Fete Lifestyle Magazine May 2023 - Women's Issue | Page 66

At the Laughing Academy, Greene Hiller offers improv classes for all ages, storytelling workshops, stand up classes, monologue instruction, as well as group programs, summer camps for kids and professional shows. Having trained and performed at The Second City under teachers Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert along with classmates Tina Fey and Amy

Poehler, Hiller combined her passions for teaching (she has a master’s in education) and theater to enhance the lives of her students through improv. While some may seek success as performers, Hiller promotes Community, Connection, Collaboration, Cooperation, Confidence, Creativity, Communication and sees the results on a daily basis. Improv can make someone a more confident public speaker, a better leader in personal and business, and an effective communicator with family. Improv skills are applicable in a place where people work together, create together, and communicate better.

Greene Hiller says students often seek out her training to directly

address struggles with anxiety. “One of the first lessons we teach is that mistakes are ok, even anticipated and that learning to accept and even utilize those mistakes in the construction of a scene, changes the way we perceive our own mistakes or faults, they become opportunities for discovery”.

She continues, “What we teach at The Laughing Academy is known as Applied Improvisation, it is the application of the same rules and principles that enable us to get up in front of a live audience, with no script and create a performance piece collaboratively in an instant and it is applicable to any situation in which people wish for better communication, to collaborate, to communicate and truly connect.

We exercise our brain, creating neuropathways and forming new connections when we workshop and perform together, and those connections remain familiar to our way of thinking when we leave the studio and commune with the outside world.”

When two performers in a scene have created characters who remain deadlocked in conflict, Greene Hiller coaches them to cease simply arguing yes and no and to instead begin to explore the “why.” “This is true in any interpersonal conflict, we need to move beyond our hardest point of view and begin to explore and share the why of how we feel in order to forward the relationship, just as we must do so to forward the scene,” adds Greene Hiller.

Human beings have both cognition thinking and metacognition thinking, which is thinking about how we think. The key for a more optimistic mindset is to tap into your metacognition, if you have an anxious thought, explore the why, how did you come to this conclusion or fear. Improvising as a character you are entirely in a state of metacognition, there are two of you up there; the actor and the character you are creating. Both are responding to your scene partner, and you are examining your instinctual responses, while also thinking “what would my character do?” based on information you and your scene partner have just created about the character and the relationship between the two of you. This is a workout for your metacognition, training your brain to be aware while also remaining present in the moment.

The Laughing Academy is currently offering classes in adult improv, adult standup, kids summer day camps, and kids summer week camp in addition to evening “after hours” stand-up comedy shows.

All ages are welcome. For more information, visit www.thelaughingacademy.com.