The Best Improv Classes In Washington DC

Balancing event quality with event cost is always a concern when putting together improv classes for corporate events. Whether they are professional development training sessions, improv team building classes or just an improv class for the staff to have some fun with. Most corporate event planners are working with a budget and they'd like to bring as much as they possibly can to their event, but when they start asking facilitators like The Radical Agreement Project to cut corners, bad things can happen.

Here is a DC improv event example. I was working with a large NGO in Washington DC in late 2019. The client was hosting an event for about 120 staff members in a cavernous conference room in a Dupont Circle hotel. Then he was beautiful The Catered menu was scrumptious everybody on staff was an absolute Delight to work with but there was a problem.

The client Had selected to go with breakout rooms for their event as they had so many attendees it wouldn't be feasible for just one instructor to lead everyone in an improv workshop. typically why women is about 20 people I'll keep an improv workshop with just one facilitator it even a little bit past that but once you get to 2425 attendees are going to have a worse experience.

I explained this to my client in the proposal process and they agreed to hire six instructors so that each improv workshop would occur concurrently and have about 20 participants to one instructor in each session. However my client never booked breakout rooms at the hotel the event was at even though I made sure to highlight this need in the proposal process. When we got into the planning phase my client requested that we hold all six improv workshops in the same cavernous conference room but spread out in different areas.

This is a bad idea, but it comes from a good place, wanting to keep the event within budget. Now I know it's a bad idea because it's been suggested to me many times before and a few times, very early on in my career of arranging improv for business events, I agreed to it. To my regret.

What ends up happening, no matter the size of the room, is that no one can hear what's happening inside of their workshop. Instead they hear the noises coming from the other groups working on improv exercises, because improv is often be quite loud.

When I have tried multiple improv workshops in the same room in the past here’s what happens. At first it's loud because everyone is having fun and they're excited to be improvising but after just about 15 to 20 minutes it starts being loud in a different way. With people saying things loudly like, ”I can't hear the directions to this exercise,” or “I'm not sure what you just said,” or “Why didn’t anyone think to book breakout rooms?” It can really turn into a low grade nightmare.

Ultimately, two improv workshops is one improv Workshop too many for one room.

I explained this to my client, but they pushed back hard. They didn't have the budget to pay for the extra breakout rooms.

In this instance I reconfigured the proposal to present the material as an interactive lecture instead of as a workshop. I kept the number of instructors the same but everything about the structure of the event changed.

All six instructors presented the material from a small stage erected in the conference room. Audio equipment was of course necessary. From there they would introduce a value of improv and explain how it related to Agility In The Face of The Unexpected (the main focus of the event).

They then demonstrated an improv exercise that utilized that value and asked for everyone in the room to stand up, find some space and try it out on their own. As the groups tried out these different exercises, the instructors would wander between different working groups and offer feedback where they could. Yes everyone was working in the same room but there was never a time when instructions weren’t clear or that the facilitators couldn’t be heard by everyone.

It was a workaround that allowed the budget to be respected and the event to still be great. and I have a bunch of them in order to ensure that improv events go off without a hitch. If you are looking to bring improv to your event, why not get a proposal and find out what The Radical Agreement Project can do for you!