Roles aren't gender specific4/4/2020  The definition of someone's role in a story is how that character is meant to effect the greater story arc. Their purpose is to pull on the strings of how a story turns out. When looking at roles from this perspective, it's easy to see how roles in stories aren't gender specific. Any improvisor can play any role if we free ourselves to do so, and it opens us up as performers to a much richer canon of work.
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Build the world around you4/4/2020  As an improv actor, there's a big difference between saying who you are and endowing the world around you to make your role obvious. Just saying what your role is doesn't make it so. To truly fill a role you need to have the story cast you as the part, and that is something you can easily endow.
The Writer Brain4/4/2020  Most actors are intimately familiar with the works of Stanislavski and tap into the feelings and wants of their characters as a way to direct their actions on stage. Improvisors have a hard time using this technique because they don't have a script to hold their characters to the grater good of the story. It's important for actors for the improv stage to train themselves to separate their actor brain from their writer brain. Skilled long-form improvisors relegate their character's wants to only how they emote, and not to what they endow as the reality of the story. This allows us to improvise intricate stories in which bad things can happen to good people.
Normalizing Offers4/4/2020  When you first start learning how to become an improviser, you are taught to see and notice everything around you. To ignore an offer is to block it. But just because your character ignores an offer doesn't mean that you are killing someone's idea. In the beginning of a two-hour story you need to be able to have the option of NOT calling out how characters are treating one another. By not acknowledging strong characteristic offers, it allows you to create highly dysfunctional relationships that your characters can realize later on in the story.
Show don't tell2/19/2020 Multitasking is key to making improvised theater that doesn't just look like beginning improv scene. Improvisors spend a lot of their brain power writing the plot of the story and making sure everything happening is being endowed. The mark of a skilled performer is one who can seamlessly cover this part of their job while casually creating dialogue that has nothing to do with the action at hand.  Christian Utzman
Christian Utzman is a full time actor, teacher, and an original founding member of the Un-Scripted Theater Company. Christian spends much of his free time writing about the improvisational theory behind the work here at the Un-Scripted Theater Company. Improv Ideas
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