Hey You Got Peanut Butter in My Chocolate
with Hideout Education Director Andy Crouch and ColdTowne Conservatory Director John Ratliff
Saturday December 17, 1pm-3:30pm (2.5 hours)

Andy Crouch needs you to understand that Peanut Butter is clearly the best and purest form of improvisation – and really the only way that improv should be learned or practiced. He’d love to show you some specific exercises and discuss his deeply held and deeply felt beliefs about Peanut Butter improv.

John Ratliff has dedicated his life to the Chocolate variety of improvisation and will maintain with his dying breath that it is the only way for right-thinking people to make things up on stage. Give him two hours of focused scenework and he’ll make you a life-long partisan of Chocolate improv.

Come spend 2.5 hours participating in a war of ideas. Through games, exercises, scenework and discussion these two advocates of improvisation will pit their styles against each other, demonstrating the clear superiority of their particular style and the absolute incompatibility of Peanut Butter and Chocolate.

John Ratliff is the Conservatory Director at ColdTowne, where he was voted Best Teacher or Coach in 2011 and 2015. He also teaches at The Actor’s School, and in 2011 was named Best Improv Teacher in The Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin Critics Poll. He performs around town with his group Reverb and was an original and returning cast member of The Hideout Theater’s Austin Secrets show. At ColdTowne he wrote, directed, and appeared in The Church of Indeterminate Divinity, a “secular service” with live musical accompaniment, and has been a recurring cast member of Stool Pigeon. His past jobs include freelance journalist, stained-glass glazier, radio DJ, copy editor, tour guide, musician, and drafter of congratulatory and honorary resolutions for the Texas Legislature.

Andy Crouch took his first improv class at the Hideout Theatre in 2001, started teaching improv to students of all ages in 2003, and more than a decade ago he took over the roles of Education Director (and Director of Professional Development). He’s endlessly intrigued by improv as an art form — studying with top instructors all over the world, directing Hideout shows like Maestro, Theatresports, Start Trekkin’ and creating new formats like Fandom: Improvised Fan Fiction and Live Nude Improv — but his real passion is spreading the transformative and empowering ideas of improv as far and wide as possible.

$35 / 2.5 hours / Limited Space / Class held at Hideout Studios – 2505 E 6th St, Unit C