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, not an improviser — tells a true story from their life, prompted by a word from the audience. The troupe then improvises scenes: not by re-enacting the anecdote, but by digging into what it woke up. The monologist returns several times — each new story launches another round of scenes, and the evening is built that way, between told truth and improvised fiction.
Deconstruction
A long ordinary scene is played first — ten minutes, realistic, no games. Then it is taken apart: its moments are replayed, its unsaid things explored, a character's childhood is visited, a line is pushed to absurdity, and back again. The first scene becomes a mine the group digs into for the rest of the show.
Improvised Documentary
An invented documentary on a subject called by the audience: pieces to camera, restaged archive footage, experts who contradict each other, a witness in tears. The form alternates direct address with ordinary scenes, and draws its strength from its seriousness — the more convinced the contributors, the funnier the whole.
Improvised Movie
A whole film, in a genre asked for by the audience: opening titles, cuts, slow motion, close-ups, voice-over, final shot. One player can take the director's role and call the edits, the flashbacks, the changes of angle. It is these cinema codes, played by bodies, that make most of the pleasure.
Invocation (Opening)
An opening in four passes on a word from the audience: "what it is", "what it is not", "where you find it", "I am this thing". The group moves from describing to embodying, until it becomes the word itself. Ritual, serious, almost solemn — and often the front door to a deeper show than expected.
La Ronde
A chain of two-handers: scene 1 puts A with B, scene 2 takes B with C, scene 3 C with D, and so on until it comes back to the first player, closing the round. Every character is therefore seen twice, with two different partners — and that is the whole flavour: you discover that a man who is charming with his wife is a tyrant with his employee.
Living Room
The improvisers begin by talking about themselves, with no character: a real conversation, sitting down, on a theme from the audience. Scenes are born from that talk, and the conversation returns between them. The form deliberately blurs the person and the role: the audience sees people first, characters second, and remembers both.
Monoscene
One scene, one place, one continuous time: no edits, no flashbacks, no ten-year jumps. Players come and go as in life, and the piece builds by accumulation — a detail dropped in the third minute becomes decisive in the twentieth. It is the form closest to written theatre, and the most merciless: with no edit, nothing arrives to rescue a scene that is not moving.
Montage
The simplest long form, and the best first one: a suggestion, then a series of scenes with no required connection, each inspired by the previous one or by the suggestion. No structure to remember, no beats to count. What links the scenes is not a mechanism but a theme, which appears on its own — often without the players having decided it.
Pattern Game (Opening)
An opening, not a show: from one audience word, the players chain free associations, with no scene and no character — a word, an image, a memory, a sentence. The group is not trying to be funny: it is looking for material. After five to eight minutes, three or four themes have imposed themselves, and the show's scenes will come out of them.
Slacker
The camera follows one character… then crosses another, leaves the first and moves on with the second. Each scene hands over to the next through a secondary character who becomes the main one. The show advances step by step, never doubling back — a whole town crossed in one continuous movement.
Story Spine Play
A play built on the spine of the folk tale: "Once upon a time… every day… until one day… because of that… because of that… until finally… and ever since that day…". Each step becomes a scene. The form guarantees a complete story — beginning, break, consequences, end — even to a group that has never told one.
The Bat
A long form played in complete darkness: the audience hears only voices, sounds, breathing. With no bodies and no eye contact, everything rests on sonic precision — an approaching step, a door, a whisper too close to an ear. The form manufactures a fear that light would make ridiculous.
The Harold
The founding long form, born with Del Close. One audience suggestion, a collective opening that mines it for themes, then three rounds of three scenes, separated by group games. In the first round the scenes have no apparent connection — in the second they move — in the third they meet — characters cross, ideas answer each other, and what looked scattered turns out to have been about the same thing all along.
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.