Improv From The Mall - A life changing experience

Today another Improv 301 (Characters) class ended, also ending a series of Saturday mornings of me teaching. This group of students started out with 101 in June and stuck together as a group throughout the classes. What I never expected about teaching was how much I was going to love it. The true pleasure comes from watching people grow, evolve and make new relationships. It was kind of sad seeing it end today. The other awesome thing about teaching, especially 301, is our theater's location in a mall, especially on Saturdays. Yes, a mall. A mall with a Bass Pro Shop! Yes, a Bass Pro Shop, amongst a golf shop, peanut store, Victoria's Secret, phone kiosks and more! We keep our curtains open during the day. Call it shameless marketing if you must. I call it an opportunity to sit in fish bowl and watch others while they watch us. I never intended to teach with the curtains open. It just happened that way when our curtains weren't ready when we opened the theater. Another fine example of "yes, and". We had to open without those curtains and as a result we learned that there are so many advantages to keeping them open. Besides the obvious marketing advantages, it has taught students to quickly get over their fear of people watching them. People stop and stare in at us like we're animals in a zoo. This isn't always so comfortable for 101 students, but 301 students evolve to a place of egging it on, by waving at people and taking on even bolder initiations for the attention of the stranger at the window. In character development specifically, the mall has become my biggest teaching resource for students to study people for character ideas. I have even gotten so bold as a teacher to send students off into the food court in character as a group, pushing them to interact with each other and strangers as the characters they developed in an exercise called "character walk."

Even now as I sit here writing, I'm watching the many people in camoflage walking to and from Bass Pro, some with fishing poles, some with gun bags, some without teeth, some with mullets. I can't make this stuff up! If I got a nickel for every piece of camo that walked by, I'd be doing improv for free every day instead of most days. I swear people have walked into our theater and said (imagine the voice of someone in "Deliverance"), "What is this place here?" And I respond with the standard "Comedy Club" response. (I used to say "Improv Comedy Club") and I'd hear, "What is this IMPROVE place? What things do you improve?" Anyway, once when I gave the standard "comedy club" response, these guys in camo said, "What's a comedy club? We're not from around here." True story.

Again, I can't make this stuff up and I so appreciate the many walks of life that pass our door, especially when one of them takes a chance to jump into the improv pool and see a show and watch that experience change their life. And while I momentarily mock some of these stereotypical folks, I'm grateful for the opportunity, with the help of  DSI Comedy Theater, to bring an artform to a community that never knew it until Carolina Improv Company and Uptown Theater were born here in what we affectionately call "The Redneck Riviera" or "Mayberry at the Beach." Hmmm...sounds like titles for new improv shows!

Being from Chicago where improv is as popular as Starbucks on every corner, I was starving to have improv back in my life since it was the foundation of my career in entertainment marketing. I knew at the young age of 19 that I would never get rich from it but it always found a way back to me as a source of comfort, creativity, attitude re-adjustment and so much more. And now, it's a source of gratification to share it with others ... even if it's from the confines of a mall in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Give me some sweet tea, a gun rack, some grits and I'll call you darlin' while mumbling "bless your heart" under my breath. Now what I need is more than 3 Starbuck's in one town

(and 1 is in the Tar-zhay)!

Improv 301 students "finding the game"



Uptown Theater @ Myrtle Beach Mall