find and play funny patterns in stand-alone scenes.
Day 2
On the second day, we will bring game into narrative - improvising a structure from A to B, looking for opportunities throughout to develop strong comedic POVs, and find and play game.
Requirements:
An understanding of narrative improv is useful, though not essential. (Narrative structure itself will not be taught in this class). If this is not possible, experience of improvising characters would be useful. Not suitable for absolute beginners.
About Tamar Broadbent
Tamar is a UK-based improviser who performs and teaches at the Free Association in London. She has recently appeared in Hell Lane, a narrative Halloween-themed improv show and Episodes, a narrative and game-based show about unseen episodes of famous television shows.
From 2018-2020, Tamar was a main stage performer at the renowned US improv comedy theatre Boom Chicago in Amsterdam. She performed long form, short form and musical improv five nights a week, and wrote sketches, stand up and songs for the theatre.
Tamar has been teaching improv for over five years, with Boom Chicago and the Free Association as well in the corporate world. She is a fun, positive and constructive coach, and loves nothing more than helping already great players discover something new.
