BCAF 2016 Workshop: Improv to Sketch Intensive with Kevin McDonald

Workshop Description:

Join Kevin McDonald of the Kids in the Hall for a one day, 8-hour intensive workshop to improve your acting and writing skills. Students will learn how to write comedy through performance, and use improv as a writing tool.

The workshop will warm up with improv games to help sharpen storytelling skills, and students will eventually create their own improvised scenes in small groups. They will then work their improvised scenes into full comedy sketches. Kevin will go from group to group, helping with the "writing" of each scene. Each group will then have the opportunity to present their sketch.

After getting notes, and revising and presenting the scenes again, the workshop will end with the groups finalizing their scenes and performing them at a show that night!

This workshop will improve your acting and writing skills, and teach you how both skills work together to create great scenes and hilarious comedy. And if prompted, Kevin will tell lots of stories about the Kids in the Hall.

Instructor Bio:

Kevin McDonald is a Canadian comedian, actor and voice artist. He is known as a member of The Kids in the Hall, the voice of Pleakley in the Lilo & Stitch series, Waffle in Catscratch, and the Almighty Tallest Purple in Invader Zim.

McDonald founded The Kids in the Hall with his friend Dave Foley. They met in Toronto at the Second City Training Center, and the two wrote and performed in sketches together more than any other pair in the group. In the troupe’s TV show and stage shows, he portrays several popular recurring characters, such as the King of Empty Promises, Sir Simon Milligan, and Jerry Sizzler. Still, it’s a frequent running gag that McDonald is the least popular member and always struggling not to get kicked out.

Since The Kids in the Hall’s end in 1994, he’s played many roles in movies like Boy Meets Girl, Agent Pleakley in the Lilo & Stitch series, and Harry Potter in Epic Movie. On TV, he has appeared on The Martin Short Show, Ellen (as a radio personality), That ’70s Show (as a confused young cleric, Pastor Dave), Seinfeld, Friends, NewsRadio (on which Foley starred), MADtv, Arrested Development, and Corner Gas. McDonald has also done voice work for various animated series, including Invader Zim (in which he did the voice for Almighty Tallest Purple), The Angry Beavers, Catscratch (in which he voiced Waffle), and Clerks: The Animated Series. He also played an imaginary friend named Ivan in the Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends episode Sight For Sore Eyes, and appeared in the music video for “Roses” by Outkast.

In 2006, McDonald hosted a CBC Television special, featuring several of Canada’s best-known sketch comedy troupes. “Sketch with Kevin McDonald” won a Canadian Comedy Award (Best Taped Live Performance – The Minnesota Wrecking Crew), with The Imponderables nominated for the same award.

He was recently in Montreal as a part of the Just for Laughs Festival with the reunion of The Kids in the Hall, and also with his show “Hammy and the Kids” with Craig Northey, based on his two dysfunctional families, his father (“Hammy”) and The Kids in the Hall.