Workshops

Unique comedy experiences for every audience.

Humour as a tool for resilience, connection and healing from racism.

Interactive sessions to enhance comedic skills and creativity & promote healing through laughter. Mona teaches classic impro comedy and runs tailored workshops — in English and Norwegian — helping participants cope with and heal from racism through humour. She is also developing a series of workshops for improvisers on how to portray diversity on stage.Watch this space.

Mona's applied theatre workshops are built on a simple but radical idea that humour i it is one of the most effective tools we have for surviving racism, processing it, and refusing to be diminished by it.

Rooted in impro comedy techniques and informed by over two decades of diversity counselling, academic research into humour and racism, and training with internationally recognised practitioners — including John Gebretatose of Good Camel Comedy Theatre and Ashawnti Sakina Ford of Blackout Impro and Oluwadamilola Apotieri-Abdulai of Access to Play, Nigeria — these sessions create a space that is simultaneously funny, safe and genuinely transformative.

Workshops are available in English and Norwegian.

All workshop photos, courtesy of Renaissance Foundation, London, UK.

COPING WITH RACISM THROUGH HUMOUR

An applied theatre workshop using impro and drama therapy-informed techniques as tools for processing and healing from experiences of racism. Drawing on Mona's counselling training, her academic and artistic research into humour and racism, and her extensive impro practice, these sessions offer a methodology that is distinctly her own — sitting in the same tradition as playback theatre and forum theatre, but rooted in a unique combination of comedic performance and therapeutic practice. Initially developed as part of artistic research - and in an effort to give back to marginalised communities. This is not a comedy class. It is a space where laughter becomes a tool for resilience, solidarity and healing — and where your experience of racism is taken seriously, even when we are laughing about it. Available for community organisations, educational institutions, healthcare providers, corporate diversity and inclusion programmes, and arts organisations. Delivered in English or Norwegian.

CLASSIC IMPRO COMEDY CLASSES

Foundation and intermediate impro classes teaching the core principles of improvisational comedy — listening, presence, spontaneity, and the art of making your scene partner look brilliant.

Rooted in the tradition of Keith Johnstone — one of the babas of impro — Viola Spolin — the mama — and iO Theatre Chicago. Plus one entirely informal but arguably more formative influence: an Egyptian upbringing, where the ability to make a room laugh is not considered a skill so much as a basic social requirement. Impro has been the national sport in Egypt since long before anyone wrote a book about it.

Classes are open to all levels, from complete beginners to experienced performers looking to sharpen their practice.

Delivered in English or Norwegian.

PERFORMING DIVERSITY — FOR IMPROVISERS

A series of workshops for impro practitioners exploring how to portray diversity on stage. Drawing on Mona's unique combination of performance experience, academic research into ethnocentrism and racism, and training in decolonizing impro and academic knowledge about "the other" — these workshops are what the impro community has been waiting for. Coming soon. Sign up below to be notified when dates are announced.

Delivered in English or Norwegian.

Testimonials

Write your text here...