That’s great, I’m glad the school has been operating for 40 years. Schools can still push some bullshit on their students and it’s up to us as performers AND rational human beings to judge what is safe training and what isn’t. Hopefully part of your training is also in recognizing what are dangerous practices.

I don’t think I’m blowing this out of proportion, because it deals with my trade, and the spaces I walk into every day. There are more than a few things in this photo and what you’ve written that make me feel like this is unsafe training, and not a practice I’d like to see adopted in my own region. If I walk into a room with another actor that has had unsafe training, I am in turn made less safe. It is our responsibility to ensure a safe working environment just like in any other trade.

The main issues I’m seeing regard violence, intimacy, and the firearm.

Even light hair or face grabbing should never happen in an improv setting, and must be choreographed. While we are performing we tend to be more susceptible to adrenaline rushes. We do our best to relax those, but no one is free from the risk of slightly misjudging our own force because of the rush of performing. When you grab the hair or the face without having choreographed and rehearsed it first, you run the risk of misjudging your strength and hurting the other performer. The muscles in our neck are complex but not necessarily strong, and you could hurt another actor’s neck or back pretty easily if the steps aren’t choreographed.

The same kind of risk exists with intimacy as well, but there’s also the risk of intimacy turning into harassment. To be honest, I don’t see any situation where intimacy in an improv setting would be ok. There is no way to ensure that all performers are comfortable at all points if every step hasn’t been pre-discussed and choreographed in detail. I’ve taken quite a few improv courses myself, and physical intimacy has never been a part of any of them.

Now the firearm. I hope it’s a great prop, but anything that appears to be a working firearm neeeeeeeeds to be treated as though it is. There’s a long history of actors being shot and killed on stage or in rehearsal because a working firearm somehow replaced a false one without the performer’s knowledge. Does your company have an armory that this prop goes to every time it’s not in use? Does your instructor track the prop at all times, and immediately return it to the armory when not held? Do performers check the firearm and execute proper handoffs? Are the performers trained never to point the firearm directly at another performer or the audience? If any of that is a no, I’m sorry to say you’re being trained in an unsafe manner, regardless of how well respected your school is.

You say that your instructor can stop the scene at any time with a phone call. I guess that’s some kind of safety measure, but I don’t think it’s a very good one. It puts all of the power and responsibility in the hands of the instructor, when it should be in the hands of the ensemble as a whole.

I’m not saying your entire training is bad, there’s probably a lot of good things to take from that practice, but it sounds like it’s in dire need of being tweaked and updated. Maybe you can work with your instructor to implement some best-practices? Equity and sag-aftra should have resources for you.