back to my roots

I start teaching for PHIT again this weekend. It will be the first class I have taught in just about a year and I'm definitely looking forward to it.

For those who aren't familiar with PHIT from the beginning, the whole idea of a theater started with classes. There had been a few one-off classes taught on longform by folks like Matt Holmes, Bobbi Block, Alexis Simpson, and Tony DiGerolamo when I sat down with a few people in October 2005 and laid out my vision for PHIT.

The first improv class I ever taught was a Level 1 class that shifted all around Houston Hall on the Penn campus because it was a space I could get for free (I was still affiliated with Penn at the time). Every week I would realize I had to teach the class in a few hours and then sit down to try and write what exercises I would do. About halfway through I realized they would want some kind of performance structure to do and settled very haphazardly on The Armando. I'm thankful I didn't ruin them all. In fact, a couple of people turned out pretty darn good: Mark Dames and Jay Brenner were both in that first class. Along with a girl named Sarah Handfest. Sometimes you just cannot make this stuff up.

From that, we've come a long way. There is now a fully written out curriculum with class goals, exercises, descriptions, etc. for each of our improv Levels (the curriculum totals around 65 pages for all three improv levels). We've got a dozen plus people who've taught classes at the theater - and many, many more if you include workshops - and we've started sketch classes.

And now I'm back teaching, at least for a few weeks, which I'll stop short of calling a nice *break* from the business side of things (because that never goes away), but instead call a nice thing to look forward to on Sundays...

You hear that Level 3 students??? Don't mess this up!