London, 7th of July 2026

👋 Greetings, dear readers.

I can definitely feel the slow pace of summer. Another heatwave is striking London this week, so I’m trying to come to terms with it.

The other day, someone asked me for reading recommendations on applied improv for an upcoming corporate facilitation. They asked because they knew I work with applied improv, assuming that I operate in corporate settings. That is actually quite far from my reality.

I find myself frequently correcting that assumption. There are so many settings where improv can be applied beyond just greasing the gears of capitalism, even though I must admit I did my fair share of corporate improv back in Spain.

It’s because people tend to automatically link the concept of applied improv to the corporate world, it seems to draw many improv facilitators towards it. Rightfully so, to be honest, the pay tends to be good.

I’m NOT going to speak about improv applied to corporate, so let me forward you to Neil Curran for that, also you can listen to Dayna Gowan’s Improvly Speaking podcast, she brings a lot of guests tackling that side of applied improv.

So, there are many flavours of applied improv that I’ve done and I do. Some examples are…

• Playback Theatre, of course! It is applied improv in the sense that we don’t know what’s going to happen or what we are going to do. And it’s my main tool. Its purpose is to create or strengthen community bonds by bringing awareness to people's stories through their reenactment.

• Collective creation (AKA devising). This is another obvious use case. Many theatre companies use devising techniques to write pieces from improvised material focused on a specific topic. In fact, that was the exact focus of my postgraduate dissertation. 🤓

  

• Theatre in education. Every now and then, I run workshops in schools to help students cement their knowledge of a particular topic. These are mostly history topics, so we do a lot of activities where students improvise within a specific scenario to get a deeper insight into the historical situation.

• Team building and soft skills for immigrant teenagers. This is what is mostly done in corporate settings, but mapped into colleges where teenagers are learning a profession and to integrate in society, since most might be immigrants. This is one of the most rewarding uses I’ve practiced.

• Language learning. Improv games are ideal for practicing a new language. By designing sessions that scale from single words to full-fledged interactions, you can achieve surprisingly impactful results and feedback. I’ve been using this approach to help Spanish and Catalan learners.

• Artistic support for kids and teens with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). There are many companies that, when secured with council funding, run programs for young people to come together around theatre and art. In these settings, the use of improv is mostly tied to the one-on-one facilitator. Having worked on several of these projects, I can definitely say that improv is a powerful tool when you need to adapt to the ever-changing behaviors of young SEND artists.

• Performance training. This may lean a bit overlapping into corporate because role playing as customer to train sales people is usual. However, we can find this in medical settings and, in my case, social work training. After the pandemic, a few of the first gigs that I got in the UK was literally posing as the exam for social work students. I could tell that some of those students needed indeed a few improv classes.

These are just a few examples, but there is a plethora of uses under the applied improv umbrella. It’s just a shame that the capitalistic side is the most notorious.

So, next time someone tells you that they do applied improv, don’t assume and ask them about the setting! 😛

Stay hydrated, love to you all. 🫶

🎭 The Theatre bit

Back in May (in 2026 Nᵒ21) I spoke about the Carles Alberola’s play Regala'm esta nit (Give me tonight). Little did I know that it was a sequel of the play I read last week, Mandibula Afilada (Sharp Jawline) written almost 30 years ago.

To be honest, I didn’t realize it was a sequel until the third act when the patterns started to look familiar, breaking the rules of traditional theatre and bending the way the story is presented.

Alberola has a brilliant gift for writing seamless dialogue and staging situations that balance very well between lightness and grounded surrealism. His characters talk like ordinary people, making contemporary popular references yet the scenes move with poetic rhythm. Honestly, he makes writing plays look so easy. I wish I had that skill.

Again, too bad you are deprived of translation.

📆 What is coming up

• 🇬🇧 10th of July - Acaprov at Shoreditch Balls (London, UK). Stranded in the city with no holidays? So are we! Come and have musical fun with us. Get your tickets.

• 🇬🇧 14th of August - Acaprov at Shoreditch Balls (London, UK). August tends to be a void for those staying in the city, why not filling it with fun and music? Join us for a good time. Tickets here.

• 🇬🇧 11th of September - Acaprov at Shoreditch Balls (London, UK). For so many people, September is a time for another beginning. Kick off the academic year with a musical. Secure your sit.

• 🇲🇹 18th of September - Intro to Playback Theatre (Valletta, Malta). I´m honoured to be part of the facilitator roster attending the Improvizza! festival in Malta. I´m excited to introduce Playback Theatre to improvisers there. Tickets here.

📚 🎮 🎥 📺 The geeky dessert

I don’t go through visual novels as much as I’d like to. Recently I finished Coffee Talk, a visual novel with slight touch of coffee brewing mechanics.

We play as a barista in a Seattle coffee shop (you can’t get much more hipster than that). Day by day, we get to know our customers and the things they are dealing with. There’s not much we can do to impact their lives, but if you mess with their order, their mood might change, leading to a different outcome in their story arcs.

I forgot to mention that in this world, monsters and other mythical creatures actually exist, and it's our job to satisfy their caffeine cravings.

I really enjoyed it, so it’s a shame it sat in my backlog for so long. I bet I could’ve finished it earlier if I had played it on a more portable device. It’s available on every platform you can imagine—even on your phone. If you need something fun and cool for your commute, I highly recommend it.

Now onto the sequel…