Dec. 19—It has been quite the year for Santa Fe Improv.
The nonprofit organization launched community based programs for New Mexico school students and educators under the leadership of its executive director Eric Weiss.
“Improv4Schools started this fall, in 2024, so that was our pilot semester,” he said. “It came out of a need that I saw in the state of New Mexico, and specifically in Santa Fe, for kids to be able to communicate more effectively, to have confidence in themselves, to be engaged in their community.
“And it’s something that I saw that would happen to the adults that would come take classes at Santa Fe Improv, and my feeling was that if we can just replicate the transformative process that goes along with the adult experience, and we can do that in the schools, then we should try.”
Due to theater budgets being slashed in the state, children do not have access to the tools that will help them succeed socially and emotionally, Weiss said.
“There’s been attempts to address social, emotional learning in a way that I think is not effective,” he continued. “Oftentimes, it deals with kids getting in front of a computer and learning something from a module. This is something we can actually do in the classroom, live with them, that makes them look up from their phones and engage with the world around them. And I think that’s sort of why we started it.”
Santa Fe Improv was founded in 2009, and became a nonprofit organization in 2019, dedicated to bringing improv to adults and teens in New Mexico.
“We’ve successfully been running adult classes for several years now, but this initiative is our attempt to really bring the benefits of what we know the benefits of improv are to our community, free of charge, to the schools and the students,” said Lucy River, managing director at Santa Fe Improv. “It’s been successful this semester. So we’re going to expand next spring. We’re excited about it and it’s a lot of fun.”
The nonprofit is funded through grants and individual donors. Its largest donor is the city of Santa Fe’s Office of Economic Development. Fees for adult classes also help cover a lot of the overhead, River said.
“The balance of our community work is through donations from our students, from our show goers,” she added. “We have performances every week.”
Improv4Schools currently serves Capital High School, Mandela International Magnet School, and the Academy of Technology and the Classics in Santa Fe. Capital High School is comprised of a large body of students who are native Spanish speakers. Capital’s improv class is taught primarily in Spanish and translated through Spanish-speaking sponsor teachers at the high school.
“It wasn’t necessarily our plan to develop bilingual programming, but I think in the improv spirit, we were like, ‘Oh, let’s see if we can do it,’ ” Weiss said. “And then the Mandela and the ATC kids, those classes are in English. But, the program varies too, depending on what the schools need. Is it a 50-minute period, or, for instance, Mandela has 90-minute periods, so we’ll teach for 90 minutes in those classrooms. We try to customize it to what the teacher thinks they need and what the school would allow for. We try to be flexible, so it can be as many places as possible.”
The Student Teams Improv Show + Jam will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 20, at Santa Fe Improv. Two student comedy improv teams will perform, followed with an intermission with free pizza and beverages. After the intermission, a hosted improv jam will take place and audience members can choose to be part of it. Tickets for the event are $10, plus fees. The next day, Sibling Rivalry, a team in residence will put on their final show of their residency at Santa Fe Improv at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 21.
Santa Fe Improv hopes to expand Improv4Schools to Albuquerque and throughout the state, including rural and Indigenous communities.
“Our idea is that this actually becomes a statewide program and that Santa Fe is kind of just the start of it,” Weiss said. “I would like to start developing stuff in Albuquerque and we’d love to see it scale, because I think it’s something that a lot of different cities would benefit from.”