Summer Intensive: Narrative Toolkit

Note: To attend this class, you must have completed the Nursery’s level 3 or equivalent training. If you wish to attend, please email classes@thenurserytheatre.com with a summary of your experience. You will be given a password that enables you to book.

Build your Narrative Toolkit over 5 evenings in a row with the same teacher and group. Just like our courses but jam packed into one week! This intensive runs every evening from Monday 10th August to Friday 14th August, 7pm-9.30pm.

Taught by Jules Munns of the Maydays (‘Happily Never After’) and Impromptu Shakespeare, this course will introduce you to a range of tools, techniques and jigs to level up your improvised stories. Based on the core idea that narrative shows should not feel like a maths problem, but serve the scenes and players, this intensive will both bring out and hone your natural narrative instincts. It does not introduce a one-size-fits-all structure, but concentrates on providing players with the skills they need to create stories that they care about, stories which retain all of the freewheeling joy of your first improv class, but feel complete and gratifying to play and watch.

Skills taught include:

• Beginnings, middle and endings – how to create, satisfy and occasionally defy audience expectations
• The important moment – noticing patterns and how interruption can be the start of a story
• Premise – asking ‘what if’ to give you a clear core idea for your show
• A sense of place – how to use genre and specificity to give reality and detail to your setting
• Reaching the crisis – how to know what your character wants, but instead give them what they need
• Worldview, morality, protagonists and antagonists – how to make your show about something that matters
• Landing the plane – how to make shows that resolve rather than just stop

With a maximum of 12 attendees, the Narrative Toolkit is run by Jules Munns. Jules performs with the Maydays and Impromptu Shakespeare, as well as being one half of Ten Thousand Million Love Stories. He has performed and taught across the world, from Finland to Pakistan, Malawi to Canada. He creates improv blogs and podcasts and performs online for the Nursery.