New Workshop: Chair Work for Advanced Improvisers

Chair Work for Advanced Improvisers - Instructed by Dara Katz

8 weeks
Sundays 12am - 3am
$350 

Will you ever be the best improviser you can be? Do you have a shot at being the best improviser in the room? A crowded room? A house packed with very important agents, managers and decision-makers? To get to that point, you need to know how to perform with the toughest scene partner you’ll ever have: Mr. Chair.

Prerequisites: 

To enroll in Advanced Chair Work, student must have completed my previous workshop, Chair Work for Car Scenes, or a reputable improv theater’s advanced studies program. Students with recommendations from an improv instructor who performs regularly at ticketed venues for an audience of strangers or has an IMDB page may also be considered. 

Course curriculum:

Perhaps you understand how to improvise. You know how to communicate through character work and solid acting in order to create something beautiful, heartbreaking and at once knee-slapping funny. Without any pre-planning, just your improviser instincts, you can present Truth (capital “T”) where there once was just empty stage.

Well, you may know how to do all of “that,” but have you ever tried to do a seated improv scene without a chair? It’s hard. You have to have crazy strong quads. It isn’t like, oh let me open this improv cabinet and grab an improv glass type of object work. It’s nearly impossible. So, for even the most advanced improviser, using real chairs is a must. Don’t believe me? Go see a Second City main stage show. They use chairs.

In this workshop you will study how a chair affects a scene and how you can affect the chair. You will wipe the slate clean of what you thought you knew about chair work and recalibrate your mind to think about chairs in a whole new light. We’ll start with the basics like sitting in chairs and how to bring on, position and strike chairs in a way that can provide hearty laughs from your audience. If the point is to get laughs, good chair work can be the piece you’ve been missing—the piece you need to land your next commercial audition. 

Finally, depending on how advanced the class proves itself, we will hopefully concentrate mostly on advanced chair work. This includes understanding how to throw chairs at people on stage without them fearing you or never wanting to play with you again; how to throw chairs at audience members without them needing stitches; and how to make your chair into a horse.

Course materials:

Eames: Furniture 1941-1978 

Chairs and the Advanced Improviser - an E-book authored by me. You can download once I give you the URL and password and pay a small E-book download fee of $59.

*Limited class size since the space can only fit so many chairs. 

3 December 2012 ·

• Tags
• chairs
• improv
• comedy

If The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills Were Scripted: “Uh Oh, Somebody’s Crying!”

At Mulholland Grill (there’s no snake symbol on this computer, but the ‘G’ in grill is made out of a snake. This is imperative to imply the right undertones for the scene), VANDERPUMP and MALOOF meet for drinks to discuss their friendship. MALOOF is uncharacteristically nervous, like a 20-year-old on his first JDate who’s detrimentally underestimated how attractive his date would actually be, and therefore detrimentally under prepared himself. In a state of panic, MALOOF cannot stop herself from asking VANDERPUMP how she is doing or complimenting her on how beautiful she looks. She ultimately provides a stuttering apology which VANDERPUMP accepts. The dramatic irony here is that we all know that what they had will never (evuh, evuh) be the same.

Among the clouds at Casa De YOLANDA we see she has an impossibly perfect array of picture frames wrapping around the stairs, so perfect that all you can think of is how crooked your Andy Warhol poster hangs on your only free wall.

Read the rest at Thought Catalog

28 November 2012 ·

• Tags
• Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

Best Excuses I Give Myself for Spending $4 on a Starbucks Cappucino

By: Sarah Ashley

Next week is Thanksgiving.

This morning, I still had face paint on my face. 

First paycheck my new job came yesterday. 

Kinda small paycheck. 

The line is not long. 

I packed my lunch today. 

Yay Obama!

I have to do so much laundry tomorrow.

I have to do spreadsheets today. 

Redefined karaoke until 2am.

Me tired. 

Anything can happen today. 

17 November 2012 ·

• Tags
• starbucks
• cappucinos
• excuses