Community
Many theatre troupes are devoted to staging improvisational performances and growing the improv community through their training centres. One of the most widespread is the international organization Theatresports, which was founded by Keith Johnstone, an English director who wrote what many consider to be the seminal work on the relationship between status, story telling and improvisational acting, Impro. There are also many independent Improv groups around the world; a non-exhaustive but lengthy list is available here. In addition to for-profit theatre troupes, there are several college-based improv groups in the United States that are becoming popularized as a result of programs such as Whose Line is it Anyway?.
In Europe the special contribution to the theatre of the abstract, the surreal, the irrational and the subconscious have been part of the stage tradition for centuries. From the 1990s onwards a growing number of European Improv groups have been set up specifically to explore the possibilities offered by the use of the abstract in improvised performance, including dance, movement, sound, music, mask work, lighting, and so on. These groups are not especially interested in comedy, either as a technique or as an effect, but rather in expanding the improv genre so as to incorporate techniques and approaches that have long been a legitimate part of European theatre.
Read more about this topic: Improvisational Theatre
Famous quotes containing the word community:
“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (20th century)
“The people needed to be rehoused, but I feel disgusted and depressed when I see how they have done it. It did not suit the planners to think how they might deal with the community, or the individuals that made up the community. All they could think was, “Sweep it away!” The bureaucrats put their heads together, and if anyone had told them, “A community is people,” they would not have known what they were on about.”
—May Hobbs (b. 1938)
“The heroes of the world community are not those who withdraw when difficulties ensue, not those who can envision neither the prospect of success nor the consequence of failure—but those who stand the heat of battle, the fight for world peace through the United Nations.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)