Creativity & Performance

When I hear a student already heightening, I read it as either a breakthrough or a sign of someone with experience. Other players may just laugh naturally at the added detail, while others catch that sudden ah-ha moment where a light bulb finally goes on. Polite agreement never builds momentum, and heightening is what actually moves a scene forward. The standard beginner class leaves students polite instead of creative. Beginning with just yes and tends to point students towa

That workshop with Joe Bill changed how I hear a scene after the offer lands. I had been performing for four years and still thought the entire job was to follow a checklist, so when Joe Bill walked into our room and told us to let our scene partner affect us, I finally understood what he was asking. That's something nobody ever puts on a beginner handout. He was asking me to drop the mechanics and let whatever he handed me actually move through me, which is a step most of us

Seriousness feels safe because it keeps your skills visible, but that safety comes with a tax on the ideas you're actually trying to find. Someone sits in the back row and watches us do a game where we have to accept every object as real. She assumes we're warming up for the actual work, and I used to assume that too. The real shift happens when she sees how much harder the game gets than our actual scenes. You start to notice that the work was happening all along, and nobody

Holding back feels like a small private decision that only costs you. It's neither small nor private, and you're not the one who pays. Someone hands you an invisible banana, and you say, "Oh, a banana, sure." The scene doesn't die right there, but something just happened, and everyone in the room felt it without being able to name it. The usual note afterward is that you dropped the offer. That's true, and it's the least interesting part of what went wrong. Half-committing is

Life moves fast, doesn't it? We're all in a constant sprint, juggling emails, meetings, and a seemingly endless stream of notifications. In this always-on world, there’s an almost involuntary urge to fill every silence, to respond instantly, to never leave a gap. But what if one of the most powerful tools for better communication, deeper connection, and even sharper decision-making isn't about what you say or do quickly, but what you don't? What if it's the simple, often-over

It sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it? We're often chasing the biggest laugh, the most absurd gag, or the quickest punchline in improv, but I've found that the shows that truly resonate, the ones that stay with you and make the humor land harder, often have a secret ingredient: a little bit of pathos. This isn't about turning your comedy into a drama; it's about adding a touch of authentic human feeling that makes the funny moments shine even brighter. The Power of Emotiona

The intentionality-as-bait concept makes sense on paper, especially for stand-ups, but it's only one door in. There's a concept floating around in improv teaching right now that I've been thinking about. The idea that intentionality, having a clear point of view, a want, a direction in your scene, is the hook that draws new people into improv. It makes sense on paper. Stand-up comedians, for example, already understand this because creating a set is inherently intentional. Yo

Here's something I've noticed teaching improv workshops, people can do beautiful two-person scenes all day but put five of them on stage together and suddenly it's a traffic jam. We spend so much time on duos that group scenes become this mysterious thing nobody quite taught us how to handle. The truth is they work differently and once you get the hang of them they're some of the most fun you can have on stage. The single most useful thing I can tell you about group scenes is

Every good improv scene has an invisible referee. Not a person in the scene telling people what to do, but a shared understanding between the players of what counts. Think about it. In a pickup basketball game nobody stops to check the rulebook, but everyone knows when a shot matters and when someone traveled. That knowing is the referee, and it lives in the room, not in any one player. I've been thinking about this after reading Will Hines's latest piece on intentionality ve

Your scene partner is standing three feet away, waiting. The audience is watching. You have no idea who you are, where you are, or what\'s happening. Your brain offers you a premise: maybe we\'re zookeepers, it suggests, or astronauts, or estranged siblings at a funeral. That\'s the trap. The moment you reach for an invented premise, you\'ve stopped looking at the one person who can tell you everything you need to know. The most powerful way to start a scene is to notice what

I was working with a student who had a big presentation coming up, the kind where the room goes quiet and every pair of eyes locks onto you like a heat-seeking missile. She told me her strategy was to "turn into someone else," a professional version of herself who didn't get nervous and knew all the answers. A mask, essentially. The kind we all reach for when the stakes feel high. Here's the thing about masks, though. They crack. Play the character, not the caricature The imp

I watched two improvisers walk on stage last week. The first one had an idea, you could see it in her eyes, that little plan she was carrying: I'm going to be a flight attendant, and the scene is an airplane. She opened with it. The second player accepted it, but the whole thing felt flat. The offers were polite but thin and the scene ended politely four minutes later with a weak button and a relieved audience. The second pair walked out and one of them just looked at the oth

The Paradox You Feel First You can master chess, you can master guitar or public speaking or surgical technique, and each of those has a plateau, a point where the marginal gains shrink to almost nothing and you're just maintaining what you already know. Improv doesn't have one. The better you get at it, the more possibility you see, and that's not a poetic accident, it's structural, built into the very thing improv asks you to do. Convergence and the Infinite Pivot Most skil

The Moment It Clicks There's a moment in every improv workshop where someone gets hit with the truth, the realization that they've been told to "listen harder" for years but no one ever stopped to explain that listening is only half the equation. And then they play Freeze Tag from the back line, and they understand. How Freeze Tag Works If you've never played Freeze Tag (it's a warm up game you'll find in most improv programs), here's how it works. Two players are on stage do

You're on stage your scene partner says something and you have to decide in a split second: do you go with it or do you push past it? Most of the time you know you should go with it but it feels like giving up your idea. What you're really doing though is listening. Not the kind of listening where you wait for your turn to talk but the kind that actually changes you in the middle of a scene. Not all listening is the same. There's a spectrum from the obvious adjustments everyo

There's a concept from UCB training that I keep coming back to, even though I've never set foot in their building. Not yet, anyway. But their philosophy adds useful depth to my own, so I pay attention. The idea: find the unusual thing in your scene. The bank robber who cares more about the tellers' feelings than the money. The doctor who's afraid of blood. That one offbeat detail that makes the scene play. "Unusual" is vague on purpose. It's whatever you notice as unexpected.

I've been wondering what advice works in every improv style, and I think I found the layer underneath. There's a note that keeps surfacing in improv conversations lately, the idea that the most universal piece of advice you can give any player regardless of their training or tradition is simply to add specific information. It makes sense on the surface, a vague scene start dies on the floor while a specific one fills in the room around you, and I've seen enough wishy-washy sc

Will Hines is an improv performer and teacher you might know from the UCB Theatre in New York or from his book How to Be the Greatest Improviser on Earth and his newsletter Will Hines Improv Nonsense which has become a kind of water cooler for improvisers who think seriously about what they do. He recently wrote something that stopped me cold. The Toronto problem is too much agreement and not enough direction. He was teaching in Toronto and noticed that players would agree be

You hear a lot about "Yes, And" in improv. You hear about support, about agreement, about building on each other's ideas. And all of that matters. But there's a quieter piece that holds it all together. Accountability. In improv, like most things, accountability starts with the basics. You said you'd be at rehearsal. So you go. You said the show was at 8. You're there at 7:30, warmed up and ready. You said you'd learn that format. You study it on your own time. None of this i

I had a student once who could talk his way through any scene. Fast lines, clever setups, always had something to say. And the audience liked him well enough. But he never really landed. There was always this gap between what he was saying and what the scene actually needed. One night I told him, "For the next five minutes, you cannot speak a single word. You can make sound, but no language. You have to find the scene through your body." He looked terrified. But he did it. An