The Best Improv Classes In Tampa

An advertising agency in Tampa wanted to use an improv workshop to focus on collaboration. Now that is an interesting topic because good collaboration often looks identical between disparate groups. But bad collaboration takes on many different forms.

For this reason when looking to improve a team's collaboration it is important to first understand where the collaboration is lacking. I explained this to my client and she forthrightly got into it.

Her team of advertising executives was quite large and each individual member was extremely talented. Sounds like a dream come true, right? But this wealth of talent led to projects becoming unfocused and bloated.

What was going on?

Well each member was so talented they each felt it was important for them to make substantial contributions to each and every project. That meant the mutation of each and every project didn't stop until everyone had put their fingerprints on it. That's another way of saying that each project became complicated and overwrought.

Improv teaches us to treat each scene with the doctor's motto, FIRST DO NO HARM. If a scene is going great, then a great decision might be not to get involved. Or to only get involved a tiny amount.

This lesson can often feel counter intuitive to comedians with role models like Jim Carrey, Robin Williams and Chris Farley. But it is absolutely essential for comedians to learn how to pick their moments and leave other moments for their teammates.

Environment Charades is a great exercise for teaching the value of simply supporting other people's ideas rather than inserting your own new ideas. Mirroring exercise can do the same, so I included both in my curriculum.

Another less obviously beneficial exercise for this focus is One Word Story. That's because One Word Story often becomes hopelessly confusing if no one adds punctuation. But no one wants to only say period or question mark when they could say a fun word instead.

By running One Word Story and heavily noting missed opportunities to add punctuation, pointing out the resulting mayhem as you do, you can really illustrate the danger of overvaluing your own input.