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Our Mission Statement

“To showcase the best of the world’s improv to Nottingham, and the best of Nottingham’s improv to the world.”

The local improv community - in Nottingham and The Midlands - is at the heart of what we do. We want to create an annual event which both serves as inspiration for the local community, and showcases the incredible improv talent that this area of the UK is lucky to have all year-round. We aim to provide all who attend the best possible experience while having a lasting impact on the local improv scene that is felt beyond the four days of the festival. 

RHIIF ‘22 was a great start to delivering on our mission, and before designing this year’s festival we surveyed the local community and those who attended from further afield to ask for their thoughts on how we can make our second festival even better. The results of that have informed what we will be looking for in our performers and workshop teachers.

What Are We Looking For?

• Bring What You Love
  One of the most inspiring things about last year’s festival was having teachers teaching the classes that they love the most. Sharing their personal improv obsessions presented in their own unique style was infectious. We want more of this in 2023 - we’d much rather you bring a class about something you feel deeply passionate about than the tried-and-tested class you think might be popular.

• Different Viewpoints
  We want to curate a line-up with a wealth of ideas to inspire and challenge us in different directions. We believe that the more influences we can put in the melting pot, the better. To that end, we are likely to weight places in favour of performers and teachers who have not worked in Nottingham before, in order to bring new ideas and perspectives to our community.
  
  We particularly encourage expressions of interest from teachers who are underrepresented in improv festival teaching.
  

• Correctly Filled-in, On Time Responses
  As mentioned above, we anticipate more expressions of interest than the opportunities we have available to offer. As such, submitting a response late or half filled in is likely to hurt your chances. If you have any questions about the application form please reach out as we’re happy to help with anything you want to ask.

What We Will Ask For, Specifically

As we’ve said before, we anticipate the number of expressions of interest to be greater than the number of opportunities. Therefore, our application form is designed to be brief to ensure we’re not taking too much of anyone’s time. Once you’ve thought through your ideas for workshops, the expression of interest should take around 10 mins of your time to submit. 

The application offers the opportunity to pitch up to two workshops, but you are also welcome to just submit one.

• Name / Contact Info
  

• Gender
  

• Name of Workshop 1
  

• Length of Workshop 1
  2hrs, 3hrs, One Day (5hrs), Two Day (2x 5hrs), Other.

• *Brief* description of Workshop 1
  Two to three sentences. This is a workshop description, not sales copy, so please include the key learning objective(s) for students and who the course is suitable for (beginners / intermediate / etc).

• Name of Workshop 2
  

• Length of Workshop 2
  2hrs, 3hrs, One Day (5hrs), Two Day (2x 5hrs), Other.

• *Brief* description of Workshop 2
  Two to three sentences. This is a workshop description, not sales copy, so please include the key learning objective(s) for students and who the course is suitable for (beginners / intermediate / etc).

• Do you want to be considered to coach an ensemble team?
  (Yes / No)

• *Brief* description of your teaching experience
  Four to five sentences, including how long you have been teaching, where you have taught, and a brief glimpse into your philosophy or style.

• Name of reference* for your teaching.
  Could be a person at a school you have taught at, a festival you have taught at, etc.
  

• Contact Email for Reference
  We will contact your reference before confirming your place.
  

• A Short Equal Opportunities Monitoring Question
  RHIIF believes that a greater diversity of voices makes improv a better place and we want to be able to foster that as best we can. To this end, we ask your help and co-operation to enable it to do this by filling in a couple of simple questions, however this is completely voluntary and leaving blank will not affect the chances of your application being successful.
  
  If you are in the position where you cannot provide a reference due to perhaps being a newer teacher, or working independently to a school, please still apply - we want to hear from you. We appreciate that improv infrastructure is very different city-to-city and country-to-country, and we don’t want applicants to be disadvantaged by this. We ask for references as it allows us to ensure we are curating the best and safest line-up for our students - to get this information without a reference would likely involve us having a more in-depth discussion with you one-on-one.
  

• If you also intend to apply for a performance slot, please let us know the shows name so we can link the applications.
  We will open show applications separately in a few weeks, but it’s good for us to be able to link our potential teachers to shows. 

As we curate our line-up, we may come back to you for more information about you, your workshops, or ask for further references. If successful, we will ask you to read and confirm to adhere to our code of conduct, as well as providing headshots and marketing copy. 

Opportunities Available

At the festival there will be two types of teaching opportunities available:

• Open Workshops
  These are workshops which go on sale to the general public, the theme of which is down to the teacher. You can pitch: 2hr, 3hr, One Day (5hr), or Two Day (10hr) workshops as part of this form. 
  
  At RHIIF we had three Open Workshop Teachers deliver nine workshops over the three day festival.

• Ensemble Coaching
  An ensemble of improvisers that have never played together before is assembled at the festival. They get one day’s coaching from an improv expert (you!) to help them to create a show bespoke for the festival.
  
  At RHIIF 2022, we had three Ensemble Teams taught by three Ensemble Coaches. 

While these are the two distinct types of opportunities we can offer at RHIIF, the festival team create, produce, and promote improv events through-out the year in cities around the world (from London to Sydney). By putting in an expression of interest to RHIIF, you are also putting yourselves on our radar for future events and festivals. Even if you are unsuccessful this time around, we hope there would be plenty more opportunities down the road. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and we wish you the best of luck with your submission.

If you have any questions that aren’t covered here, please drop us an email at robinhoodimprov@gmail.com.

Thanks a lot,
The RHIIF Team