The Art of Audience Care – CONNECT TO THE AUDIENCE

The audience is nothing to be afraid of!

This workshop is designed for performers who aspire to transform interactions with their audience into unforgettable theatrical experiences. We focus on the art of engaging directly with the audience to gain personal stories over simple suggestions. Through this approach, performers learn to create a charming and meaningful connection, making each performance uniquely resonant with the audience.

In this workshop, you will:

– Learn strategies to maintain a welcoming and inclusive environment where audience members feel valued and inspired to share.

– Invite and incorporate real audience stories into your performances – always making them a hero.

– Develop skills to connect empathetically with the audience, enhancing the emotional depth, authenticity, and comedy of your improvised theatre.

– Refine your improv skills and elevate the way you interact with your audience!

 

Instructor:

Ali Frogatt (Canada)

level: 3

It is a three-day workshop:
(with a total of 11 workshop-hours)
Friday: 2.00 pm – 5.00 pm
Saturday: 11.00 am – 5.00 pm (one 60 minute lunch break incl.)
Sunday: 11.00 am – 2.00 pm 

 

Fee: 275,- euros (VAT included)

Musicology – CONNECT TO THE MUSIC

In this workshop, participants will learn to deeply connect with music and explore the impact of rhythm on their acting. Without focusing on words, this workshop will emphasize listening and presence. Actors will be invited to feel the tempo of scenes, play with musical variations, and discover how rhythm can support or transform an emotion or interaction. It’s an experience where theatrical and musical improvisation meet, where every note and every silence becomes an inspiration. Participants will leave with a new sensitivity to the musicality of the stage and the ability to create powerful improvisational moments without the need for words.

 

Instructor:

Morgan Mansouri (France)

level: 3

 

It is a three-day workshop:
(with a total of 11 workshop-hours)
Friday: 2.00 pm – 5.00 pm
Saturday: 11.00 am – 5.00 pm (one 60 minute lunch break incl.)
Sunday: 11.00 am – 2.00 pm 

 

Fee: 275,- euros (VAT included)

Sense of Reality – CONNECT TO THE MOMENT

PROFESSIONALS ONLY!

In improvisational theatre, maintaining a strong and grounded connection to reality is a fundamental skill that allows the actor to be authentic, present, and believable on stage. Sometimes, even experienced improvisers drift away from this quality. This happens often not because of a lack of skill, but at the opposite, because of an over-reliance on narrative skill, performance energy, or the good old commitment to “make the scene work”

In highly experienced performers, this can take the form of:

– prioritizing clever or entertaining story development over truthful reaction

– overusing agreement and construction at the expense of inner truth

– pushing for significance, meaning, or dramatic impact too early

– “performing” emotions rather than actually inhabiting them

– shaping the scene instead of letting it emerge moment by moment

The scenes resulting from that are often technically strong, fast, and entertaining (hopefully) but maybe slightly detached from the lived reality. 

Everything works, and yet something essential is missing: the sense of real time, real consequence, and real emotional necessity.

“Sense of Reality” is an attempt to return to that missing layer. It is based on a few essential principles:

– the ability to observe and self-observe while building the narration

– the capacity to remain within an emotional state without escaping or embellishing it

– the ability to let perception crystallize into a clear internal decision

– the execution of actions that are precise and appropriate to the real impulse of the moment.

Focus

The work in this workshop is not about generating more ideas or improving narrative complexity.

It is about slowing down internal processes in order to restore causality between perception, emotion, decision, and action.

We will work on the transition between “knowing what is happening” and “actually letting it happen”, reducing the gap between impulse and expression.

We will try to perform while tapping on our meditative brain energy.

The aim is to recover a state in which improvisation is not constructed, but discovered in real time through attention, emotional continuity, and grounded action.

Intention

In this laboratory, we will take the time to refine a more authentic way of being on stage and interacting with others, one in which scenes are not “performed correctly,” but lived with clarity, precision and real presence, even for highly experienced improvisers who are used to driving story and maintaining control of the stage.

 

Instructor:

Antonio Vulpio (Italy)

 

It is a three-day workshop:
(with a total of 11 workshop-hours)
Friday: 2.00 pm – 5.00 pm
Saturday: 11.00 am – 5.00 pm (one 60 minute lunch break incl.)
Sunday: 11.00 am – 2.00 pm 

 

Fee: 275,- euros (VAT included)

34th TÖRN Cup – Der Hamburger Maestro™

In the TÖRN Cup, your favorite players from Hamburg as well as improv newcomers and guests from all over Germany will compete in a hot, emotionally charged competition. There they will be randomly thrown together in different combinations and have to prove themselves in a gripping thriller, a love ballad or an improvised horror film. Will the players of the evening play their hearts out or play their hearts out?

It is up to the audience to decide who has done the best. And this decision is not always the easiest, because only one*r can qualify at the end of the evening for the championship title and take home fame and honor, but especially the coveted 5-euro bill.

The special: Immediately before the show, there will be a free impro workshop, for which you can register in advance. With a bit of luck, participants will have the chance to try out what they have learned on stage directly afterwards and perform at the TÖRN Cup. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, everyone is welcome! Since the number of participants is limited, it is advisable to register in advance at maestro@improfestival-hamburg.de! The workshop will take place from 5-7pm at the Motte.

 

Where?
Motte
Rothestrasse 48, 22765 Hamburg

When?
Friday, 03.07.2026
Start: 20.00

 

Advance Sales

Normal price: 12 Euro

Cultural support: 15 Euro

Concession Tickets: 8 Euro

School Students: 6 Euro

 

Door Sales

Normal price: 15 Euro

Concession Tickets: 12 Euro

School Students: 6 Euro

 

Maestro Impro was created by Keith Johnstone, TM & Copyright 1970-2025
All Rights Reserved
Exclusively licensed by International Theatresports Institute

Your Unknown Side – CONNECT TO YOURSELF

We all play characters we can relate to easily: We may know our maternal or childlike side well, the active hero within us, or we may simply be able to empathize with our personified innocence. And at the same time, there are characters we may find difficult to portray believably without turning them into caricatures. Perhaps one of us struggles with the dull, bullying villain, while another struggles with the manipulative temptress?

How do we bring these characters to the stage as strong, interesting and vivid figures? How can we bring them to life again and again over the course of an entire evening? And what does it mean for our storytelling when we play out the scenes entirely through strong characters?

This workshop is based on the belief that all facets of humanity are already inherent within us. Nothing is truly foreign to us, even if we give certain aspects less space in our lives. This is where we begin, bringing to life a wide variety of personalities for our improvised scenes—personalities that are far removed from the stereotypes we usually create on the fly.

By combining Inside-Out and Outside-In-techniques, we ensure that we maintain the characters on stage, keeping them flexible, yet still recognizable. And last but not least, we make sure that the story—as if by itself—emerges from the characters and is allowed to unfold moment by moment.

This course will be taught in German.

 

Instructor:

Nadine Antler (Germany)

level: 2

It is a three-day workshop:
(with a total of 11 workshop-hours)
Friday: 2.00 pm – 5.00 pm
Saturday: 11.00 am – 5.00 pm (one 60 minute lunch break incl.)
Sunday: 11.00 am – 2.00 pm 

 

Fee: 275,- euros (VAT included)

Motte

Rothestraße 48

22765 Hamburg

www.diemotte.de

Why should I start an improvised scene positively?

There are several reasons why it makes sense to start an improvised scene positively.

Reason 1: Retraining impulses
From my experience, most people tend to react defensively or pejoratively under stress in order to protect themselves. As a result, 90 percent of all scenes begin negatively with impro newcomers (and not just with those). In part, the negativity is hidden, it’s little things that are wrong, that you or my partner are not doing right. “You are late.” is a much more common phrase than “Great, you’re here at just the right time.”

So when we start improvisational theatre, there are impulses that we have to “retrain”. To have a plan and not to let yourself be distracted from it can be very helpful in everyday life. For improvisation on stage it is rather uninteresting. To ask questions to people can signal great interest in my fellow human beings outside the stage, but on stage it very often shows insecurity. Because: We tend to ask for information in order to hand over responsibility to the other person. A similar impulse is the initial negativity. To protect ourselves, quite useful in everyday life, but problematic for the stage. Why?


Reason 2: The creative process
When we create a scene/story/situation together, we make ourselves vulnerable. I give an idea and with it a piece of me, and when my partner goes into it, we are in the middle of being creative together. If I now – subliminally or openly – always (re-)act negatively and critically, my counterpart gets the feeling that his/her ideas are not good enough. And automatically the other person suddenly feels uncreative. (An experiment, which by the way can be done quite easily).

Therefore: Being positive relieves my fellow players and helps the creative engine to get going.


Reason 3: Raising the stakes
Saturday night. At the club. All evening long I’ve been watching an attractive man with a stunning smile at the other end of the room.

Scenario 1: I dare to approach him and tell him that I can’t take my eyes off him and that I find him incredibly attractive. – He beams at me, answers me: “Wow, that’s great that you’re talking to me. Can I buy you a beer?” We were both positive.
The beginning of a story about you and me.

Scenario 2: I dare to approach him and tell him that I can’t take my eyes off him and that I find him incredibly attractive. – He laughs out loud and answers, that he doesn’t need to hear this from someone like me, then turns to his buddies to tell them how pityful I am to talk to him so clumsily. I was positive. He was negative.
The beginning of my story.

Scenario 3: I dare to approach him. I get cold feet on the way there, so when I get there I just say: “Hey you, I just wanted to tell you that your shirt is not buttoned up properly. – He replies, “Why don’t you mind your own business?” We were both negative.
End of story.

As soon as (at least) one character on stage behaves positively, he or she raises the stakes. If you make yourself vulnerable then there is something important to you. On the one hand, this makes you sympathetic and thus suitable for the audience to identify with, on the other hand it becomes easier to let something happen to your character and thus tell a story.

(But aren’t there also improv schools where people are taught to start in the middle of a conflict? Is that “wrong” then? – No. But that would go beyond the scope here…)

Nadine Antler