You're the Best Around! Or Nah.

About a week before Christmas I was in the living room with my mom and my younger sister when my sister made the bold claim that I was the best improviser in my company. It's one of those blindly supportive things that family members tend to say and it's generally the sentiment you'd expect from family. What caught me off guard, however, was my mom's response. "No, (this guy) is really hilarious!"

Things Pile On

This week I got massively overloaded and one responsibility stacked on top of another until the whole Jenga tower came crashing down. I like to think that I generally know my limits, but every now and again I let all the things I do get the best of me. I don't know that every person is like this, but I know that once I start feeling overwhelmed all progress on all things ceases. The struggle from there is getting the wheels moving again, even if they move very slowly.

My temptation is to apologize profusely for missing blog posts. I want to mention how terrible and lazy I am. I want to make jokes that an ape could adhere to a schedule better than I can and that I am more beast than man. But you know what? Screw that. Apologizing and feeling self-conscious and bad about myself is what made me shut down in the first place!

If you find yourself getting overwhelmed and falling behind on your self-imposed responsibilities, remember that you're human. You're not terrible or lazy, you're a person who's got a lot on their plate. You've probably put a lot on  your plate. There's no shame in that, and don't let someone make you believe that there is.

Take a break, form a new plan of attack, and dive back in. If you're like me, you probably need a moment to forgive yourself for being a human and not an all-powerful problem solving machine. Once you're able to do that and re-organize your thoughts, you'll probably produce better results after that break anyway.

Here's a list of the things that I'm doing: 

• Commuting an hour each way to improvise twice a week
• Working 25-30 hours as a server
• Trying to organize a group of improvisers in my immediate area
• Planning new classes for the winter session
• Legitimately attempting to budget during Christmas season
• Writing and "promoting" a blog twice a week

There are a lot of minor stresses that encircle each of those things and that make my head start to spin. But those are all things that I want and need to be doing. Most of them are things that I have chosen to subject myself to! I've taken my break and now it's time to refocus. Let's all dust ourselves off, get our heads straight, and forge ahead like we need and want to. 

I believe in me and I believe in you, we can handle these things!

Spolin:A Basic Understanding

I've been looking for some more theory to have rattling around in my brain and I managed to get my hands on Improvisation for the Theater by Viola Spolin. Spolin is regarded as the "American Grand Mother of Improv" and basically all improv theory comes out of her work in some way or another. I haven't finished the book, so if there's a twist ending don't spoil it for me. Here are some

 of the basics that I've gleaned:

Voila! Viola Spolin

Nashville Improv Community

Last Tuesday night I had the honor of performing with three other improv groups in Nashville at Zanies. The line-up was Nashville Improv Company, Sprocket Improv, LOL!Nashville, and Tongue N Cheek Improv (or TNC as their fan page bills them). It was a super fun night and it was very nice to get together with some improvisers who I hadn't really gotten a chance to talk to before. Also we all brought in a lot of people and started practically zero fires, so we'll probably be invited back!

Where I Say Nice Stuff About Improv Friends

Love and Improv are similar in at least one way: they both can seem impossible until you find the right people. I've found the right people.

The Nashville Improv Company with Tara DeFrancisco and Michael Tatar!

Dealing with Pre-show Anxiety

Most days I feel like I could take on the world and at least go even, but sometimes the creeping spectre of doubt is able to land a few hits on my psyche. Pre-show nerves, it happens to the best and most experienced of us. If you're nervous, that's great! It means you're taking risks and leaving your comfort zone. After the jump, I'll go over a few ways that help me cope with anxiety.

First step: Breathing and wiping down your sweaty palms.

Top Five Things That I'm Thankful for This Year

Time to get myself in the thankful spirit with a rousing blog version of TOP FIVE THINGS. I've got my game face on and it's time to get THANKFUL AS HELL UP IN HERE.

Shamelessly stolen from my very own instagram. Deal w/ it.

My Mid-Twenties Have Begun--What Now?

This past Sunday was my birthday. I am a fresh-faced 25 year old who is ready to take on the world! It's way better than the withered and weary 24 year old that cropped up around this time last year. It's been a heck of a year and I think it calls for some serious reflection.

Taken at The Basement theatre in Atlanta. Best house lights in history.

Improv Jams and Why They're Great

Wednesday night, I was lucky enough to be part of Nashville Improv Company's most recent Improv Jam. For the uninitiated, an Improv Jam is when you perform a show and invite audience members to join you on-stage. The NIC does these as short form shows that usually run about 90 minutes. Students, prospective students, improvisers from other troupes, and frequent audience members make up our typical Jam crowd. At first blush, it seems like a lot of things could go wrong by just inviting somebody with potentially no training on stage, but a lot tends to go wrong even when have 10 year vets filling out a cast. Instead of asking what the worst that could happen, let's find out what's the best that could happen.Improv Jams rule. They are crazy fun, and I believe every troupe should have one occasionally. Here's why:

Learning to Trust

Trust: It's a pretty important thing in improv. It's a pretty important thing in life, too. It can also be very difficult to earn from and give to other people. Growing up on the internet where everything is a scam and everybody is probably lying to you, our generation is pretty rightfully wary of just trusting any schmo who asks that of them. But you know what? Trusting people feels good, man.

Polar Express Rafi wants YOU to trust your scene partners!

Teacher Post: The Benefits of Building a Blanket Fort

Gonna drop some teacher tips on you guys today! So your class is clipping along at a pretty good rate and your students are pickin' up what you're puttin down every lesson. You're blitzing through curriculum faster than you could have expected because A) you're probably a better teacher than you give yourself credit for and B) your students are geniuses who were created in laboratories. Now's the time to stop and smell the roses, but how do you do it? Sometimes it's as simple as reading stories or playing their favorite games for half an hour, but sometimes you gotta go big. You gotta build a blanket fort.

My second-in-command Callie Mattox and I finishing the Blanket Fort. The students had all jumped inside already.

Improv Game: Improv Turducken

The NIC Thanksgiving show (or T. Hanks Giving, as we call it) is coming up this Saturday and we are getting into the holiday spirit by stuffing our games with seasonal cheer. The Improv Turducken isn't a game that we slightly altered to fit a theme, but one that sprang forth in rehearsal as a twisted reminder of what happens when your improv ingenuity goes to far. It is an improv scene, stuffed with another scene, stuffed with another improv scene. It is beautiful and terrifying to behold and also sometimes covered in cranberry sauce.

Improv TurDucken: We have improv'd too deep, and too greedily.

Long Form Theme: The Dungeon Master

My improv company loves themed shows. We have had Wild West shows, Summer Camp shows , and even Pirate Musicals. Our Thanksgiving show is probably the best example of this, it's T. Hanks Giving. We all dress as Tom Hanks characters and theme our games around Tom Hanks movies, it's brilliant and dumb. When I was working on coming up with a new theme for shows I realized we hardly did anything with the fantasy genre. Then I wondered if it would be possible to improvise a D&D campaign in front of an audience and not have it be totally awkward and terrible. This is the ongoing tale of my struggle with The Dungeon Master.

Improvisers and Responsibility

Improvisers are a diverse group of people. We excel in a wide variety of things and we struggle with an incredibly broad range of deficiencies at the same time. Improv is a job that is often done for free (or very close to it) so most of us have day-jobs that we use to support our improv habits. We have families and friends outside of improv who don't understand what we mean when we say we have to go to rehearsal. I get it, fellow improvisers. It's tough to commit fully to this thing, but somebody's gotta do it.

Blog-O-Ween: The Final Blog O th' Ween

We finally made it and now we're famous! Well, one outta two ain't bad I guess. Posting every day has been surprisingly difficult and somehow incredibly easy at the same time. Over the past 17 days (minus weekends, what am I a savage?), I have struggled to force myself to open a new post window each night and each night I started writing with relative ease.

I've learned a lot about my love for improv and teaching through the past three weeks and I feel like it is stronger than ever. Blogging is always something that I aspired to, but was afraid to do. I didn't want to get started and then quit. I didn't want to let other people see my personal, private thoughts about things I loved. I was afraid my love would get picked apart.

I realize now, for the moment at least, that I'm blessed by a pretty small and silently supportive audience. I get page views, a handful of likes on facebook, maybe even a share from my mom, but that's totally fine with me. I'm not writing this blog to be correct or offer perfect solutions to issues I've encountered in teaching or improv. I'm writing this to figure out how to solve those problems or explain how I've solved them in the past. I hope people disagree with me sometimes, because I'm pretty sure I'm wrong a whole lot more than I'm right.

I will be going back to updating on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the most part, but I will still start a post-blitz every now and again.

I will be focusing on providing some more robust posts with the lighter update schedule and I will really be working on remembering to take pictures of things so all of my updates aren't just WALLOFTEXT. That's all I've got, friends. What would you like to see outta this thing?

Blog-O-Ween! A Reflection On My Teaching Style

Wednesday night was my final class before Halloween and I tried something new. Usually my pre-Halloween class is a hectic jaunt around whatever building we happen to be in. I recruit two or three friends to play characters and I have them lead us on a chase around the building dropping candy wherever they go. It is stressful and exhausting and almost always not planned thoroughly enough. I also worry how parents will feel when my costumed friends inevitably give their children floor-candy. This year I did away with all the hubub, and I think it was a real sign of growth for me as a teacher.

Blog-O-Ween! Spittin' Improv Game

"Find the game" your instructors tell you. "The game will make your scene a piece of cake," they state nebulously. What the hell is the game (aside from Triple H's nickname)? The game of the scene is... wait for it... literally whatever you make it. It's almost like you and your partner have total control of your scene and the game isn't something mystical. Oh my goodness!

Blog-O-Ween: Guessing Games Are Improv Magic

Tonight I had a friend tell me that I get far too emotionally invested when we play "Five Things" during rehearsals or shows. For people who don't visit ComedySportz on the reg, Five Things is basically the ultimate guessing game. Your guesser has 5 minutes to  get about 15 gives and your givers can only mime and use gibberish. It looks impossible and that's what makes it improv magic.

Blog-O-Ween! Pictures from GMXv6

GMX was hella fun. Nearly too fun. Here are some pictures:

Pictured Here: Friend Durst (aka Mike Whidden) standing watch over our Star Wars themed Comedy Carnival Cornhole Center

Pictured here is Boba Fett, Lego Torture Walk, and Molly Bahre who's clearly having none of it.

We had a booth! Look at our beautiful shirts, our beautiful Jesse, and our okay Brittney.

I have mentioned that I am not a Dr. Who fan, but this Dalek was absolutely wonderful.

And here's my second sauciest Tardis pose. I can't share the #1 ranker, it's too scintillating. 

Blog-O-Ween! GMX This Weekend!

The Nashville Improv Company has bravely volunteered to do about 16 hours worth of panels at the Geek Media Expo (GMX) this year and I am (perhaps foolishly) blindly following them into battle. We had a smattering of panels last year and it seems that the Geeky, Media-y, Expo-y powers that be liked us a whole bunch. The feeling's mutual, GMX, we love you too!

Blog-O-Ween! Just do it!

Getting your students interested and involved in class can be difficult. If you're anything like me, you are always incredibly into the theory of what you're teaching and you want your class to be able to appreciate the beautiful mechanics of what they're about to do. While it's great to be so excited about how stuff works, sometimes it's better just to let it work before explaining it. In theatre and in improv it is important to let your students get to creating in a safe environment quickly before even thinking about sharing theory with them. So quit mucking around with vocabulary words in your theatre class and just do it!

Blog-O-Ween! Women in Improv

In the Nashville Improv Company we are lucky enough to have a large amount of talented women. 6 out of our 16 members are ladies, but that runs counter to the trend in most improv circles. Most groups, in Nashville and elsewhere, feature maybe two women in a cast of eight or so. Women are pretty strongly represented in the Music, Theatre and Dance worlds, so it's not that they're not interested in performing. In a world where women are just as capable improvisers as men are, why are there so few female improvisers?

I find that, moreso than men, women are forced into subordinate roles in scenes incredibly often. Not only that, but if they try to resist they find themselves berated by their male counterparts. Heck, sometimes they accept the offer and still get berated for their troubles. Quite a few professional improvisers (including Susan Messing and Nikki Pierce) believe that it's not that huge of a hurdle. They basically claim that all the ladies dealing with these issues should suck it up and improv harder.

It's kind of easy for people with as much experience and training as Susan Messing to suggest that most female improvisers are only limiting themselves. Strong and specific initiations don't come easily and quickly for every performer. Being labeled as a weak, worthless character over and over again when you are just learning how to improvise is a huge hurdle to have to leap over. When improv loses its spontaneity and fun, why would you even want to continue? If you get crushed on every rep before you have a chance to learn, I don't blame you for wanting to quit. I'd want to quit.

Improv-ladies, do you feel like comedy and improvisation are biased against you? How have you dealt with misogyny in scenes? Was overcoming the issues just a function of stronger, more specific initiations or was it finding a group of non-jerks? Was it a combination of both? Let me know your experiences, cause I super feel like I don't know what I'm talking about.

Blog-O-Ween! Dealing with Negativity

It's telling that I nearly titled this post "combating negativity." The thing about negativity in your improv or workplace or classroom is that if you decide that you've got to engage it in some kind of combat, you've already lost. I have struggled quite a bit with negativity in my time, both from others and from within myself. Let me tell ya, it sure kills a lot of the fun in stuff.

Blog-O-Ween! A Teaching Horror Story

This comes from my Summer teaching at Lexington Children's Theater back in 2010. I had never taught before that Summer and it was also my first professional internship. We had cleared our way through six out of ten weeks of classes when disaster finally struck. The only way we could survive was quick thinking and powerfully efficient teamwork.

Blog-O-Ween! You Got Your Pop Culture In My Improv!

The dreaded Pop Culture suggestion or reference appearing in an improv show is enough to make some improvisers quake in terror. But fear not! Pop Culture can be a powerful ally in impressing your audience. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to audience members who were so pumped that we got their specific suggestion. It's not about having a magical, in-depth knowledge of everything, but it is about loving and respecting every single suggestion enough to give it a shot.

Blog-O-Ween! An Actor's Horror Story

With Halloween just around the corner, another mysterious event is knocking at our doors, scratching at our windows, and leaving all the cabinets open in our kitchens. That's right, Blog-O-Ween is here! I'm going to be updating every weekday until Halloween, so keep an eye out for a lot of posts coming down the pipe.

I'm going to kick off Blog-O-Ween with one of my very first horror stories from performing. I wanted to write an improv horror story, but I've been incredibly lucky so for in my improv career. Theater? Not so much. Brace yourselves for true terror.


It is December of 2007 and I have been cast in my first speaking role in a play. I am Jingles the Elf in a play called Santa's Spectacles. My high school theatre class was putting on for some of the local elementary schools. The play is filled with the singing of Christmas Carols and a whole bunch of clever dialogue. We have rehearsed twice.

Important Lessons From Teaching Young People

Teaching is hard. Teaching young people is harder. Of course teaching your lesson is important, but it's also what you're specifically trained to do. If you want your class to actually be successful, you're gonna have to do more than just communicate the material. Here's what's important in a class for young people (though I'm sure many lessons can be translated into teaching older students).

How I Stumbled Into Improv

It's been nearly a year and a half since I began improvising professionally. I was a freshly graduated theatre major who was struggling to be an actor. In my desperate quest to find more stage time, I googled "nashville improv" and was directed to the fledgling Nashville Improv Company website. They had a place to enter your e-mail address to be notified of auditions, and even though it seemed pretty sketchy I chose to sign up. It had been years since I'd improvised outside of a college class, but I wasn't really expecting to be cast in an improv troupe. I'd go and get some audition practice in, network a little, and move on with my life. The best laid plans, am I right?