Humor, creativity and freedom. Improvisation is a nice way to express yourself while practising an extra-curricular activity at school.

Improvisation is a form theatre often comedy. It is unscripted and created spontaneously.

Also, improvisational techniques are often used extensively in drama program to train actors for stage, films and television and it is integrated in their reasheal process.

It first started in the 16th to the 18th centuries in the street of Italy and the current rules of improvisation were created by The Compass Players troupe in Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Here in canada we have the LNI which is a popular improvisation league who does matches we can watch on the TV. There are a lot of actors and comedians as Pierre-Luc Funk or Real Bosse who are a part of it.

At la Camadière, we have our own improvisation team who are both called  “Les specimens“. There is a junior team for secondary 1 and 2 and a senior team for the secondary 3,4 and 5.

During their practices the players often play a game called «la course au mime». Here is a little explanation of the game; the coach creates teams and gives a certain number of mimes to each team.  The one who guesses all the mimes in less time wins the game. Maissa Lapalme, one of the senior player at school says that ‘’that game really helps to improve our imagination and prepares us for the tournaments.‘’

Also, there are tournaments, where one school competes against another one. During each matches, there are three referees. Two of them have to vote for the best improvisation and take notes during the match.The other one, gives you a category then, a theme. There is also a maximum number of participants who have to do the improvisation and a limited time to do it.

After two of the three referees determines with the help of the public who wins . In improvisation, there are two kinds of ways to improvise,  mixed and compared. Mixed is that the two teams compete one another at the same time on the stage. Compared is that each team go one after another on stage to do their improvisation.  

Finally if you really like to express yourself and get your imagination out you should definitely think of starting doing improvisation. Like Maissa lapalme says : ‘’improvisation is really my passion because i can always be myself and it gives me freedom to invent a story and a mini script in my head just based on a categorie and a theme.’’

writing by : Raphaëlle Roberge

edited by : Annabelle Mainguy, Lola Pearl O’grady, Marie-Maxime Geoffroy