choose your own adventure

04 Nov choose your own adventure

With the nights coming in (in the UK), the global situation still so uncertain and people just as in need of community and play as ever, the Nursery/Maydays collaboration made some more changes and tweaks to our classes in response to your feedback. 

This is what we have been up to:

Clearer level pathways

With all the new courses, electives and other things available, the reasonable question can be ‘What do I do next?’. We cleared up some of this with standardising our levels early this year, but we are going one stage further and created a course pathway that will contain all of our improv courses going forward. It’s not a simple level 1-6 thing, but a branching set of specialisations that allows you to choose what you want to concentrate on. In some areas, there is a single course that works on core skills necessary to a certain area of improvisation, but the more advanced you are, the more options you have. Rather than wondering ‘what’s next’, you will be clearly able to see what is available and choose our own adventure. You will be seeing it next week when it comes back from the designers.

Oh, and for the newer classes, we will be doing some sample sessions so you can try out what we have been cooking up. 

Accounting for time zone

We are a UK-based school, but while we are online, that doesn’t mean very much. There will always be some events which you can’t make, but in order to widen the opportunities, this autumn and in the new year, we will be trialling some non-standard time zone activities. Our new performance slot will be on a Sunday afternoon, our musical drop-ins will now alternate Sunday morning and evening (better for our North American friends) and one of our spring intensives will be in the afternoon as well. Stand by some for other classes at non-standard hours as well. 

Teaching teams

Two of the big things that people have been saying is that they wanted more time with the same people and more performance opportunities. Put these two ideas together and you have our new Teaching Teams. Based on the model that gave us ‘Quench’, these audition-only teams will have 12 week rehearsal periods cumulating in three performances on Friday nights. Players will join for a season at a time, then have the opportunity to continue or not as they wish. Teaching Teams are ensembles curated and guided by us for ongoing learning and experimentation. You can apply at this link here.

(It is important to stress that although these teams will have a coaching fee, we are not erecting a paywall around playing at the Nursery. There will still be lots of opportunities to play with us for free, and there are, of course, scholarship places available.)

New performance Opportunities

This we will still have to be a little vague about, as we are working out the details, but Saturdays are not enough for us, so we will have to do more shows. In addition to the Friday night Teaching Team shows described above, we will also be creating a second house team in the new year and starting a new performance slot probably on Sunday afternoons. Look out for auditions and applications for the above very soon, as well as our mysterious experimental short-form show. This isn’t much more than that tantalizing idea yet, but which will probably involve Too Much Tech and lots of special guests. 

Longer courses and Deposits

These two things go hand in hand. Our courses are well-priced, but as we are doing some longer courses, we don’t want people to lose out on opportunities because they don’t have money in their bank accounts right at this very moment. Initially, we will be trialling a deposit system with our longer courses to knock out the kinks, but we plan to roll it out when we know the system works.  

Oh, and we can never say this enough: if money is a problem with one of our courses, please get in touch. We never want that to be the reason why people aren’t improvising. We can help out if you 

There is a bunch more we want to do, including super electives (four-week courses), more guest teachers and classes and courses apart from improv. But one step at a time. We hope you like the changes we have made and look forward to seeing you in a class very soon. We are, as ever, open to your suggestions, comments and thoughts via any of the email addresses below. We are friendly folks and like to know what we are getting right and wrong. 

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