IRREVERENTE - LISBON INTERNATIONAL IMPROV FESTIVAL
WORKSHOPS
Here, improvisation comes to life in intense, inspiring, and playful workshops. During the festival, artists and instructors from around the world come together to share tools, spark creativity, and challenge the unexpected. Come in, choose your workshop, and dive headfirst into the irreverent experience of improvisation!
LVL
IMPRO LEVEL
A - BEGINNER
B - COMFORTABLE
C - EXPERIENCED
MT
MIXED TEAM
WITH A PRESENTATION AT THE END OF THE WORKSHOP
This workshop is not about singing well, or even being able to sing at all. It’s about discovering your character’s voice. Character Concerto is a 12-hour improv workshop dedicated to creating rich, grounded, and long-lasting characters. We’ll explore multiple ways of building characters that feel alive and specific, using music as a powerful source of inspiration, emotional drive, and rhythm. Gradually, we’ll invite singing into the work, not as a musical skill, but as an expression of character. The focus is not on singing well or playing musicals, but on using music and voice to heighten stakes, deepen presence, and allow the audience to forget the actor and truly see the character.
12 HOURS
23 & 24
09:30 - 12:30
14:00 - 17:00
LVL
B
VINCENT VAN NIEUWENHUYZE
MIGUEL TAPADAS
MT
Intimacy: The state of having a close, personal relationship or romantic relationship with someone. (Cambridge Dictionary) In this workshop we will explore how to make intimate scenes safe for all while at the same time creating beautiful, believable scenes. We will focus on how to convey intimacy in our improvised scenes, from the flirting and attraction at the beginning of a connection, to how to create scenes which strike an emotional chord and are authentic and varied, going beyond the romantic to different types of personal relationships. We will focus on safety principles that are there to guide us and we will learn more about how they can be applied to our work as improvisers. We will also learn how to express and respect consent and boundaries, both ours and those of our scene partners, to help us create scenes that are safe and credible.
12 HOURS
24 & 25
09:30 - 12:30
14:00 - 17:00
LVL
C
SIMONE ELLUL
MT
Two sides of the same coin: Opposition is a powerful thing. It can be a tool. It can be a method of creation. It can be a theme. It can be a format. Opposition makes you see and fill the balance. In this workshop we will get deep in opposition not only to build different characters and relationships, but also different kinds of scenes, spaces, styles, transitions, speeds: dark and light, strong and weak, beauty and nasty, yin and yang, yes and no: finding ourselves being the “and”, being something together, being the same where we are different.
6 HOURS
23
09:30 - 12:30
14:00 - 17:00
LVL
A
LUANA PROENÇA
![Charlotte Gittins (photo © Kate Scott)[100]_edited.jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/110292_e7c3966944114ea2ade00bcc157b103e~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_207,h_203,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/Charlotte%20Gittins%20(photo%20%C2%A9%20Kate%20Scott)%5B100%5D_edited.jpg)
Corsets, candlelight and emotional chaos. From Jane Austen to Bridgerton, we love stories full of longing looks, social rules and dramatic tension. In this workshop, we explore how to bring those heightened worlds to the improv stage while staying playful, truthful and alive. It can be easy to feel trapped by literary genres, so we’ll explore how to get out of our own heads, make exciting narrative decisions and create messy, funny, flesh-and-blood characters everyone cares about. Using period drama as inspiration rather than a limitation, we’ll create scenes that feel rich, cinematic and deeply human. The way characters move, breathe and interact with the spaces around them can tell us everything we need to know about power, chemistry and the complex worlds they inhabit. Through physicality, status and spatial relationships, we’ll build charged, emotional scenes full of love, conflict and intrigue. Expect bold characters, big feelings and delicious drama — all improvised in the moment.
MT
CHARLOTTE GITTINS
This workshop focuses on objects and details to create new images and new imaginaries. It's a cinematographic and photographic investigation of object theatre to expand the imagination of improvised performance. What worlds can emerge from an image in space, and what is our relationship with it? Improvisation generally starts with an empty stage and invisible objects worked with pantomime.
In this workshop, we work from the relationship with a concrete image of an object to expand our improvisation into a technical hybridity with film and photography to rethink our scenic improvisation.
LUANA PROENÇA
Silent present - the art of non verbal improvisation. Before words, there was the body. Non-verbal communication is the most direct and truthful form of expression. In non-verbal improvisation, the performer cannot rely on dialogue or verbal explanation. Everything is built through presence, intention, rhythm, and physical clarity. This workshop invites participants to reconnect with the body as a primary storytelling tool. Through silence and movement, performers explore how emotions, relationships, and narratives can emerge without spoken language. Silence is not emptiness. It is a space of heightened attention — where the body listens, reacts, and creates meaning. Participants will explore: Physical presence and body awareness; Clarity of gesture and intention; Use of space and imaginary environments; Emotional expression without words; Rhythm, timing, and physical storytelling; Non-verbal interaction in solo, duo, and group improvisations. The workshop draws inspiration from pantomime, physical theatre, and improvisation, offering practical tools applicable to stage performance, improvisation formats, and visual theatre.
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DAN CODREANU
Playing with vocal techniques, body tensions and characters' inner stories, this is a chance for improvisers to escape their comfort zones and create characters radically different from themselves.
Starting with monologues and moving into scenes, we explore ways of escaping our own self-imposed limits and building complex, funny, messed-up humans with lives all of their own.
6 HOURS
25
09:30 - 12:30
14:00 - 17:00
LVL
A
CHARLOTTE GITTINS
MT
It is often said that “puppet theatre begins where the actor’s possibilities end.” Puppetry opens an infinite field of expression, especially through metaphor. In this world, anything can become a puppet: a forgotten object in a bag, something lying on a writer’s desk, or a childhood toy that still carries memory and emotion. If we are attentive enough, objects already have a life of their own. A sculptor once said that when looking at a piece of wood, they already see the artwork inside — their role is simply to bring it to light. The same applies to puppetry: the puppet already has its own life; our role is to help it speak. But what is the story being told? Ultimately, it is our own story, expressed through metaphor. Puppetry becomes a powerful tool for personal expression, imagination, and non-verbal storytelling, allowing performers to bypass realism and access deeper, more symbolic layers of meaning. This workshop explores the intersection between improvisation and puppetry, encouraging participants to discover character, emotion, and narrative through objects and animated forms.
DAN CODREANU
If we face improv as a theatrical language, we can question what we know that improv is and start to explore what it can be. This perspective amplifies the power of improvisation in our creation and the bridges of possibilities and process. For groups and solo work. Let's stage our ideas, finding structures and elements to translate our improvisation. We will work with Space as Dramaturgy; Tools for Show Dynamics; Exploring Concepts and Ideas; Structures and Protocols and Aesthetics, Style and Theater Languages.
LUANA PROENÇA
RESERVAR
Improv is storytelling, but which stories? Did you grow up with the western fairy tale Cinderella? Or eastern folklore like The Ox and The Kancil? Time to hear these stories from other parts of the world! You will become open to other cultures, learn to play even when you don’t know the references, and reflect that you might know more about your own cultural roots than you expect.
3 HORAS
22
09:30 - 12:30
LVL
B
60€
AREE WITOELAR
If we face improv as a theatrical language, we can question what we know that improv is and start to explore what it can be. This perspective amplifies the power of improvisation in our creation and the bridges of possibilities and process. For groups and solo work. Let's stage our ideas, finding structures and elements to translate our improvisation.
3 HORAS
22
14:00 - 17:00
LVL
B
60€
ELKE REID
dali dalliance - surrealist improv
Failure is a superpower! Inspired by cartoons and silent film, we celebrate the "Comic Body." We use Masks as a gateway tool to find precision and slowness, before transitioning to Cartoon physics and visual comedy. We learn to celebrate the "flop" and find the tenderness inside the monster. Use your body to bypass the brain: discover that the audience loves you most when you fail magnificently.
AURÉLIEN LOISEL