An Improvisers’ Learning Journal
Welcome to An Improviser’s Learning Journal 🙂
(a comprehensive improv book by global teacher/director/performer Nick Byrne released in online journal form)
It’s a very low-cost subscription service which will email you a journal entry once per week with all my learnings, thoughts, experiences, and contributions to the world of improvisation, replacing the idea of a traditional book and making the content more accessible and affordable.
Many of you know I’ve been writing what I thought would be my hardcopy book about improvisation. It’s just my small offering to the Improvisers’ pool of resources, which I thought I’d best document before I start forgetting too much 😉
And of course, since I’ve been telling students and friends and colleagues that I’ve been writing this, quite a few of you have been asking about when it will be ready….., well…..
The problem (and the opportunity) is that I’ve already written far too much for one improvisation book (over 150 000 words so far), and I’ve not even touched half the chapter headings I’ve been thinking about to date, so instead of inauthentically trying to divide it up into a few sexy book titles that I may never think I’ve finished (I might print them some day), I’ve put the material out there straight away, in journal form.
Each journal entry is a minimum of 1000 words (and often quite a bit more), and costs as little as $1.00AUD depending how many entries you subscribe for in advance, and how picky you’d like to be about the topics you’d like to explore.
You can simply start from what I might consider the beginning of the journal, or for a tiny bit more, you can choose to tell me what areas of improvisation most interest you or what questions you are trying to address, and I’ll send entries that seem most relevant.
I’ll post lists of available chapter/topic headings and little teaser paragraphs here or at https://www.facebook.com/an.improviser.s.learning.journal/ in the hope of interesting you 😉
Some chapters in progress to date:
Preface and History, The Language of Improvisation, Prepare to Be Unprepared, Learning on Your Feet, Scene Starts and Platforms, The Body of the Scene, Ending the Scene, Short Form, Long Form, Environment, Relationship, Character, Narrative, Teaching Improvisation, Applied Improvisation, Authenticity, What is the Moment?, Playfulness, Genres, Music, Poetic and Archaic (Shakespearean), Going Solo, A Life Improvised, Show Formats, Lesson Plans, Respect Equality and Equity, Miscellaneous Performance Elements, Humour, Partly Improvised and Hybrid Performance, Great Moments in Improvisation and On My Travels,…. it just keeps going. 🙂
The entries will be written at a level that I hope anyone very slightly exposed to improvisation can understand, but I hope they will also be of interest to advanced improvisers looking for additional resources and my own perspective. I will of course include ideas and exercises I have learned from those great teachers who inspired me, but each entry will definitely be flavoured with my own approaches and ideas and anecdotes from festivals and companies I’ve visited worldwide.
I hope it will be fun to read, quite practical, comprehensive, and what I honestly believe in and want to share about our beautiful art form.
It seems I keep writing it, so it might as well be available 🙂 I hope you enjoy it and join me on my journal journey.
If you’d like to give a subscription a try, you can do that right now using the Paypal button below or writing to admin@impro.com.au for more options.