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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.