IMPROV COMEDY WORKSHOPS

Improv workshop: “The Halfway Point” with LIZ ALLEN
Thursday, December 5th. 7pm to 10pm.  Cost: $55

When you’re at the halfway point of a longform piece, then what? Just when the group needs to regroup and recenter itself, the halfway point is often the place where the group pulls apart. Each person has an idea of where this piece is heading and impatiently forces the outcome…THIS is what this longform piece is about! …And, as each person angles to take the piece towards success, …the piece fizzles out.

The thing is, the Halfway Point is the time for individuals to let go of control, allow the form to speak, apply other pattern and collision techniques, and make room for the form to flourish.

In the workshop, we’ll cover getting past the Halfway Point to enjoy all aspects of longform improv.

“Connect. Feel. Relate” with Matt Elwell
Sunday, December 8th . 12pm to 3pm.  Cost: $55

How to build scenes with emotion and active relationships in the first 30 seconds.

Tired of scenes about “stuff”? Why do so many scenes end up being two people standing at center stage negotiating “stuff”, places, and people that we never see? This highly interactive, fast-based elective uses group exercises and scenes to instill the habit of building the scene from the deep emotional relationship between the characters. Don’t have a deep emotional relationship? No problem! We’ll make one!

In this workshop participants will learn techniques to:

• Shift the focus from “stuff we can’t see somewhere else” to “the two people we can see right here, right now”

• Declare an emotion and build on it line-by-line through heightening and justifying

• Parlay emotion into motion to make scenes more physical, active, and dynamic

INSTRUCTOR BIO
Matt has spent the last 25 years gallivanting across the Chicago and U.S. improv scenes. He spent most of his artistic career with ComedySportz Chicago where he played, taught, and directed for several years and also served as the Executive Director of CSz Worldwide. He has taught at Second City, performed with Second City Theatricals, Second City’s troupe GayCo, and has performed at places like iO, the Playground, and WNEP.

“Expanding your Improv Perception Matrix: A Toolbox to Improvise Without Fear” with Anthony LeBlanc
Thursday, December 19th, 7 to 10pm.  Cost: $55

As an autistic comedian, Improv gave me the gift of learning to be more flexible with the rules that I naturally fixate on and embrace both change and the unknown. As a teacher, I also started to realize that part of my success with improvising came from how my brain worked to make sense of the world by processing the way AI does, continuously increasing the data I can pull from while getting more complex in the algorithms I use to access that data.

Feeling that these tools can be helpful for anyone, neurodiverse or neurotypical, I began incorporating one or two exercises in each of my classes over my many years of teaching, and they’ve become an integral part of my teaching style.

This workshop is a compilation of several of those exercises into one workshop to help you learn how to start seeing improv scenes and shows differently. Where you find the fusion of who you are and what you know to develop a keenness and depth of perception and decision-making, referred to as acumen: where your mind and instincts sync up to help you do some of your best work free from the fear of failure.

INSTRUCTOR BIO
Anthony is a long-time Second City alum, teacher and director where he wrote and performed in two of their Chicago Mainstage revues (Taming of the Flu, and the Jeff Award-nominated America: All Better!), directed several resident stage and theatrical productions in Chicago and Washington, D.C. including The Winner … of Our Discontent andSoul Brother and Where Art Thou? (Chicago), and Generation Gap at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Helen Hayes-nominated Nothing to Lose (But Our Chains) at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.
His Second City credits also include having acted as Interim Executive Producer of The Second City in 2020, and serving as an Artistic Director for The Second City Inc.

Independently, LeBlanc directed several productions including The Magic Negro and Other Blackity Blackness as Told by an African-American Man Who Also Happens to be Black at The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, and is a part-time faculty member at Columbia College Chicago.

Anthony currently works at Nickelodeon/Paramount doing talent development and as an on-set acting coach on such hit shows as The Reboot of All That and The Really Loud House.

A native of Beaumont, Texas, Anthony holds a degree in Computer Science and Physics from Loyola University New Orleans and is an autistic Blerd dedicated to promoting Neurodiversity and DEI in comedy.