Since January 2006, we’ve occassionally offered our introductory improv comedy course (Level 1, now IMPROV 101) for free to drum up business. This started out on a recommendation only system. You had to be recommended to the class to take advantage of the offer. Many of our current players and teachers came to ITC because they were recommended to our classes by someone they knew.

Four years and a few variations later, on Jan. 3, 2010, we put out a notice on Facebook that we were offering our IMPROV 101 class for free. (We also linked to the Facebook event through our Twitter account.) At the time, we had four classes listed on our site and a handful of registrations. This was the first time we ever used social networking to promote our free 101 offer.

We expected we’d get some extra students; we didn’t expect so many so fast. Within 24 hours, the four classes listed on our website filled up, with 16 students to a class. We had to add more classes. Those filled up. We added more classes. Those filled up. In total, we listed and filled up 13 classes with 16 students per class. That’s just over 200 new student registrations.

The offer went viral, rapidly, almost uncontrollably. After 13 classes filled up, we still received emails and phone calls from people asking about the free classes and looking for a spot if someone dropped out. (And yes, the drop-outs came. Being free, a lot of people opted not to commit to their IMPROV 101 class, many never showed up.) For classes with 16 students registered, on average 12 students per class showed up and saw the class through to completion. We expect attrition but when there is no fiscal attachment, 100 per cent commitment is a hard sell.

One week before a class starts, we email the entire roster to remind the students their class starts soon, how to find us, who their teacher is, and also ask them to let us know if they cannot commit to the class any longer so that we can free up their spot for someone else. No hard feelings. We want people to have the best experience they can while they are with us.

I’m very open about the fact that we put out the offer to drum up potential repeat students. I don’t believe that pure altruism exists (and, if prompted, will get into a long discussion as to why siding with that notion helps you be a better improviser). I want people coming into our free 101 classes to love it enough to carry on studying — with us, preferably — but more importantly, I want them to discover a love for improv and to have something in their life that consistently brings them joy on a weekly basis.

Improv changed my life and keeps me feeling young, healthy and happy. For me, it is an amazing gift to be able to give people, whether we see repeat business from them or not. I want to provide as many people as I can with the experience of improvisation and the potential to discover a new skill, hobby, career and meet a wonderful group of new people: improvisers.

I love that a bunch of new people have fallen in love with this art form enough that they want to continue studying with us. So many people came into our classes recently having never done improv before, never taken a class. Others have studied at other local training centres and like our approach. Some have decided our approach isn’t for them. Whatever the results might be, one thing I was concerned about was that this offer might affect other training centres in the city that rely on student revenues to keep people employed, to pay the rent on their theatre, to keep the doors open. I hope our recent freemium approach isn’t negatively affecting their business.

On the other hand, I need to ensure that ITC continues to exist and grow so that the 100+ performers and writers in the company have a place they love that continues to help foster their growth and provides them with the outlets required to present their work. My main goal with initiating the offer was not to draw from the current market of improv students, but to expand the market itself, to bring more people into the world of improv.

In 2009, we had a total of 454 registrations for our regular classes (not including weekend intensives); in January, we had 190. We repeated the offer in February; nine more classes have filled up, more than 50 students from the free 101 classes registered for IMPROV 201. In February, we had 179 registrations. On March 1 alone, we received nine registrations. That’s 378 registrations for the first two months of 2010, roughly 75 shy of last year’s entire registration count. I anticipate blowing past all of 2009 in Q1 of 2010. That’s great news for us and great news for improv in Toronto.

My friend, Zach Ward, loves the aphorism “the rising tide raises all boats.” We work and build out businesses taking this notion into consideration. In Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, we have seen this to be true. In Chicago that you can throw a stone downtown and hit someone who has taken an improv class. If I’m not mistaken, The Second City in Chicago has 10 studios at its training centre and has approximately 1600 students in class each session. (By camparison, there might only be about 800–900 improv students in all of Toronto.) The Second City’s training centre helps feed iO Theater’s training centre, which helps feed Annoyance Theatre’s training centre, which helps feed The Second City’s training centre, and so on and so on. People start and one place and learn that and study elsewhere and learn that, and so on.

Many students that discovered improv an comedy at ITC are now graduates of The Second City conservatory program, perform at the Bad Dog Theatre on a regular basis, and take fantastic elective classes at both of those training centres. Some of our former students and players are now on the main stage at The Second City. There are improv and comedy shows now every night at the week at Comedy Bar, Bad Dog Theatre, The John Candy Box Theatre, and other companies and groups are performing at other venues around the city. The rising tide lifts all boats.

Everybody wins. Our students win. Our teachers win. ITC wins. The Toronto improv and comedy communities win. Our use of the freemium approach is converting non-paying students into paying students, who recognize not only the value of our training, but the added value of having improv as part of their daily lives. Our use of the freemium approach had led the conversion of our Green Room (our hangout and chill-out area) into a third studio. Because of that conversion, we can offer more IMPROV 101 classes and expose more people to this work that we do.

On the business end, the revenue from those students — and you might even be one of them — will allow us to make improvements to our training centre (such as baseboards and air conditioning!), improve staffing, and to accomplish a number of other goals that we have our sights set on.

In the end, it turns out that offering these free classes could just be the thing that allows us to afford to do the things we really want to do. Speaking of which, we’re always enrolling. Check it out: http://www.impatient.ca/

One of the subjects I’ve been asked a lot about over the years is coaching improv. Over the last three years — since we established a three-tier system to our teams (Incubator, Harold and House teams) — that question has been asked more and more. What is the role of an improv coach? To answer that, I first want to address the nomenclature of improv “teams” and why those teams have “coaches.”

The idea of improv teams, as it relates to longform improv, came out of the iO Theater in Chicago at a time when it was known as ImprovOlympic. The improv Olympics performed at that theatre consisted of different teams competing in different scene events. (The Canadian Improv Games are actually built on this old IO show format.) Charna Halpern has talked about how she created the idea of coaches to help facilitate an environment in which experienced and new improvisers interact with other and build a support system for young teams. When the games at ImprovOlympic stopped and Del Close came on board as artistic director, short-form teams became Harold teams.

At the Impatient Theatre Co. we used to just have Harold teams. Even though it was clear which teams had more experience and were working better as teams, there was only one level. We created the hierarchy to provide a distinction in the level of experience that a team — and/or its players — has. Some people don’t like this, but it actually has significant developmental benefits for the teams, which is an entirely different post.

Allow me to quickly outline our team structure...

Incubator Teams: At the ITC we take the term incubator fairly literally and use it to suggest that teams at this level are still young and going through a more rigidly defined process of development and learning to perform Harold well.

Harold Teams: These teams (and/or their players) have experience performing Harold from the ITC approach. Often Harold teams are incubator teams that have been elevated to Harold status through hard work and practice. Sometimes this can take a year or more of performing at the incubator level.

House Teams: A house team is a featured team at the ITC and performs regularly and might even have their own weekly show. Big In Japan and DHARMA are ITC’s two current house teams. Each team headlines one of our two weekly Harold Night shows (both of which currently take place on Tuesday nights). Big In Japan performs Harold; DHARMA performs something akin to 4 Square, very organic and highly transformational.

As you can imagine, since the quality of experience, development and skill of the teams and its players varies from team level to team level, so does the role of the coach vary from level to level.

Coaching at the Incubator Level

When coaching an incubator team, it is the coach’s job, role, responsibility to hammer into the incubator team the ITC approach to performing Harold. For this reason, the coach’s role is more akin to that of a director, where the team members have little say with regard to their objectives.

Teams at this level are typically fresh out of our training centre and, while they may have spent a lot of time coming up through classes with each other, they haven’t had a significant amount of experience performing Harold — four months at best subsequent to their IMPROV 401 classes. Since Harold isn’t something that can be taught in only eight weeks of class, there are two more levels of intermediate and advanced organic and conceptual approaches to the work.

The team will likely spend an inordinate amount of time running scene drills and practicing organic openings until they want to die. The incubator team is not focused on finding its own voice or style or unique difference that separates it from the rest of the teams. In fact, the goal should be just the opposite. The coach works to — for lack of a better term — beat the concepts of longform improv and Harold into the team until they become intuitive and instinctual, when they can stop thinking and start playing. It’s not until the team can break away from the shackles of the training wheels Harold’s underlying framework and become more organic with it that they’ll truly start to become a team unto themselves.

This whole process for incubator teams can take a long period of time, frequently upwards of a year. In the meantime, incubator teams are being coached at least once a week and performing on a regular basis — currently incubator teams perform two out of every three weeks. This process has significant advantages for the development of teams and players as both are able to relax and focus on their growth in a structured non-competitive environment for extended periods of time where they are held to little in the way of performance expectations. It is not imperative that incubator teams consistently perform good shows, only that they are working steadily and that growth can be seen in their work over an extended period of time.

Coaching at the Harold Level

When working with a Harold team, the coach becomes much more symbiotic with the team. It is common for teams to change coaches once they reach this level to get a fresh pair of eyes on their work. Harold teams have proven that they understand and can implement the concepts of longform improvisation, but more importantly that the group has become a unified and cohesive team.

At this level, teams are encouraged to start finding and developing their own unique team voice. The coach helps them do that but still retains a great degree of influence over their work by bringing new ideas and approaches to the team for experimentation and by providing the “outside eye” POV on the work that every team needs.

The coach is not there to rule or dictate, but to challenge and push the team to discover the best they can be and to stage the best performances they can rally. When I coached Big In Japan, I spent six months with the team working almost exclusively on organic openings. We ran openings many different ways, highly narrative one month, highly physical the next, and switched it up from month to month to month until they were able to take all of those approaches and use them as weapons in their openings and throughout their show from a level that was instinctual, intuitive and often awe-inspiring.

Coaching at the House Level

This is the purest role of the coach at the Impatient Theatre Co. The coach of a house team is there to serve the needs and desires of the team. Kind of like the navigator on a ship. The team determines the destination, the coach figures out the best route to get them there.

While house teams consist of some of the best players in the company, the coach is still ever pushing the team forward. The coach may develop exercises that push players out of their comfort zones or focus on areas of weakness or areas in which the team or its players have let slide while they spent time focusing on other skills. Still having some influence over the direction of the team, the coach’s primary task is to gain understanding of what the team wants and how to guide them down that path.

So, that’s a cursory glance at the role of the coach at each improv team level at ITC. I could go in-depth on each one of these levels but that would be a topic for another post some day.

I’m excited to be working with this young team and providing them with the tools they need to succeed at this wonderful art form they’ve all chosen to take part in. Keep pushing forward. Keeping working at the craft and challenge yourself always. Quo vadimus?

I mentioned this the other day and someone suggested that if universes were lanes on a highway, then when we change lanes we don’t take the other lane with us. This quickly brought me to the realization that if the Multiverse exists, then it only exists in the wake of our existence, that is the existence of each of us in our own reality.

I use the word wake intentionally because our existence leaves a mark that can be felt by those in close proximity to us, but over time fades out and, eventually, can no longer be felt. If my wake passes through your wake, it changes the current of space-time and creates cross currents. Heraclitus said “You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” He sounds like a Buddhist.

The idea of parallel universes has always been one that intrigued me; I loved watching Sliders when I was younger (can you say Sabrina Lloyd?). But it’s impossible, now, for me to conceive of something so arrogant as a Multiverse — William James must have loved himself immensely. To think that a whole entire universe is created (or exists) for every choice we have made or will ever make is preposterous. It’s on the level of creating gods to protect us from our fear of existence as irrelevant and meaningless, or to preach that non-terrestrial life forms are mere science fiction, when our very existence on this planet is proof enough of the possibility.

So, with these thoughts I leave you for debate on the issue and these words from one of the wisest men who ever drew his wisdom from the commons: “This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.”

If I had kept at it, I would probably be an Internet celebrity by now as thousands (hundreds of thousands) of people would have looked to my words as inspiration for their own opinions. I could have been crushing it, giving soon-to-be-moms hope and confidence as a blogging soon-to-be-mom myself, or gotten real and developed a bunch of cloud-based web apps that do little more than contribute to the cacophony of web apps already out there.

But who’s kidding who. The real reason I kept shutting down my blogs was because I felt I didn’t have anything interesting to say. I can write, but are the words I type of any value?

The idea now is to change all of that. To write things of value. To share my opinions and ideas about the world and the things I know. I know I have value to offer. I also know that with current tools (WordPress) and social media (Facebook, Twitter) that I can get the word out easier, that I can initiate discourse with the blogosphere, Twittersphere, Interweb cloud, Socialverse, or any other combination of words you can think of to jam together — like Webagonia (where the Web lives), Zionosphere (the Real World), or clapp (cloud app).

So, kprobbins.com is reborn. Here I am — although using a really lame WordPress theme until I can design a new one. I’m going to write about things. Things like web design and development. Things like improv and sketch comedy, screenwriting and being a TV junkie. Things like cool new shows my awesome improv company is producing. Things like why I think parallel universes can’t exist.