Four weeks on your own

Borrow other people's bodies. Yours has only one walk.

• 10 minThree Faces in the MirrorSolo · Beginner · 1

  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.

  💡 The mirror is there to CHECK, not to perform in: look for three seconds, then close your eyes and feel the body from inside. An improviser who watches himself play has stopped playing.

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• 10 minStatus WalkSolo · Intermediate · 1

  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.

  💡 Nobody can see that you're training; it's the most discreet exercise there is. And it teaches what no class teaches as well: status is not what you are, it's what you do.

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• 5 minDo NothingSolo · Beginner · 1

  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.

  💡 The worst fault on stage is not a lack of ideas, it's the inability to do nothing. An improviser who can bear five minutes of emptiness will bear the three seconds of silence the real offer comes out of.

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• 5 minNote the three bodies you could not hold

💡 Ten minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday. This is a habit, not a workshop.

Hear yourself — the part nobody does.

• 12 minRecord, Then ListenSolo · Intermediate · 1

  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.

  💡 Hearing your own voice is unpleasant — which is exactly why almost nobody does it, and why almost everybody repeats the same twenty tics for ten years.

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• 8 minEmotional ScalesSolo · Beginner · 1

  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.

  💡 We all play inside a range of three emotions and mistake it for a style. It's the missing states that tell you what to work on.

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• 8 minSing the RoomSolo · Intermediate · 1

  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.

  💡 The shame of singing wears off through repetition, not technique. Ten minutes alone in your kitchen beat three workshops where you never opened your mouth.

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• 2 minNote the three emotions your body refuses

💡 Listening back is unpleasant. That is exactly why it works, and why almost nobody improves.

The most visible skill, and the least trained.

• 12 minMake a Coffee, ReallySolo · Beginner · 1

  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.

  💡 Object work is the most visible skill and the least practised. An audience forgives a bad joke; it never forgives a cup that changes size halfway through the scene.

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• 15 minDub the Muted TVSolo · Beginner · 1

  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.

  💡 The best solo training in JUSTIFICATION: the screen hands you absurd offers, just like a partner would. And it won't hold it against you when you accept them badly.

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• 3 minNote what you invented instead of remembering

💡 Do it in real time. Every shortcut you take alone will show on stage.

The central skill of improv, and it trains alone.

• 10 minFirst Line, No PlanSolo · Intermediate · 1

  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.

  💡 This doesn't train eloquence: it trains you to BEAR not knowing where you're going. That's the central skill of improv, and it trains perfectly well alone.

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• 10 minNarrate YourselfSolo · Beginner · 1

  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.

  💡 It sounds ridiculous, and it installs the single most useful narrative reflex there is: hunting the CONSEQUENCE instead of the next thing. "And then" sends people to sleep; "because of that" tells a story.

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• 10 minInterview Your CharacterSolo · Intermediate · 1

  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.

  💡 A character with nothing to hide has nothing to play. It's the awkward questions that give them an inside — and they're asked perfectly well on your own.

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💡 Do not stop, do not restart, do not judge. Ninety seconds, five times.