Remy Bertrand has spent well over 10,000 hours teaching and facilitating improvisation. Based in Monpazier, Dordogne, after 30 years in London, he has been working internationally since 2006 through Imprology, as well as in drama schools, universities, charities, and other organisations.
Over the years, he has directed large-scale improvised performances with Zootrophic, a multidisciplinary improvisation ensemble, and co-directed improvised short films with Peter Snowdon. For more than nine years in London, he also hosted Love Explosion, a monthly open-stage night where anyone could get up with a randomly chosen partner and improvise together for two minutes.
Alongside his public teaching, Remy has worked extensively with improvisation in professional training, including with senior GPs for the NHS, international banks, consultancy firms, utility companies, and the fashion industry. He remains open to challenging work, but left LinkedIn a few years ago and has never regretted it.
His training is ongoing and has included work with John Wright (Improvisation, Clown), Kate Hilder and Sten Rudstrom (Action Theatre), Mary Overlie (Six Viewpoints), Lee Simpson (Improvisation), Lucy Hopkins (Clown), and Punchdrunk (Immersive Theatre).
Remy often says that his greatest teachers have been his students. He is less interested in teaching people how to perform “correctly” than in creating the conditions for curiosity, courage and pleasure, to generate genuine encounters. For him, improvisation is not just a performance technique but a way of exploring how we respond to others, and how we stay available when we do not know what comes next.
Many of the people he has worked with have gone on to become performers, directors, teachers, and facilitators, while others have taken improvisation into psychotherapy, community work, corporate training, film, music, and social projects.
Marianne Hooper (Pixie) has a deep understanding of improvisation thanks to a strong commitment to the form and a neuro-atypical mind. She trained as an actor at East 15 and Clean Break Theatre Company, and as an improviser and impro teacher and trainer with Remy Bertrand at Imprology. Marianne has studied theoretical physics at UCL as well as Mindfulness, Reiki, Judo and numerous schools of psychotherapy. She is a regular performer with the ensemble improvisation company Zootrophic.
We welcome everyone to our improv classes except habitual bullies. A big part of our job is to allow sufficient time and space for things to run their course, promote compassion and forgiveness to self and others, and substitute the need to shine and achieve with the desire to explore and experiment.
Practicing improvisation might help you gain precious insight into how you relate to yourself and others. Improv might offer relief and a little distance between you and the clamours of the world. However, your facilitator is not a trained therapist. He or she is your guide in a forest of possibilities. You are in charge of your journey. We'd love to start a cult because that is where the real money is. In the meantime, we’d like to demystify as much of the improv process as possible and offer simplicity as the ultimate sophistication.
You don't need to drink or get high before an improv class. A good warm-up will have the same effect, only ten times better.
On an average day, we will teach you stuff you don't know or have forgotten. On a great day, we will together discover things none of us knew existed.
We advocate improvisation as an optimum level of unpreparedness, and this influences the way we teach. Our classes are always highly experimental, and our facilitators will, for the most part, improvise their facilitation. When you haven't prepared obsessively, you need to pay more attention to what is happening around you and use what is there collaboratively. This leads to magical moments that nobody could have anticipated. Improvisation can be scary. Our facilitators keep doing it, so we don't forget how it feels.
We have as few rules as possible. Rules are attempts to remedy past failures and offer no guarantee about the future. We've noticed that people who feel respected tend to be respectful without having to obey rules about it.
We run many free events, like classes, open door gatherings, and participative shows. If you spot a paying course that you can't afford because it would genuinely deprive you of the indispensable, please contact us at with:
- The course references;
- The amount of money you can afford to pay for this course;
- Any non-monetary ways you are offering to contribute.
We will do our best to accommodate you (money shouldn't decide everything), bearing in mind that we receive no other funding than what people pay for our classes.
