Nobody knows what happens next. That is the entire point.

Two people walk on stage with nothing. No script, no set, sometimes not even an agreement about who they are to each other. Ninety seconds later a room full of strangers is laughing at a relationship that did not exist when the lights came up and will not exist again once they go down. Then it is gone. There is no recording worth watching and there is no second take.

That impermanence is not a limitation of the form. It is the form. Improvisers spend years learning to build something worth keeping and then let it evaporate, and the skill turns out to transfer to nearly everything else — listening, teaching, negotiating, running a meeting that has gone sideways.

Most of what is written about improv online is either a listicle of party games or a corporate workshop deck that mentions "yes, and" and then stops. The actual craft — how a scene finds its game, why the second line matters more than the first, what Del Close spent thirty years arguing about — is mostly passed down in person, in rooms, by people who learned it the same way.

This site is an attempt to write it down properly and give it away — so that the class you eventually pay for is spent doing the work rather than learning what the words mean.

• I'm brand newStart at chapter one. What improv actually is, and what it isn't.
• I want to take a classBeginner courses and open jams in Kansas City, plus the theatres worth travelling for.
• I'm running a rehearsalThirty games with instructions, coaching notes and what each one trains.
• My teacher said a wordSixty-one terms in plain English, from base reality to wimping.