Last month TNM debuted a new super fun project – comedic tours of the beautiful New Orleans Museum of Art as docents. It was crazy fun, too!  This month NOMA has asked us to be a part of the programming for their 100th birthday party!  We will be giving tours at 6:00p and 10:00p Friday, December 16th. Clicky clicky to see the full schedule of events.

This event is FREE and open to the public.

Like, spend an evening at the lovely NOMA!  Tonight TNM NOLA invades New Orleans Museum of Art to launch the first of our new monthly series of art/comedy tours.  We will host two twenty-minute tours at 6:00p and 8:00p acting as docents leading groups with TNM comedians.  $10.  Drinks and music are totally happening.

Tom Thibodeau — @ImprovWins I iz happier ‘cuz of it

Kate Adair– Being a part of TNM creates the same opposite-of-lonely, there’s-flickering-hope feeling I have watching X-Men movies. So though the list of things I am thankful for about TNM is longer than I can list, I am particularly thankful to be surrounded by the sexy, uncanny talent of kind and intelligent people who not only know how to play hard, but how to play great.

Clifton Hall — @ImprovWins thankful for improv because of the friends I’ve made and amazing people I’ve met because of it. Also makes me feel good about me

Mike Spara –I’m thankful that TNM has provided a space for artists to come together and celebrate their craft and each other in equal measure.  It has given us a community of support to pursue individual endeavors, collaborate on larger goals, and welcome others into a badass, beautiful, intelligent, loving creation.  It is a platform, the best of incentives and excuses, for us to love what we do and one another.  I love you all for being a part of this.  You are eternity and the mirror.

This life thing is hard.

I don’t know what age that sunk in for you, but for me I knew pretty early on that being alive is hard and that it wasn’t going to ever not be.
But ideas follow each other like dominos falling, and right after that initial realization came a second realization about what would make life beautiful and worth it: We don’t get through this alone.
We’re all in a struggle to love ourselves, to care for each other as best we can, and funnel our energies into making something great. Not famous or successful, but great by virtue of these creative endeavors fitting us well, consoling us, and offering joy to others.

So that’s what I always wanted. Some way to be a part of the wonderful thing.

In school, that is what easily captured my attention; the idea of a time or a place where people worked together to do something joyful and make something with a voice. I studied all kinds of movements- Dada, Lo-fi, Franciscans, Feminists, The Velvet Revolution, Fluxus, Afrocentrism.

It was tempting to wish that I’d been born at some other time or place. I wanted to party with Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven!
Any time I fit in with a group of friends I would yearn for us to all abandon everything else and just create a movement together. In high school my friends and I spent hours planning our commune. Yeah, I went to a weird high school. I was a bit crushed when it became obvious everyone would be moving away after graduation and exploring college and jobs instead of us becoming a creative force as a group. By the time I was in graduate school I was an expert on just how cool the moments in the past were, when groups of artists banded together to live differently, and how distant I was from that kind of community. I began to despair of ever having anything like that in my life. I could live creatively, I could throw some eccentric parties, and I could build a life with my partner – but I had no idea how to find that magical place where the next creative desire was being met, the community of freedom and creation.
I suppose, blog-reader, you might expect me to now proclaim “And then I found Improv!” but it wasn’t that simple. I did go looking for longform improv, and I found it. And I enjoyed myself. I liked doing scenes and I liked meeting funny people. However, that was about all that was going on where I started doing improv; folks having fun and competing to be funny. It wasn’t until nearly a year later when TNM was founded that something about the way I was involved with improv became “movement-like.”

What are the qualities of a movement?
Movements aspire. They are made of people who believe in change and have a deep desire to live or create differently. They are enamored of the present. They value the people within them and empower those people. Movements are unified. A movement can articulate why the people within it are thrilled to be part of it, what they yearn for as a group, and their principals: a movement is comprised of people who are not motivated by self-gratification or personal status. Movements take themselves a bit seriously. Even when they are forcefully absurd and fixated on humor, subversion, tearing down all the idols, movements have some fervor behind them. Movements belong to people. I know that I am defining the word “movement” in such a way that benevolent social and artistic movements are included while other violent movements (Nazis & Futurists, for example) are excluded, that is a bit naïve but totally intentional. Anyway, a real movement is something that fully belongs to the people of which it is comprised. Unlike a cult, a movement is the product, property, and passion of its people. They are exalted and empowered to be more than they would be by themselves and they’re all honored as creators and leaders.
The New Movement was founded with those kinds of ideas in mind. It has expanded and grown as a result of strength of aspiration, a unified creative process and goals, fervor for our shared vision, and above all a constant communal dedication to the elevation and empowerment of all of our people. We are relentless about joy, completely uninterested in drama or status, and forceful in our hustle. Improv will change because of what we’re doing here. Life will change because of what we’re doing.
The New Movement welcomes you.

Shyla

We’ll be coming through New Orleans for a workshop (see description below!) then off to Atlanta’s Basement Theater & Charleston’s Improv-a-Thon at Theatre 99 this weekend.  Want to tell your friends in Atlanta or Charleston to come see us? Tell them to come and freak us out with some strange information that they shouldn’t know so that we can spend our long car rides trying to solve mysteries!

WORKSHOP in NOLA:
We all had so much fun in the last Date Workshop that we were all like “This should be it’s own show, right?”.  So, we’d like to run this workshop again not only to help folks work on their character and dynamic work, but also to start farming for a cast of The Date Show. Wanna be involved?!

Let’s Go On A Date w/ Tami Nelson Workshop -Thursday, Nov. 17th 7-9p @ The New Orleans Healing Center #250
We take the frame of Date Night and work on how to heighten character, dynamic, premise and elasticize our scenes to the max.

Workshop is $10, email nelson DOT tami AT gmail to save your spot.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, TNM is all about the love. In the final chapter of “Vintage Live Performances”, immerse yourself in a sea of love and dance during TNM’s open mic night, “Block Party” where anything goes. It just so happens that this time, what goes is the sweet, sweet love that squids have for musical theater and similes. Enjoy!

-Adam Artho

Last weekend The New Movement participated in Fun Fun Fun Fest, and it was all the things that we are.
There was the admirable amount of hustle: we were represented in 6 different shows on the comedy stage! The winsomeness, rawness, courage: this could be illustrated by innumerable images of our infinitely silly old-timey western costumes, Mikey DoDo slathered in whip cream and making sweet love to the air, or Christrew.biz pacing the Anarchy wrestling ring. The simple revelry and coolness: I will not lie to you, I love that we get to walk around with an “artist” wristband that, however superficially, affirms my suspicion that we’re all in the exact same genus as Slayer.
However, beyond all this, is what we most are, in the core of our being.

Something that is, to me, nearly ineffable and unmistakably divine.
If I try to express this moment, this quality of our community I fall short of words. Love. That is the only one I really have for it.
You see, when we gather there is a freeing of energy like a force of nature. We are so intent on joy, so passionate about each other, so willing to envelop the moment and risk our full selves in the support and celebration of each other.
It just gushes out and there are moments of playfulness that define the word itself.
In the fields of auditorium shores we exploded in dances, games, acrobatics, purelove.

Oh I get it, you think I’m being overly effusive. Here are some other, better spoken, friends on the topic —

Cris Skelton wrote: In short, The New Movement is one of the best things that’s ever happened on this Earth. I’m ecstatic and humbled to be a part of it. Thanks for this weekend, guys. I will remember it forever.

Rob Gagnon wrote: The people involved in The New Movement have changed my life, I’m happier, I’m more consistently funny in ways that make me proud, I’m performing more and more on bigger stages, depression stays out of the way more often, I don’t worry about being cool, I enjoy spending time with people as much as I enjoy spending time alone… so much of my pride and accomplishments stem from this group of people.

Lisa Friedrich wrote: this weekend served as a reminder of all things accomplished by truth, beauty, freedom and love. the support and love i’ve seen first to ninth hand is incredible.

Chadwick Smith wrote: Maybe even the best weekend ever. But those moments during the M83 show with The New Movement just doing our thing and getting everyone invovled was pure magic and love. UBH all around.

-Shyla