Chase the Ball with Roy Janik
Sunday, December 23, 3-6pm

Learn to control the audience’s focus by becoming deliberate with your own. You will experience a series of exercises designed to hone your attention and heighten your awareness of yourself, the scene, and your ensemble as a whole. From two-person scenes to huge group scenes, you’ll know exactly what’s happening with every person on stage.

Put another way: Think of the focus of a scene as a physical ball of glowing energy. If you’re talking about something that’s happening elsewhere, that’s where the ball is. If you’re discussing a past or future event, the ball has warped through time and is now there. So what do you do in a scene if the ball gets away from you? You either coax it back in, or you chase it.

Roy Janik is the Artistic Director and co-owner of The Hideout Theatre. As Artistic Director, he schedules over 500 shows in a given year. He performs in many of the Hideout’s mainstage productions, and he is the creator and director of the critically-acclaimed show Austin Secrets. In addition to being a company member of the improv groups Parallelogramophonograph and Squirrel Buddies, he also spearheaded the creation of the Improvised Play Festival- the world’s first festival devoted exclusively to theatrical, narrative improv.

Since 2005, Roy Janik has taught, directed, hosted, coached, narrated, and scheduled improv, pretty much nonstop. He has traveled to over 45 cities worldwide to teach and perform, including Juneau (Alaska), Edinburgh (Scotland), and Melbourne (Australia). During that experience, he developed a deep love of narrative improv and crystalized his thoughts on the role of playfulness in improvised theatre. The lesson he keeps learning is that there are always deeper layers to uncover in improv and that it’s a neverending journey.

$35 / 3 hours / Limited Space / Class held at The Hideout Theatre – 617 Congress Ave