Tip & Exercise: pronouns

Teaching improv can feel daunting or difficult, especially if you don't see people like you teaching. To encourage you to start, or to improve your teaching, every month I will share with you a tip and an exercise.

Tip: Sharing pronouns.

Lately, we as improvisers are becoming more aware that gender is not only male or female, but that our students fall into a wide spectrum of gender identities (female, non-binary, male, etc.).

This is why at the start of a workshop, you want to ask your students how they want to be addressed. Here is an example of how you can do that: “Let’s go around the circle and tell us all your name and your pronouns. I will start. My name is Laura and my pronouns are she/her/hers.”

If you teach an online workshop, you can also ask people to rename their screen name to their name plus their pronouns. Easy!

Like with names, students sometimes forget each other’s pronouns. The more normal you make it to repeat them (names, pronouns, both) the more relaxed students will feel about practicing them.

A great way of repeating, is to put them into an exercise…

Exercise: If it wasn’t for…

Ask every student to think of 1 characteristic of themselves that they are proud of. Write this (truthful) answer on a sheet of paper, then add their name and pronouns on top. E.g. “Alex - they/them/theirs - Reliable”. Show the paper in front of you so others can read it.

In this exercise I ask the students to confirm what we have heard the other person say about us, expand 1 or 2 sentences on it and then connect that to the characteristic of the other person. Though the characteristic is truthful, the confirming and connecting can be fictional (however not sarcastic).

As a teacher you can start. “My name is Laura and I am very positive. I always see the silver lining of everything. Like when my bike was stolen, and instead of being sad I started skateboarding. But… I couldn’t be so positive if it wasn’t for Alex being so reliable. They always show me that I can see the best in humankind, because they are truly a person of their word.”

Then it is Alex’s turn to confirm (“That is right, Laura, I am very reliable”), expand (“I even keep all the PIN numbers of my family”) and connect to the characteristic of another (“But I couldn’t be so reliable, if it wasn’t for Nasir being so witty. His jokes make me less stressed. That way I never forget anything.”)

Go around the circle until they are back with the first person (probably the teacher).

I use this exercise for practicing names, pronouns, connection and empowering ourselves with our positive characteristics.

Feel free to give it a try & tell me how it went!