"Jagodowski and Pasquesi, award-winning master improvisers from Chicago's legendary comedy scene, are internationally known for their acclaimed, two-man longform show, TJ & Dave. [This is] their authoritative and entertaining look at techniques, principles, theory, and ideas behind their approach"--Cover.
Improvisation is an art of spontaneity, freedom and impulse. Audiences the world over flock to shows where anything could happen! But lurking at the heart of many companies that perform it is a contradiction, a bait and switch. Students who sign up for classes are taught 'The Rules': the strictly right and wrong way to play make-believe. How the hell did that happen?Patti Stiles is an actor, improvisor, director, teacher and playwright who has worked professionally in theatre since 1983. In Improvise Freely, she turns 'The Rules' of improvising on their head and shows that there is another way. Is it okay to ask questions? Why do we Who? What? Where? And what if it's time to say 'No thanks' to 'Yes And'?
There is an ever-increasing number of books on improvisation, ones that richly recount experiences in the heat of the creative moment, theorize on the essence of improvisation, and offer convincing arguments for improvisation’s impact across a wide range of human activity. This book is nothing like that. In a provocative and at times moving experiment, Gary Peters takes a different approach, turning the philosophy of improvisation upside-down and inside-out. Guided by Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and especially Deleuze—and exploring a range of artists from Hendrix to Borges—Peters illuminates new fundamentals about what, as an experience, improvisation truly is. As he shows, improvisation isn’t so much a genre, idiom, style, or technique—it’s a predicament we are thrown into, one we find ourselves in. The predicament, he shows, is a complex entwinement of choice and decision. The performativity of choice during improvisation may happen “in the moment,” but it is already determined by an a priori mode of decision. In this way, improvisation happens both within and around the actual moment, negotiating a simultaneous past, present, and future. Examining these and other often ignored dimensions of spontaneous creativity, Peters proposes a consistently challenging and rigorously argued new perspective on improvisation across an extraordinary range of disciplines.
“Like the best of his subjects, which include Stephen Colbert, Bill Murray and Tina Fey, Wasson has perfect timing.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune Finalist for the 2017 George Freedley Memorial Award In this richly reported, scene-driven narrative, Sam Wasson charts the meteoric rise of improv from its unlikely beginnings in McCarthy-era Chicago. We witness the chance meeting between Mike Nichols and Elaine May, hang out at the after-hours bar where Dan Aykroyd hosted friends like John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner, and go behind the scenes of cultural landmarks from The Graduate to The Colbert Report. Along the way, we befriend pioneers such as Harold Ramis, Chevy Chase, Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Alan Arkin, Tina Fey, Judd Apatow, and many others. “Compelling, absolutely unputdownable…And, in case you’re wondering, yes, the book is funny. In places, very funny. A remarkable story, magnificently told.”—Booklist “One of the most important stories in American popular culture…Wasson may be the first author to explain [improv’s] entire history…a valuable book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Improv Nation masterfully tells a new history of American comedy…It holds the element of surprise—true to the spirit of its subject.”—Entertainment Weekly
In recent years, scholars and musicians have become increasingly interested in the revival of musical improvisation as it was known in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This historically informed practice is now supplanting the late Romantic view of improvised music as a rhapsodic endeavour—a musical blossoming out of the capricious genius of the player—that dominated throughout the twentieth century. In the Renaissance and Baroque eras, composing in the mind (alla mente) had an important didactic function. For several categories of musicians, the teaching of counterpoint happened almost entirely through practice on their own instruments. This volume offers the first systematic exploration of the close relationship among improvisation, music theory, and practical musicianship from late Renaissance into the Baroque era. It is not a historical survey per se, but rather aims to re-establish the importance of such a combination as a pedagogical tool for a better understanding of the musical idioms of these periods. The authors are concerned with the transferral of historical practices to the modern classroom, discussing new ways of revitalising the study and appreciation of early music. The relevance and utility of such an improvisation-based approach also changes our understanding of the balance between theoretical and practical sources in the primary literature, as well as the concept of music theory itself. Alongside a word-centred theoretical tradition, in which rules are described in verbiage and enriched by musical examples, we are rediscovering the importance of a music-centred tradition, especially in Spain and Italy, where the music stands alone and the learner must distil the rules by learning and playing the music. Throughout its various sections, the volume explores the path of improvisation from theory to practice and back again.
Develop and exercise musical improvisation The Path of IMPROVISATION is ebook, oriented to the learning and practice of musical improvising with any instrument in every style of modern music: Jazz, Blues, Rock, etc. Examples and exercises in this book are accompanied by 44 tracks in mp3 format which will help you understand each concept and to transfer it to your instrument. Application of these tools in the development of phrases and solos is grouped in 5 chapters, where we shall work on the indispensable elements to allow a creative musical development: IMPROVISATION: To study or to play? Creativity. How to use this book? The "Diary of practices." FORM: Recognizing the parts of the themes on which we shall improvise. HEARING: Recognizing notes, scales and chords in different keys and modes. RHYTHM: Phrasing beyond scales employed. NOTES: Different scales and the tensions they generate on the chords. CADENCES: Melodic lines as a function if the groups of chords, their tensions and resolutions. The solo. In each chapter, information will be ordered by degree of difficulty, accompanied by theoretical concepts which will help you understand their application.You may work, independently, on those points you may consider necessary to develop from any level, creating your own diary of practices, as I mention in detail at the introduction: scales (pentatonic, modal, Mixolydian, artificial, chromatic, etc.), arpeggios and their combinations, tensions and resolutions, guide notes, target tones, modulation, Swing, Blues, Turnarounds, "The Solo" y its guidelines, etc.
Process: An Improviser's Journey is an invaluable resource for mastering improv. Author, teacher, and improviser Michael Gellman was given a mission by famed improv coach Del Close: “[T]o create improvised one-act plays of literary quality from scratch.” Already steeped in the world of improvisation, he took it upon himself to do this, in the form of a class for other improvisers in which they would build the skills necessary to execute such a seemingly tall order. Scruggs and Gellman’s book, modeled after Stanislavski’s timeless An Actor Prepares, follows a fictional young actor taking Gellman’s real-life class. Scruggs and Gellman introduce readers to Geoff, who has just moved to Chicago to pursue acting. He undergoes the standard trials of audition and rejection before he takes the advice of a fellow actor and turns to improv classes at Second City. At first, Geoff thinks improvisation is about laughs and loosening up, but he soon learns that it is a powerful tool as well as an end in itself. Through Geoff’s eyes, the book introduces readers to key tenets of improvisation: concentration, visualization, focus, object work, being in the moment, and the crucial “yes, and.” His experiences with the basics of improvisation do serve to get him a few roles, but his real breakthrough comes when he signs up for an improvised one-act class with Michael Gellman. He and his classmates arrive unprepared for the challenge, but with Gellman’s prompts and advice, they slowly move through process to performance over the course of three seasons in Chicago. The class culminates with their final project: a completely improvised one-act play performed in front of a live audience.
Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of clichés. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, The Philosophy of Improvisation ranges across the arts—from music to theater, dance to comedy—and considers the improvised dimension of philosophy itself in order to elaborate an innovative concept of improvisation. Gary Peters turns to many of the major thinkers within continental philosophy—including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kant, Benjamin, and Deleuze—offering readings of their reflections on improvisation and exploring improvisational elements within their thinking. Peters’s wry, humorous style offers an antidote to the frequently overheated celebration of freedom and community that characterizes most writing on the subject. Expanding the field of what counts as improvisation, The Philosophy of Improvisation will be welcomed by anyone striving to comprehend the creative process.
Impro for Storytellers is the follow-up to Keith Johnstone's classic Impro, one of the best-selling books ever published on improvisation. Impro for Storytellers aims to take jealous and self-obsessed beginners and teach them to play games with good nature and to fail gracefully.