News and Blog
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,...
read moreSydney Theatresports: Something Improvised This Way Comes
We here at Academy of Improvisation were lucky this past weekend to see Sydney Theatresports as the hero, with Theatresports All-Stars at the Enmore Theatre. This was a celebration of Sydney Theatresports from the 80s, 90s and 00s, featuring a selection of...
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Don’t ask questions, myths and legends
That old chestnut of questions in theatrical improvisation scenes has popped up a number of times over the years, and seems to be doing the rounds of our local community yet again. Like many theatrical improvisation techniques, it’s either taught wrong in early levels...
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Children and improvisation
In December 2017, The Sydney Morning Herald published a story about how playful parents can prevent anxious kids. How do parents become more playful? And what does this mean for children and improvisation? Improvisors know very well. In the last 10 years, research...
read moreImprovisation 101 classes for March 2018
We’ve just announced our Improvisation 101 improv classes for March 2018. We’re running two: one in Gordon on Tuesdays starting 6 March, and one in Chatswood on Thursdays starting 8 March. Both classes run for 4 weeks, on either Tuesday or Thursday evenings from 7pm...
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