The Improfessor

Meu fotógrafo (“my photographer”), cozinheiro (“cook”), and assassino de mosquitos (“mosquito killer!”)…Dale…traveled back home today because his U.S. passport only allowed for a three-month stay. I will miss him terribly, but my last month here in Brazil will be very...

“I know of one acid test in the theatre. It is literally an acid test. When a performance is over, what remains? .... When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself—then something in the mind burns. The event scorche...

“Only one capable in the language common to the clown and to children, a language distanced from sense, would understand the clown himself, in whom fleeing Nature bids a shocked adieu…. Nature, so pitilessly suppressed by the process of becoming an adult, is, like that...

“One status relationship that gives immense pleasure to audiences is the master-servant scene” ~ Keith Johnstone (Impro 63)

As promised, my post this week will begin with master-servant and additional status techniques we are exploring in my Impro System Lab. I will als...

“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” ~ Paul Klee, c. 1910

Dale and I went to the wonderful “Paul Klee: Equilíbrio Instável” (Unstable Balance) exhibit this week at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Belo Horizonte. Klee (1879-1940), a Swiss...

“A skilled clown has no need to think ahead, he trusts always that ideas will present themselves…. When people start to learn clowning they attempt far too much, they won’t allow the events to carry them, they think ‘I do this’ instead of ‘this happens’” ~ Keith Johnst...

I introduced “status” to my Impro for Leading, Collaborating, and Creating class this week, and I assigned Daniel Pink’s chapter on “Attunement” from To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others as a way to connect status to terminology that would resonat...

This week began with a bang! Dale and I were invited by our new friend Roberto, a former genetics professor at UFMG, to the rehearsal of his samba club, Unidos do Samba Queixinho, in a warehouse near downtown Belo Horizonte. We had no idea what to expect and when Rober...

I am in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, teaching/researching IMPRO at UFMG (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais) on a U.S. Scholar Fulbright from August through December 2019. UFMG is the largest federal university in Brazil and, apparently, quite prestigious (e.g., home to 3...