The time at university when I appeared in a Pinter play and ruined a key pause with the sound of my prop flapping loudly and nervously in my hand. I am not sure when I started struggling to talk in front of groups, but I usually chalk it down to a few difficult moments I would rather forget. Translated to real life, it is a bit pie-in-the-sky (you can’t surround yourself with excellent listeners), but it is a good reminder that the problem is not always you. Rather than waiting for your turn to talk, you pay attention, make eye contact and forget that it is your turn until it is. Successful improv sketches hinge on a kind of telepathy among players, but at our level the key is “active listening”. “Like, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but what’s the worst that can happen?” “I’ll be shy until the day I die, but improvising has this strange way of making me less scared of the world,” he says. While he now performs on stage, he credits improv with providing him with “a general fuck-it-ness approach” to life. Scott started doing improv after Wikipedia-ing his favourite comedians to see how they started out. Speeko people search free#Morwenna Ferrier warming up with The Free Association. In life, the loudest hog the floor with “Yes, and”, you have no choice but to speak. The bedrock of improv, “Yes, and” prevents you from stalling in a scene, but it also encourages you to talk. Pointing at random objects in the room, my partner and I riff off each other. We are then paired up to play “Yes, and”, a call-and-response activity designed to help build scenes. Ours involves a llama, deep societal poverty and a Saw-like death using a corkscrew. The host, Scott, has us warm up with physical bonding exercises: Vroom, Screech (where we pretend to be cars – funnier than it sounds) a mnemonic game (Memory, but with mimes) and my favourite, the Story Game, where players bat single words between them to tell a tale. I try to think about the worst that could happen (shame?), but, alas, terror doesn’t care for logic. The attenders, aged between 20 and 50, make small talk and I soon feel that familiar dread. Speeko people search windows#Sitting with the others in a circle, I notice the room is rigged for activity: bottles of water, open windows (because it gets hot), everyone in practical shoes. Many go on to form groups and perform at ticketed events. There is a syllabus and a handbook students have to learn the fundamentals in order to graduate from one level to the next – there are five in total – performing as they go. Founded in 2015, the FA now trains several thousand students a year in rooms above pubs in north-east London. The Free Association is the UK’s largest improv theatre group. From the Italian Commedia dell’arte to the House of Commons, the ability to think and perform on your feet, script-free, is a skill that can lead to greatness. I chose improv because it’s real – you can’t stage something that literally takes place on the stage – but also because it has been around for ever. There is a sizeable industry dedicated to helping (or making a few quid) people like me: TedX Talks apps such as Speeko toastmaster courses. I soon found myself alongside six people in a well-lit room inside the Irish Centre in Camden, north London, one Thursday evening, ready to be cured. With this in mind, I did something people like me rarely do and signed up for an improv class. It could be social phobia, or stage fright perhaps a bit of both. Although it has never been clear exactly what “this” is, a pattern has emerged over the years: talking, to a number of people, usually in a loud or public setting, isn’t easy for me. I am not always this anxious on a night out – jokes sometimes land, ripping yarns are occasionally told – but I would love to be able to tell a simple story without enduring all … this.
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