These are two different 1-day workshops with Joe Bill!

The First 30 Seconds - SATURDAY March 30th 

8-16 STUDENTS  

11am-1:30pm 

This workshop will give you skills to help you get grounded in a strong character in the first 30 seconds of your scenes. These techniques will work in doing scenes aiming for comedy or as the beginning of any scene in a Narrative context, essentially these are acting skills.

I'll show you why the first 30 seconds are usually the most important, how to balance the engineer and jazz musician in your brain and how to effectively be in response to yourself, your scene partner and the scene itself.

Comedy Through Connection - SUNDAY March 31st

8-16 STUDENTS 

12pm-3pm 

Do you ever feel tired of chasing comedy premise and then finding the joke or game of the scene but running out of steam once you do? In this workshop I will teach you how to approach comedy as a consequence of human connection as opposed to playing a premise and patterns for the sake of themselves. I'll also give you some behavioral  neuroscience insight about how your brain works in different contexts of improvisation.

Lots of repetitions and feedback cap off both of these workshops!

BIO

Joe Bill is widely regarded as one of the best teachers of Scenic, Longform, Duo Improvisation, and Improvised Storytelling in North America today. He is one of the founding members of Annoyance Theater Chicago where, for 12 years, he performed in and/or directed more than 60 different shows.

He is the creator and host of Story Chain, a virtual (and now sometimes live!), 90-minute, international story sharing event that he developed in 2020 during the Pandemic. He was the Director of Corporate Training at iO Chicago for 15 years and started training and performing there in 1985. He was a Guest Artist in Residence at The Second City Training Center & Conservatory where he taught intensives in Duo Improvisation and Improvisation for Actors for 10 years.

Joe is ½ of the original improvised Monoscene (we used to call it “Real Time”), BASSPROV with Mark Sutton, and has been touring all over the world teaching, directing, and improvising with several other amazing Duo Partners like Patti Stiles (Our Play), Jill Bernard (SCRAM!), Stacey Hallal (Stacey & Joe, We Slept Together) Lee White (Paradigm), David Razowsky (Razowsky & Bill) and Heather Urquart (Blues Hammer), ALL in different, original formats and styles.

Joe has taught and performed on every continent on earth, except for Antarctica which remains on his bucket list.