Do you know what improvisation acting is?

Well, the Maize High Drama Club is preparing for a show using improvisation games to improve their ability to act on the fly. The Drama Club will be performing their show at Maize High on November 10-11 in the main auditorium.

But what is improvisation exactly? Maize High sophomore Vivian Sumner-LeVardi, believes that, “Improv is where you make things up as you go.” 

So why is the Drama Club practicing for their show in November  if they have to make things up while performing and don’t actually know what they are doing yet? Theater teacher and club sponsor Kathleen Barbara focuses the class on preparing for unpredictability in their performance.

“We rehearse the skills and the forms,” said Barbara. “So we rehearse the things that improv requires such as acting on instinct and thinking on your feet, saying yes to anything. We work on building those skills.”

What kind of games are the cast members performing? Cast member and freshman Austin Jackson knows the improv games in class will help pay off for the improv performances.

“We are playing multiple games like ABC’s, where you’re given a scenario and start a sentence with the letter A, then the next person has to start their sentence with B, then so on,” said Jackson. “We played Catchphrase too, where two out of three people were given a phrase to say, and they couldn’t say anything else. We also played the Dating game, in which you have an object, celebrity, and an animal, the dater has to guess who is what.”