Improv Long-form improv formats
Long form drops the rules and keeps the structure: one suggestion, twenty to forty minutes, and scenes that answer each other. It isn't harder than short form — it's slower, and it forgives nothing. You don't learn a long form by playing it: you learn it by drilling what it demands, which is why every format below links to the exercises that build it.
Armando
A monologist — often a guest — tells a true, personal story sparked by the audience suggestion. The team then improvises scenes inspired by the story's themes and feelings, not by re-enacting its events. After a few scenes, the monologist speaks again, and the pattern repeats. Honesty in, invention out. It teaches the hardest listening in improv: pulling the emotional essence from a real story rather than its plot. Players learn to mine a monologue for a theme — regret, pride, a small humiliation — and build something new around it. It's a masterclass in inspiration over imitation, and it rewards genuine, un-jokey storytelling.
Deconstruction
A long, grounded two-person opening scene is played first — often ten minutes of real relationship. Then the team deconstructs it: subsequent scenes explode its themes, replay moments as flashbacks, chase tangents, voice the characters' inner monologues, and follow minor references down rabbit holes. The first scene is the seed — everything after is its analysis dramatised. It's an analytical, advanced form that teaches deep listening and thematic mining. Players must watch the opening scene like hawks, identify what it was really about, and then build outward with intelligence rather than randomness. It rewards patience and subtlety, and it shows a group how much material a single honest scene actually contains.
Improvised Documentary
A mockumentary. Talking-head interviews — characters speaking straight to camera — alternate with 'footage' scenes about a community event the audience names: the village pumpkin festival, a struggling amateur orchestra, a competitive dog show. The interviews reveal character and back-story, the scenes show the event unfolding, and the two forms feed each other. It's a gift for character players and a lesson in structure through contrast. The direct-address interview teaches strong, opinionated characters, while the scenes demand real interaction — and the comedy blooms in the gap between how people describe themselves and how they actually behave. Endlessly rich, and very kind to a big cast.
Improvised Movie
The audience gives a genre and a title, and the team performs the whole film — complete with a director's voice calling cuts, camera angles, slow-motion, montages, flashbacks and reshoots. The cinematic vocabulary is part of the fun: a player can freeze for a close-up, the director can rewind a bad take, and scenes can jump anywhere in time and space. It teaches genre discipline and the power of framing. Because a director controls the edits, players learn to serve a bigger shape and to make bold, filmic choices — the sweeping entrance, the dramatic reveal. It's a spectacular showcase that rewards a group who commit to their genre and trust the director's eye.
Invocation (Opening)
A ritual opening. The players 'invoke' the suggestion as an object of worship, building in intensity: 'It is…', 'You are…', 'Thou art…', moving from plain literal description up through metaphor to mythic, poetic exaltation. Voices overlap and answer each other, and the word is turned over, praised and mythologised until its themes glow. It's a high-commitment, high-poetry opening that mines a suggestion for deep associations rather than jokes. It teaches escalation, group listening and the courage to be earnest and lyrical on stage. Because it climbs from the literal to the mythic, it surfaces themes a jokier opening would skip — perfect fuel for a rich, resonant show.
La Ronde
Scene 1 is characters A and B. Scene 2 keeps B and brings in C. Scene 3 keeps C and adds D, and so on, until the chain loops back to A — one community of interlinked characters, each scene overlapping the last by a single person. You watch relationships ripple across a whole town. The form forces continuity and consequence: a character carries what just happened into their next scene, so choices accumulate. It teaches character consistency, the discipline of the hand-off, and the pleasure of a world that feels connected. Simple to grasp, hard to play well — the carried-over character must stay the same person while everything around them changes.
Living Room
The players sit together 'in the living room' and simply talk — as themselves, or as loose versions of themselves — about their real lives. When something in the conversation resonates, one or two drift out into a scene inspired by it, then return to the couch, and the talk picks up again, now coloured by what was just played. It's a form about mining honesty for material. The conversation is the opening, endlessly renewable, and the scenes are its echoes. It teaches players to notice what actually moves them, to trust unglamorous truth as a springboard, and to move fluidly between reality and invention. Warm, personal, and quietly deep.
Monoscene
One continuous scene, in one location, in real time — no edits, no cutaways, no time jumps. A dinner party, a waiting room, a stuck lift, a band's tour van. Everyone who's in the room stays in the room, and the whole piece is the slow, accumulating life of that single place. With nowhere to run, the monoscene exposes and trains patience. Players can't escape a lull with an edit, so they must find the next moment inside the room — a new detail, a shift in status, a truth surfacing. It teaches deep listening, environment, and the courage to let a scene breathe. It's advanced precisely because it removes every safety net.
Montage
The simplest longform, and the best place to start. Take a suggestion, then play a series of scenes inspired by it — or by each other. Scenes may connect through character, theme or tone, or stand alone. There's no required structure, no group game to hit, no map to follow. Just good scenes, one after another, listening for what wants to come next. Because it strips away structure, the montage reveals whether a group can actually build scenes. Nothing hides a weak scene here. It teaches scene-craft, editing, and the group instinct to notice a pattern and follow it — the foundations every other longform is built on.
Pattern Game (Opening)
A word-association opening for a Harold or montage. The group starts from the suggestion and riffs in waves — a word, an image, an opinion, a short heightened run — finding the themes, viewpoints and games that will fuel the scenes to come. It's not a scene and not a story: it's a collective brainstorm performed out loud, mined for material. Taught on its own, it's the single most useful longform skill. Players learn to free-associate without judging, to spot when a run is heating up and heighten it, and to leave the opening carrying a handful of clear themes rather than a blank mind. A strong pattern game makes the whole show that follows possible.
Slacker
A follow-the-object format. The 'camera' follows whoever leaves each scene: when a character exits, we go with them into the next scene, drifting through a neighbourhood of interconnected characters in real time. There are no edits in the usual sense — the hand-off is the transition, and the world unspools like a single roving tracking shot. It teaches transitions and a living, connected world. Players learn to pass focus cleanly on an exit, to keep the town coherent, and to trust a loose, cinematic drift instead of forcing plot. Named for the Linklater film, it's a relaxed, atmospheric form that rewards patient world-building over jokes — and a lovely antidote to frantic scene-chasing.
Story Spine Play
Build a complete narrative on the story-spine armature: 'Once upon a time… Every day… But one day… Because of that… (and because of that…) Until finally… Ever since then…'. The scenes hang on those beats, so the piece has a guaranteed beginning, an inciting change, escalating consequences and a real ending — a full story, not a string of sketches. It teaches structure and cause-and-effect, the things pure scene-work often lacks. Players learn that 'but one day' breaks a routine, that each 'because of that' must follow from the last, and that stories need a shape to feel satisfying. It's the clearest on-ramp to narrative longform and a superb fix for shows that meander.
The Bat
A Harold — or any longform — performed in complete darkness, or with the audience's eyes closed. Pure audio improv: voices, footsteps, sound effects made by mouth and body, and silence used as a tool. With no visuals, the entire world is built in the ear, and the imagination of the listener does the set design. Stripping sight forces everything into the voice and into clarity. Players must label who and where they are, vary their vocal characters so the audience can tell them apart, and treat silence and sound as deliberate choices. It's an advanced, atmospheric form that sharpens vocal range and verbal economy like nothing else — astonishingly intimate when it works.
The Harold
The founding longform, built by Del Close. One audience suggestion feeds a group opening, then three unrelated scenes (1A, 1B, 1C). A group game follows, then the second beats of each scene, another group game, and finally the third beats — where the separate threads, themes and characters collide and connect. Thirty minutes, roughly nine scenes, one shape. You don't learn the Harold by performing it — you learn it by drilling what it demands: fast openings, clean two-person scenes, thematic listening, and callbacks with consequences. The form is a container, not a trick. What fills it is a group that hears the same themes and trusts them.
The Improvised Musical
A full sung show: one suggestion, one story, and five to seven musical numbers — an opening that builds the world, the main character's want song, a duet, a reversal, a finale everyone joins. The story carries the songs, never the other way round: without a clear want, no chorus will save the scene.