Events this month (Tickets still available)

Physical Improv Bootcamp Workshop at BottleRocket Theatre in Calgary, Alberta.
​Saturday, August 22nd, 9am - 4pm.
​An all-day deep dive into physicality for both realistic and fantastical scenes, co-taught by me and Jacintha Damström of Finland.
​Info and registration here.​

2026 Robin Hood International Improv Festival in Nottingham, UK.
​August 31st - September 6th.
​On Fri Sep 4th, I’ll be playing with an all-star international cast in Helliday: an improvised horror comedy, directed by Polish improviser Beata Różalska. Who will die first, and who will become the “final girl?”
​Festival website.​

Book Anniversary!

August 24th will mark the 3rd anniversary of the Improv Illusionist book. I’m so grateful to all who’ve read it and shared their comments. Please continue to send me feedback and questions—I want to expand it for a second edition someday!

Know where you are

For most scene work, having a specific location in mind is incredibly beneficial. Location suggests characters, objects, activities, and can even provide narrative events to advance a story. When you inhabit a location fully, it can also communicate mood and atmosphere, especially when you’re playing a specific genre.

In long-form improv, where you might be in a particular location for the entire show, these effects are all multiplied. But the challenge of keeping your environment details straight for such a long time also increases. Suppose someone enters at the beginning of the show and drops a letter on a desk. Thirty minutes later, that letter suddenly becomes relevant to your story, so you go to retrieve it—but where was it on the stage? (The audience, who sees everything, is likely to remember more easily than the performers!)

We often make our work more difficult by thinking we have to improvise everything from scratch, every time. But just as you can reinhabit characters from previous shows, you can reuse locations.

I’ve written elsewhere about “pre-fab sets,” where you design location layouts in advance, then reuse those layouts whenever you play a scene with that location. If your “office set” always has the desk in the same place, you’d know exactly where to go on stage to pick up the letter. And if you’ve practiced as a team, your scene partner will have known precisely where to drop it.

However, there’s an even easier way to fully inhabit locations, and that’s to use real-world places in your improv. When you have in mind a place you’re familiar with, you can easily access your muscle memory for all the elements of that location. In your home office, you know where the desk is, so it’s easier to place and interact with the improvised version on stage. That’s not to say the scene is happening in your home office. It’s an office that just happens to have the same layout and features of the office you’re familiar with.

Using real-world specifics makes you more effective as a performer, while lowering the cognitive load of remembering details. There are two major challenges you’ll have to manage, but it’s still easy because you only have to remember some slight adjustments and not the whole location.

The first challenge is adjusting to fit your stage. Real-world spaces don’t have an open “fourth wall,” and so interacting with some elements of your location might put you at the back of the stage, or turned away from the audience. Place your most important furniture along the front of the stage, so you can be facing out. Don’t worry if it doesn’t seem logical—the audience doesn’t care.

The second challenge is that every player’s real-world spaces are different, and so your partners won’t be working with the same mental map. If someone places a desk in a different spot, you have to work with their placement to avoid confusing everyone. Stay observant and hold your mental maps loosely.

h/t to David Escobedo, who explains the idea of real-world specifics in “This Improv Book.” (See Book Review below.)

Things to Try

Exercises, scenes, and practices to work out your physical improv skills.

• Use Sub-locations to train yourself to make your location choices more specific. Choose a generic location and brainstorm as many different sub-locations as the group can come up with. For example, in a hospital you could have an operating theatre, a nursing station, a doctor’s office, the parking garage, a laboratory, an MRI machine, and more. You can choose to play scenes in any of these. Long-form groups can also use this exercise as the basis for improvised plays. Establish characters at different sub-locations, and then have them run into each other.
• Fix a Problem, Leave a Problem. Great for exploring details in an environment. Decide on a location in advance. Each player passes through, one-by-one, contacting all objects previously established. Each player discovers one problem in the environment that they fix, for example, water puddle on the floor, broken doorknob. They also create one different problem and leave it behind. Players don’t have to establish new objects but will probably have to. There can be more than one problem at a time, but keeping track of too many problems will make things difficult. Watch for consistency of objects: doors opening the same way, etc.
• Finding Objects in the Immediate Environment. A Viola Spolin classic. Three or more players agree on a simple group relationship and a topic of discussion. While the discussion proceeds, each player must handle objects found in the environment. Try not to invent objects, but rather discover them. Keep the discussion going! There should be dozens of objects by the end.

More from Improv Illusionist

​Newsletter Archives​

​The Improv Illusionist book - Preview and order info​

​Emotional Safety Resources​

​Improv Exercises for Physical Skills​

​Improv Books — Reviews & Recommendations​

​Improv Podcasts — Reviews & Recommendations​

News and Links

​Improv Mastery: The Cost of Getting Good (Your Brain on Improv)​
Rachel Van Nes’s improv Substack is one of my favourites, filtering improv theory and tips through the latest research into brain science. This article is about how expert improvisers get bad at risk-taking, even after years of experience and confidence in their skills. Some great tips here for shaking yourself out of a rut.

Book Review

This Improv Book​
by David Escobedo
(Get it from Bookshop.org *)

When an author dedicates their Masters and Ph.D. research to improv, you know they’re likely to have something interesting to say. Escobedo’s manual of techniques is divided into three sections: You (what you can control), Them (what you can only react to and how to support), and Us (what we aim to create together, both on and off stage.) A great mix of theory and practical applications.

• Pros: Engagingly written, with a wide variety of ideas, including how we can build better improv communities. I like the regular use of capitalized words to reinforce important base concepts. Drawings and images are included to illustrate some ideas. (For those who prefer, there’s also an e-book version without the graphics.)
• Cons: As a self-published book, it could use a better table of contents or an index to help revisit the best concepts.
• Best for: Intermediate-level improvisers who want to deepen their skills.

* Affiliate disclosure: If you buy a book through this link, I get a small percentage. Thanks for supporting me AND independent bookstores. (Note: at present, Bookshop.org only ships to the US and UK.)

Do you have any feedback about Improv Illusionist? Send me a message or just reply to this email. Seriously, I read everything and respond to nearly all of it as my schedule allows.

Next issue September 3rd! (From the Robin Hood Improv Festival.)

Ex nihilo!