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the crunchy frog collective
Drop-in WorkshopsBecome an effective, entertaining and generous improviser!
These classes cover the full range of skills and disciplines to become an effective, entertaining and generous improviser. They are for anyone with any level of experience: actors and non-actors, experienced improvisers and novices. The emphasis is on learning while having a lot of fun in a low-key environment, while improving your acting skills, your comic skills and losing your fear of performing.
Class StructureEach Sunday, the workshop will typically focus on one area, whether it be creativity, status or story skills. After a half-hour warm up, the next hour is spent outlining the theory, peppered with regular on-stage examples and group exercises by class members; the last hour and a half sees the players putting the ideas into practice with a series of performance impro games.
Some of the skills you'll learn:
Creativity - learning how not to block your own ideas
Co-operation - how to add to each others' ideas to create a story
Gibberish - see how little communication is verbal by improvising completely understandable scenes in a fictitious language
Status - how people interact and how to bring it to the stage
Narrative - creating coherent stories on the fly
Music - special singing, drum circle and musical story-telling workshops take place on the last Sunday of every month
Alan MarriottA Brief Biography of the artistic director of The Crunchy Frog Collective and Grand Theft Impro
Alan has worked with or taught almost every improvisational theatre group in London including: The Comedy Store Players, Dogs on Holiday, Brickbats Volunteers, South of the River (with Steve Frost and Jeremy Hardy) and The Top Dog Players. He is also the creator of many successful impro shows, including: The Impro Musical and Impropera (a fully improvised opera). A list of Alan's former students reads like a Who's Who of British comedy and includes Eddie Izzard, Alan Davies, John Sparks, Gordon Kennedy, Niall Ashdown, Fay Ripley and many more.
How It All Began...
Madness and LaughterOne bright Saturday morning in the spring of 2001, the leafy (ha!) south London suburb of Balham awoke in alarm to strange sounds of a humorous nature seeping out of a tiny ramshackle theatre, aptly named the Chrysalis. For here veteran improviser Alan 'starter of many groups' Marriott had begun a series of drop - in workshops. His fiendish purpose was to discover fresh, new and talented victims to sacrifice to the triple headed God of improvisation.(gasp).
So sayeth the LordJohnstoneSpolinClose! The madness and laughter soon spread to regular Thursday night performances where suggestions, solicited from willing members of the public, were shamelessly turned into instantaneous sketches by the devotees of the great impro God.
The melodrama thickensForced to leave their beloved theatre by evil property developers (I'm not making this up), the CFC decided to seize this opportunity by boldly moving into a new venue located in the heart of London's Soho area.
Thus the Grand Theft Impro show was born and with it the return to active impro service veterans Phil Whelans, Drew Leavy, Lesley Albiston and Alan Marriott himself enhanced by the services of relative newcomers, Dylan 'music man' Emery and Duncan 'oo, I'm not low status, er, really I'm not' Foster.
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upcoming gigs |
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