Greetings improvisers,

New episode this week for Your Improv Brain... and this one is about emotion at the top of a scene. Cool! Specifically, how to use it to set your base reality, when to start grounded versus when to go full level 10, and why that choice matters.

I also spend some time on something I've never had an improv teacher address in any class I've taken, and I've taken hundreds. Alexithymia, which includes difficulty processing or labelling emotions, affects about 10% of the total population for a variety of reasons (from genetics to lived experiences). If you've ever sat in an emotion-based improv exercise and felt like everyone else just instinctively knows how to do a thing your brain doesn't do the same way, this part of the episode is for you.

There are workarounds, and you can implement them on your own without ever having to explain yourself. Even better: improv exercises and notes can be designed to support this 10% of students. If you'd like a deeper dive on this topic today, here are a couple episodes (and an updated article) you can check out. You might also find a couple episodes on visual memory and recall useful, which is related. You can find an updated article with links to those episodes here.

The partner exercise for this week is called It's Tuesday. One person makes a mundane statement, the other reacts with a massive emotion, and then you figure out why (no labels need to be used, and anything is acceptable). The solo version has you moving between sections of your room, each assigned an emotion, launching into monologues at full intensity. Both are designed to help you practise ramping up fast without needing a scene partner to bounce off of.

A few more episodes about the top of a scene are linked in the article below if you're following this series (to complete it). Next week I'll have a special extended episode about understanding fellow improvisers.

Bye for now,

Jen

Watch or Listen or Read

You can find the article for this episode here. The audio and video versions are below:

​