The Titanic Players are sponsoring an improvisation comedy class on the Northwestern University - Evanston campus!
This quarter, we have the pleasure of having our classes taught by Mike Abdelsayed.
Mike has been improvising for over 14 years and was a 6 year member of the ImprovOlympic House Team Valhalla, voted best team in Chicago in 1999 and 2001. He is a professional coach for ImprovOlympic as well as One Group Mind. He understudied for the Second City ETC and the Second City Touring Company. He has been taught by Charna Halpern, Del Close, Noah Gregoropoulos, and Liz Allen, to name a few. He was a member of the ImprovOlympic “best of” cast Instant Karma, Ask Charna, and the Armando Diaz show in addition to being a teacher in their training center. He has coached performers who have continued successful careers at Saturday Night Live, NBC’s the Office, ImprovOlympic, ComedySportz, The Second City ETC and Second City touring company, the Apollo Theater, The Annoyance Theater, and Boom! Chicago.
The classes will be focused on introducing basic improvisation comedy techniques drawn from 4 major institutions in the city: The Second City, ImprovOlympic, One Group Mind, and The Annoyance Theater.
It will focus on:
- The truth of comedy
- Drawing from personal and real experiences for inspiration
- Discovering a character through voice and body
- Gaining and manipulating stage presence
- Building a two-person scene by finding the relationship
- Using basic building blocks of agreement, addition, and patterns
- One group mind’s revolutionary concept of the expansion tree
- Insight into the audition process at Second City, Mad TV, and Saturday Night Live.
The class is not geared towards performance majors and even sheds light on using the tools of improvisation off stage in social and professional environments.
Level 1 will be dedicated to gaining stage presence, using tools that an improviser has to improvise on stage and introducing tools that can be used by two people within an improvised scene. Level 2 will teach the relationship between two separate scenes, building eventually to improvising a simple, full piece. Level 3 will focus on complex techniques and forms (only available to those who took the Fall Level One class).
The class will be conveniently located on campus on the fourth floor of Kresge. We will meet once a week for 6 consecutive weeks.
FALL SEMESTER CLASS DATES TBA
Each class will have a maximum of 16 people registered for each session. The registration fee for the first level is $100, due on the first day of class. (This is less than half of the cost of the exact same class Mike teaches at ImprovOlympic.) All students get free admission to all Titanic performances. The final deadline to register for the class will be announced after auditions. You can not get credit at Northwestern for taking this class unless it is individually arranged as an independent study through a Northwestern University professor.
To register send an e-mail to us with "class" in the subject line and in the body of the e-mail place your name and contact information including your e-mail address. Please include the day that you would like to take the class.
Hope to see you there!
The Titanic Players