Improvisation is a fun, engaging, and rewarding creative experience that anyone can learn. In order to improvise we learn some thinking and relationship skills that allow us to enter into a creative space with no script, props or director, and communicate well enough those barriers to collaboration. From the most basic improv exercises to more advanced scene work, the structure and philosophy of improv promotes generating a safe psychological space where players can take creative - and emotional - risks, stretch into expanded self-expression, and generate joy. And it is real-life applications: growth of creative thinking, communication, collaboration, interpersonal and relationship skills, greater capacity to tolerate uncertainty, confidence-building, and enhanced well-being.

Character creation is one of the most liberating experiences we can have through the improv process because it helps us expand beyond our habits of mind or the limits of "rational" thought processes. Part of the magic of improv is shining an unusual light on ordinary human character traits and qualities, playing with and looking at them through the "funhouse mirror" that heightening generates. Through a focus on characters and how they contribute to a fascinating scene, we can expand our capacity to express different points of view, engage with ideas and scenarios in ways that stretch our imagination and in all these ways expand our creativity in ways that can translate into creative thinking on the stage of life. In this class, we will discover how a character's traits, needs, and point of view shape the dynamic in a scene, and also how the unfolding, unpredictable process of improv makes the scene shape the character. It will be so. much. fun. Instructor: Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, CGP CPAI