News and Blog
Simon Says, give me some cognitive overload
Simon Says is a call and response game which many of us will remember from when we were kids. One person is nominated as Simon and everybody else watches Simon and listens for instructions, which could be pretty much anything. For example, jump up and down, or touch...
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The Ubiquitous Age of Improv – now is the best time to take an improv class
Most people join our improv classes because someone recommended it to them. Often, it’s a friend or family member who thinks it would be good for them or because they’d be good at it, especially if they’ve tried improv themselves. Other times, it’s a mentor, boss,...
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Megagames and your improv life journey
In recent months, several of our students and teachers have been introduced to and participated in megagames. A megagame is a large-scale, immersive multiplayer experience, where dozens or even hundreds of players interact either co-operatively or competitively over...
read moreThe Living Newspaper
The Living Newspaper was an early 19th century travelling theatre programme for the dissemination of news before the invention of television. The first version of this to be used in an “improv” show was by Jacob Moreno, a Romanian doctor who later became the creator...
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Should we cancel classes when there’s a big unrelated event on?
This month we’ve had to decide whether to cancel/delay lessons due to scheduling of the unrelated 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup of football (AKA soccer), which was hosted by Australia and New Zealand with lots of games in our home town of Sydney. One argument is, well...
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Midjourney does Improv – Classic scene setups
Continuing our journey with improv related prompts for large language models, we though it might be a good idea to see if Midjourney (read: the internet collective conscious) understands the subtleties of improv. We chose four classisc scene setups and let Midjourney...
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ChatGPT does Improv – The Love Doctors
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by the company OpenAI. Built on the text of the web and large language models, ChatGPT can hold knowledgable conversions based on the information it has been provided. Whether that knowledge is accurate is debatable. This blog post...
read moreCOVID-19 – Improv classes in the face of a global pandemic
At the start of 2020, we were set for a bumper year of improv. And then that thing with the pandemic happened. Looking back, we were luckier than most. When the government introduced hand sanitising and 1.5m social distancing on 15 March, we immediately adapted our...
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Mindfulness and Improvisation
We keep an eye out for improvisation research, and once in a while the mainstream media does too. The day after our last newsletter went out in June, the ABC — the Australian one, not the U.S. one — published an interesting article on the history of sports psychology,...
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