Suzi Barrett

This workshop will expand your improv arsenal with lots of simple, easy-to-implement tools that you can use in any scene. You'll be amazed at how quickly we can shake away your tired, habitual go-to's and start initiating and responding from fresh and surprising places. We’ll do a lot of short, two person scenes that play around with different narrow focuses. Keep the techniques that work for you and add them to your improv toolbox! You’ll find them invaluable when you’re looking to get out of your head and into the meat of a good scene.

In this advanced scene work class, Suzi will diagnose your “bad” improv habits and give you some techniques for counteracting them. She’ll also help you identify what it is you do well so you can hone your improv superpowers and further develop your own unique comedic voice.

Feeling shy on the back line? Questioning whether your support moves are good enough? Not to worry! The first part of this workshop is all about stoking your creative furnace and drilling tags until they become second nature. In the second part of the workshop, we’ll take that explosion of ideas and focus them like a laser, working on second beat tactics like ~ blowing out the world, taking characters on a journey, cutaways and cutbacks, jumping to an unexpected POV, and more!

Improv is a live art form, but we often treat it like a writers’ room rather than an exciting, dynamic piece of theater. This class is about leaning into the commitment of your shows-- creating stage pictures, physicalizing your environments, embodying characters that feel different from yourself, and using the space itself in creative and interesting ways. When an audience leaves their house and pays to come and watch you, you should give them something to remember!

Move beyond game and pattern, and learn some techniques for exploring your scenes and characters in a satisfying way. Then dive into exploring a show at large—blowing out the world, playing with interesting editing techniques, and varying the show’s tone with dynamic theatrical choices.

This class will improve and deepen your scene work by helping you simplify your scene’s premise, ground your character’s point of view, and create consistent, believable relationships onstage. You may already be an improv expert, but these techniques will sharpen your tools and help you build unforgettable scenes every time you play.

This frequently overlooked aspect of character dynamics is a comedic engine that will help you drive your scenes and create truthful, resonant comedy. We’ll experiment with playing low status and high status characters in different combinations, and see how those relationships create automatic games in scenes. We’ll also practice a few actionable techniques that you can use to instantly define your status in scenes—an invaluable tool for making strong, clear choices down the road!

Who/what/where is great, but they don’t mean anything if your character doesn’t have a specific point of view. Learn how this aspect of character creation can thrust your scenes forward and create immediately compelling relationships. Then, practice techniques that will help you explore POV and create consistent, memorable characters in the process.

In this workshop, you’ll practice making specific emotional choices that are grounded in reality, and experiment with unexpected emotional responses that will make scenes interesting and engaging from the top. We’ll also play with varying tones to make your shows more dynamic.

In this workshop, we'll demystify the idea of "the game of the scene" and have fun identifying and heightening singular comedic ideas. The first half of the workshop will be all about pulling premises from monologues and other source material; the second half will work on identifying and playing games in organic scenes. If you've ever felt like premise work was an uphill battle, this workshop is for you! And honestly, if you love premise work, this workshop is also for you!

This class will sharpen the skills at the core of the UCB curriculum. You’ll practice quickly and easily identifying the game of any scene in order to heighten a singular comedic idea. You’ll also work with pulling premises from monologues and interviews, then initiating those premises clearly so that your scenes are off and running from the very start.

Hip-Hop and improv comedy are two incredible art forms that go great together…if you know what you’re doing. This workshop will teach you the techniques you’ll need to create comedic hip-hop on the fly, give you some ideas for how to integrate hip-hop into your shows, and allow you to practice your skills in a safe space full of fellow creators

Everybody get in here—it’s time to talk about your group games. If you’re looking to level up your Harolds, there’s no better way to do it than to get wild and weird with your group games. In this workshop, you’ll play with five different templates for non-scenic group games, and then you’ll start creating your own! Group games are the only place in the Harold where absurd, silly, and ungrounded ideas have a home. Why not use this part of the show to go on a surprising creative journey that blows our audiences’ minds?

Learn and practice a roster of existing Harold Openings, then learn to create your own! Set your Harold team up for success by empowering yourself to develop brand new openings that are exciting for an audience to watch, while also serving up the best ideas for you to pull from.

Move beyond your predictable go-to’s and discover some simple techniques that will open up a world of second beat possibilities. By the end of this class, you’ll be attacking your second beats with confidence, and taking the audience on an exciting, unpredictable ride.

Learn and practice the advanced techniques that will make your Harolds stand out as extraordinary. We’ll work on stylized edits, playing each others’ second and third beats, and creating a “connective tissue” by turning small, memorable moments into larger patterns. We’ll also practice theming your Harolds, so they can transcend the series-of-funny-scenes model and become true pieces of art.

(Multi-Day Intensive) The Harold is the oldest form in the long-form canon, but it doesn’t have to be tired or predictable— nor should it! In this workshop, we’ll experiment with ways to super-charge your Harolds and surprise your audience (and yourselves). We’ll use the space in creative ways, work on non-scenic group games, learn some stylized editing techniques, and develop a wider scope for second and third beat possibilities. Then we’ll put everything together and discover how joyful, dynamic, and exciting our Harolds can be.

Ever wanted to create and develop your own improv form? This two-day workshop will give you all the tools you need to do it! On day one, we’ll break down long-form improv into building blocks that we can bend, shape, and use in exciting and challenging ways. On day two, you’ll use what you’ve learned to create your own new forms, then put them on their feet. By the end of the workshop, you’ll be empowered to create never-before-seen forms that you can put in front of audiences “in the wild”, and continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in longform.

This workshop is all about honing your acting chops—digging into the emotional commitment of a scene, and completely connecting with your scene partner so that even silences are compelling. In the second half of class, we’ll work with the Gravid Water form—where one scene partner reads from a script, and the other one improvises their lines. If you can up your improv skill-set with grounded, believable acting, you'll be able to create unforgettable scenes.

The key to any good genre parody is to commit to it so fully, and portray it so accurately, that the audience almost can’t tell the difference between the joke and the real thing. With this as our guiding principle, we’ll dive into the exciting world of genre-prov by studying different genres of film, TV, and theatre, then learn to accurately mimic them by embracing and exploiting the tropes that made them famous.

The Harold is the oldest form in the long-form canon, but it doesn’t have to be tired or predictable— nor should it! In this workshop, we’ll experiment with ways to super-charge your Harolds and surprise your audience (and yourselves). We’ll use the space in creative ways, work on non-scenic group games, learn some stylized editing techniques, and develop a wider scope for second and third beat possibilities. Then we’ll put everything together and discover how joyful, dynamic, and exciting our Harolds can be.