Bring Bill Chott and The Improv Trick to your City.
Special Workshops, Festivals, and more!

Exciting workshops for experienced improvisers, and beginning workshops for brand new audiences help your school or festival attract new improvisers! Add to your community with well-publicized workshops with Bill Chott, voted Best Improv Coach - INNY Awards. Raising funds to host a festival? Bring in a well-respected teacher/performer who will help turn a weekend into an experience of workshops, shows and a professionally hosted jam to bring more improvisers together. Audiences recognize Bill!
Bill Chott (The Ringer/Dana Carvey Show) knows that experienced improvisers need room to grow by trying challenging new exercises, attention to good scene work, and an approach that makes improv feel fun and NEW again! He started his studies in 1992 in a class with Stephen Colbert at The Second City, then performed in the mainstage revue Pinata Full of Bees. When he, Colbert and Steve Carrell were hired to work on The Dana Carvey Show in NY, he performed and coached at the start-up of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. He moved west just as iO West was beginning The Armando Show in L.A. He perfomed and coached there also for five years. Since then, he has performed around the world and taught festival workshops, corporations and even Special Olympics. Fans know him from 4 years on Disney's Wizards of Waverly Place, The top 10 Farrelly Bros. movie The Ringer, The Dana Carvey Show or his voiceover work on the Ambiguously Gay Duo and X Presidents on SNL. With one workshop or a weekend of exploration, you'll be bringing it all home.

Two Hour Workshops

WORK, WORK, WORKshop, 
You will work hard and get better. This workshop focuses on using object work in the creation of characters and advanced scene work. It is often skipped over in class, yet the first thing you notice about a great improviser.

Ever feel like you missed the day they gave out the secret to good improv scenes in class? You can catch up in two hours.
CHARACTER ZONE
You need to add more variety to your character work. Bill examines many paths to developing advanced characters.

 If you're doing a monoscene, you need an interesting character. Or if you're doing professional short form, you need MORE characters. You'll learn techniques that are rooted in the history of Commedia Dell'arte. Realistic characters, at last!
 SING IT
Bill will share with you the tricks and shortcuts to musical improv. It isn't just about singing. It's about using improv to add more flavor to your improv.  Rhythm, rhyme and harmony CAN be taught.

 Bill was a founding member of iO West's Opening NIght, then toured with Baby Wants Candy at the Edinburgh Fringe Fest. You'll learn in two hours what he had to learn the hard way. Feel free whenever the challenge arises, and dazzle audiences! 
ABSTRACT IMPROV 
You've done every kind of scene there is. You're sick of talking heads! This workshop involves a more poetic approach to improv including silent scenes, movement, rhyming, deconstructed scenes and the unexpected use of a narrator, or even expression without story.

Physical communication and other unexpected challenges move your work back out of the comfort zone. Risk after risk will produce killer results as a team!

Intensives - Tailored to your needs

Improv Styles Intensive
What kinds of scenes do you like to do? Register now and get ready to expand your answer to that question. Are all of your scenes just two people talking in an office? What if you could at least set it in the 1940's, or your favorite movie genre. Then think about moving your scene to fantastic new settings: boxcars, castles, wharves, caverns. 

Break the scene work limits, and really express yourself. Learn how to help your team set itself apart and create something new!
Intro to Longform Intensive
You understand what Longform is, but you don't have the time to start from square one and devote all your time to whole program.

If you're experienced at scenework, you should be challenging yourself and seeing what's behind that curtain.

Learn the terminology you need to keep up, or learn a completely different approach to longform. 

Silent Work Intensive
You've done those scenes in a workshop, or maybe even a show. The scene starts, and thanks to your patience not a word is spoken. You communicate with movement and object/space work and the first minute of your scenes fly by in what seem to be an eternity. Then...somebody talks, and the magic is lost.

Create in an evironment where you can explore silence, avoid talking heads scenes
The Business of Acting
Learn how to market yourself as an actor, how to network efficiently, and how to leverage what you already know, and turn it into publicity and more paying work. Bill has been a professional actor, appearing in 4 seasons of Disney's Wizards of Waverly Place, voicing cartoons on Saturday Night Live and as a cast member on the cult hit The Dana Carvey Show. He was one of the stars of The Ringer, and he'll share his method for turning his passion into his business.