Improv Solo improv practice
Improv is a team sport, and that's exactly why nobody trains between classes. These are the things you can genuinely work on alone: status in a supermarket queue, object work in front of a mirror, monologues to an empty room, listening to a podcast and answering it out loud. Nobody can see that you're training — it's the most discreet practice there is.
A Voice Per Body
Take a strong physical posture — hunched and heavy, puffed and proud, coiled and quick — and let a voice fall out of it without deciding one in advance. Speak a few lines as that body, then change posture and let a new voice arrive. The body leads, the voice follows, never the other way round. Character voices invented in the head come out as cartoons — a funny accent bolted onto nothing. Found in the body, they come out true, because a real voice is shaped by a real physicality: the heavy man rumbles, the anxious one clips his words. This links voice to body so your characters sound like someone, not like a bit.
Do Nothing
Sit facing a wall. Five minutes. Play nothing, prepare nothing, chase no idea. When the urge comes to move, to check your phone, to invent a scene — notice it, and stay.
Dub the Muted TV
Mute a drama or a talk show and dub every character out loud, live. You choose neither the entrances, nor the silences, nor the looks: you have to justify whatever happens, exactly as on stage. Fifteen minutes, never stopping to think.
Emotional Scales
One flat sentence ("there's still some bread"). Say it in eight successive states: tenderness, contempt, panic, boredom, greed, guilt, triumph, exhaustion. Film yourself. The point isn't to play all eight well — it's to find the three your body refuses.
First Line, No Plan
Open a book at random, take the first sentence you land on, and talk for ninety seconds from it — no plan, no stopping, no restarting. Then do it again with another. Five times in a row.
Hum First
Before any voice work, hum. Lips closed, an easy "mmm" on a comfortable note, and feel where it buzzes — start at the lips, then move the buzz up into the nose, the cheekbones, the forehead. Slide the hum up and down, chasing the tickle into new places. Five minutes, no words, no performance. The voice you use on stage is the one you warmed up, or the one you strained. Humming wakes the resonators — the hollow spaces that let a voice carry without shouting — and it's the gentlest way to find volume that doesn't wreck your throat. Do it in the shower, in the car, before a show.
Interview Your Character
Invent a character in one sentence, then interview them for fifteen minutes — questions out loud, answers out loud: what do they eat in the morning? who do they lie to? what are they ashamed of? what have they lost? Write down the three answers that surprised you.
Make a Coffee, Really
Make a coffee entirely in mime, in real time, with no shortcuts: the weight of the bag, the click of the lid, the heat of the cup, the spoon against the china. Twelve minutes if that's what it takes. Then make one for real, and compare — you'll discover everything you had invented.
Narrate Yourself
Narrate what you are doing out loud, in the third person and the past tense, like a novel: "He opened the fridge, hesitated, and closed it again." Ten minutes. Then switch to the story spine — "because of that… because of that…" — and turn a dull evening into a story that moves.
One Long Breath
Take one full, low breath — into the belly, not the chest — and speak on it for as long as you can, evenly, without letting the sound wobble or fade: count, read, or simply hold a vowel. Time yourself. Then do it again, aiming to go a little longer with the same steady tone from first word to last. Breath is the fuel of the voice, and a starved breath is why a line trails off, why a voice shakes when you're nervous, why the end of a sentence vanishes. Training the long, supported breath gives your voice a floor to stand on — steady, unhurried, and yours even when the adrenaline hits.
Reach the Back Wall
Pick a spot on the far wall of the biggest room you can find. Speak to it — not louder, but AIMED, as if the words have to land on that exact spot and no closer. Feel the difference between shouting (which comes from the throat) and projecting (which comes from breath and placement). Then walk slowly backwards as you speak, keeping the words landing on that same far spot. Projection is what lets a whole room hear you with no microphone and no wrecked voice by the third scene. It comes from breath and intention, not volume — you fill a space the way you throw a ball to someone at the back: not by straining, but by aiming further.
Read It Like You Mean It
Take any paragraph — a news story, a recipe, the back of a cereal box — and read it aloud three times, each with a different intention: seduce someone with it, threaten someone with it, confess it in tears. Same words, three completely different voices. Then read it flat, and hear how empty flat sounds next to the other three. The words are rarely the problem on stage — the voice carrying them is. This drills the truth that HOW you say a line matters more than what it says, and it builds the reflex to colour speech with real intention instead of reciting. A cereal box read as a seduction proves, once and for all, that the voice does the acting.
Record, Then Listen
Record two minutes of monologue in character — any pretext will do: a complaint, a wedding speech, a confession. Then listen back. The second half is the exercise: catch the tics, the sentences that curl up at the end, the irony you hide behind, the moments where you comment instead of playing.
Sing the Room
Pick an object in the room and sing it: eight lines, invented melody, sloppy rhymes allowed. Then another object. Then another. Nobody is listening — which is precisely why it works.
Status Walk
Out in the street, one afternoon: walk twenty minutes in high status (steady gaze, slow gestures, few words), then twenty minutes in low status (darting eyes, small gestures, apologies). Play nothing — change only those three settings, and watch what people give back.
Steal a Voice
Find a two-minute clip of someone with a distinctive way of speaking — a documentary, a podcast, a neighbour overheard. Play one sentence, pause, and copy it exactly: not the words, the MUSIC — the rhythm, the vowels, where the pitch rises and falls. Loop the hardest sentence until your mouth finds the shape, then try a fresh sentence in that same voice. Accents and vocal characters aren't learned from a list of rules — they're stolen by ear. This trains the listening that lets you catch a way of speaking and wear it. And even if you never do accents on stage, it sharpens the ear that hears how a real person actually sounds, which is where truthful character voices come from.
The Eavesdropper's Notebook
At a café, write down real speech: not what people say, but HOW — the repetitions, the unfinished sentences, the "anyway", the silence after a question. Take five exact lines home and speak them out loud.
The Pitch Ladder
Say one sentence at the very bottom of your voice — a gravelly basement. Then climb, rung by rung, the same sentence a little higher each time, until you're up in a squeak, then come back down. Notice the two or three rungs where your voice cracks, tightens or hides: those are your edges. Most improvisers live on three notes and call it their voice. A character lives in pitch as much as in words — the timid one thin and high, the boss low and slow. Widening your range hands you a whole cast to draw on, and this ladder shows you exactly where the unused rungs are.
Three Faces in the Mirror
In front of a mirror: pick three people you crossed paths with today — the cashier, the man on the bus, your boss. Take each one's body for sixty seconds: the back, the rhythm, the gaze, the mouth at rest. Don't hunt the caricature, hunt the exact posture. Move from one to the next without stopping.
Trip Your Tongue
Pick a tongue-twister and run it slowly, exaggerating every consonant until your lips and tongue ache — "the tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips", "red leather, yellow leather". Only once it's perfectly clean do you speed up. Do three or four, then read a random paragraph aloud with that same crisp attack on every word. Half of being understood on stage is consonants. An audience forgives a quiet voice, never a mumbled one, and articulation is a muscle that only sharpens with reps. Two minutes of this before you play and the back row hears every single word — which is where half of comedy's timing actually lives.