Improvisation and the Advanced Glasgow Acting Class

I want to tell you something about the project my advanced students are currently working on in their Tuesday evening classes. Not because I am trying to persuade you to join them, cos I’m not, but because I think it might be interesting to hear about the work we’re doing together.

The advanced acting class at Acting Coach Scotland is a place where students that already have a firm grip on the technique of Practical Aesthetics explore more advanced elements of the technique and the training. This is an invite-only class and the standard of the student is high.

In this block of classes, we’re doing something different, we’re creating improvised scenes from scratch, working on them for a while and then handing them to playwrights to work up into script scenes.

The project started with the students creating an improvisational scenario for two other acting students. We do this with the tools of Practical Aesthetics. The student actor created a scenario, involving two people in a situation. They determined the location and what the individuals wanted from each other in the scene. Then they decided upon Essential Actions for the characters in the scene.

The next part involved a story conference with the students telling each other their ideas. I worked as story editor, working out any kinks, strengthening any parts of the story that I felt were vulnerable and challenging some of the thinking behind the decisions made.

The ‘actors’ for each scene then created an As-If for their improvised scene, to make a personal connection to the circumstances of the scene. Then they go from Repetition to connect with their partner, to Repetition with Action to begin to habituate the essential action whilst staying connected with their improv partner and finally into the As-If to bring it all together.

The students will work for a couple of weeks now on exploring the scene through improvisation before our three playwrights Ann Marie di Mambro, Chris Dolan and Philip J Larkin come in and watch the work in progress improvisations. They’ll then take their notes, their impression of the scenes and an audio recording of the improvisations and spend a week creating a scripted scene from it. The students will then work on rehearsing the scenes under my direction and using Practical Aesthetics to bring the scenes to performance.

I’ll keep you up to date with how the scenes develop and the process the students go through as they experience the generation and fruition of ideas into their performance.