Not just for laughs: Happy Valley Improv hosts workshops to help community members, students

In an upstairs room of the HUB-Robeson Center Monday night, 22 people stood in a circle, passing around an invisible blue ball of energy and yelling out seemingly nonsensical phrases at random.

The exercise was part of a career workshop presented by Happy Valley Improv, State College’s long-form improv community, and designed to get students out of their comfort zones and connect theater to job-finding skills.

Improv, short for improvisational theater, is a form of theater in which the plot, characters and dialogue are made up on the spot. Happy Valley Improv has shows on the first and third Thursday of the month at The State Theater or 3 Dots Downtown, with performances for both its newcomers and more experienced members.

The group started three years ago when four friends began practicing in the basement of a church. Since then, they have expanded in size and provided workshops for Penn State Launchbox, Penn State’s ESL Program, Susquehannah University’s Future Business Leaders of America, Shenandoah University Professional Faculty Development and more.

James Tierney, one of the co-founders and the business manager of Happy Valley Improv, said that rather than host a mock interview or networking event, the workshops’ unconventional approaches can help participants develop the underlying skills needed to succeed in real work environments.

Monday’s workshop, called “Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone: Networking and Interviewing,” was part of the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts Career Week. The hourlong interactive experience was complete with icebreakers, games and reflections.

One exercise involved being told to embody the word “anxiety” while walking. After 30 seconds, participants were told the word “confidence” and walked with that word in mind.

“We saw all 22 participants in here go from being anxious to being confident just because we told them to,” Tierney said. “So why can’t you just tell yourself, ‘Hey, I’m going to be confident going into this’?”

But Tierney said improv can help in more than one type of career — Happy Valley Improv has hosted both creativity workshops with the marketing departments of various corporations as well as anti-bias, anti-sexist and anti-racist training designed to facilitate important discussions.

Dallas Durant is the director of consumer insights at AccuWeather State College, where Happy Valley Improv gave a workshop called “Building a Creative Corporate Community Through Improv Theatre.” Its goal was to support a “creative, inclusive learning culture” at AccuWeather, she said in an email.

“We played games as a group that required us to tap into our imaginations, think without limitations, and engage with each other in a way that we can’t easily do in the office,” Durant said. “As an analytically-minded person, I thought the activities were fun, but a real challenge.”

In addition to his role with Happy Valley Improv, Tierney is an assistant teaching professor of economics at Penn State. He said improv has helped him with his own career.

“Teaching, connecting with students — improv helps me a ton,” Tierney said. “(Improv) is a completely internal process, it can help people do a ton of different things.”

Akash Gupta is completing his master’s degree at Penn State, and decided to attend its workshop to help him learn how to network in State College, since he said it is very different than the dynamic where he’s from.

“The (improv) session helped a lot with relaxing my mind when I speak to someone,” Gupta said. “If your mind is not relaxed when you speak to someone, you end up goofing up half the time.”

Ultimately, however, Tierney said the most valuable skill that can be learned from improv and applied to a career is the ability to put yourself out there.

“When it comes to interviewing or networking, a lot of times it’s just about being comfortable with being uncomfortable,” Tierney said. “So when you’re on stage doing improv or you’re doing improv classes with people you don’t know, you’re very vulnerable. You’re open, and you have to know how to be uncomfortable and be OK with it.”

More information on Happy Valley Improv can be found at https://www.happyvalleyimprov.com/.