Improvisation traces its origins to the dark ages, when villagers had to react quickly to accusations of witchcraft and implications they'd invented the Internet. Learn a historic, fast-paced art with today's Groupon: for $19, you get an Introduction to Improvisation workshop (a $39 value) on a Saturday or Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and a T-shirt (a $20 value) at Instant Theatre Company (a $59 total value, including HST). Click here for Instant Theatre's available workshop dates.

Instant Theatre's artistic director Alistair Cook extracts on-the-spot emotion from participants during team exercises, storytelling, and scene work to encourage unleashing creativity in both stage performances and in daily life. Up to 15 students attend each intro workshop at the Instant Shop studio, flexing short-form biceps and long-form obliques in the basics of play, spontaneity, character, and story. During warm-ups, Alistair introduces concepts including acceptance and justification before a 45-minute midday lunch break re-energizes brain pistons. Performance games cap off the lesson, in which pupils craft 30-second scene starts, their first narrated scenes, and defend dissertations on the benefits of miming. After each workshop, students receive one of the company's graphic T-shirts in a hand-drawn aesthetic.

While performance experience is preferred, students may arrive to class without any prior improvisation skills. Cook and his company employ both long and short form methods using a blend of structured, freestyle, and underwater stage-combat techniques, also drawing from experience building national improv-centric instructional programs.