Austin Improv

I'm trying to do some research on the growth of improv in the US in the past 10-20 years. I feel like the number of improv theaters, festivals, schools, troupes, shows, and performers has massively expanded, but I'm having a hard time finding hard numbers or complete lists of how many of these exist (currently or 10-20 years ago) Even if I could just hone in on a few key cities, that would be really useful.

These lists seem so incomplete that they're almost worthless, statistically:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_im ... ted_States
http://fuzzyco.com/improv/groups-usa.html

Does anyone know of a current/complete list of improv theaters, festivals, schools, troupes, shows, or performers either nationally or for a city or region?

Anyone have stats on the growth of improv?

And more specifically, can anyone can prove that Austin has the most improv per capita in the US?

smerlin wrote:And more specifically, can anyone can prove that Austin has the most improv per capita in the US?

Ooh - I like where you're going with this.

smerlin wrote:And more specifically, can anyone can prove that Austin has the most improv per capita in the US?

Perhaps you mean 'disprove'...

I think to find the actual number of houses in America, or city by city, you might be able to find organizations under the US labor statistics. there is a breakdown, under the creative class designation, of employers and venues. From there you could probably find out more information on the theatres.

You could also look at NEA research, which is right on their website, and there should be a paper on Sketch/Improv/Comedy houses.

There are other statistics companies and organizations, but I imagine they do broad arts investigations. However, I doubt anyone has combined improv analysis into one project, just because profitability in the improv market alone is small. Most of the time it is associated with other houses/programs/venues and so you'd have to call each individual variable to find finite statistics.

That woul be my plan of action. Hope it helps.

Thanks Pierce. I'll look in to it.

I'm currently looking at registering a couple of new improv related domains, and some of the actual websites that are taken are parked with interesting choices of improv links (that it thinks are the most important somehow) and some of godaddy's suggestions for other names to use are interesting (in one it added chicago, hollywood, miami, or baltimore as possible prefixes).

I'm not sure what kind of larger search you could do on this-domain-is-registered and find out, and that might require a lot of random clicking and data compilation, but I bet if you could do that there's some interesting stats on how many troupes in cities have their own websites and such... or facebook pages...

Cool idea, Kristin.

Spammer aside, I've grown curious about student retention rates at individual theaters in the United States.


---edit-- ( thanks for removing the spam! mods rule!)

Yes, it's good to know how many people tried improv, but what about the percentage of folks who *stick it through* at individual theaters? For me, this statistic stands out above all others.


How'd you go about measuring retention rates? How many students end up in troupes? How many students graduate? What would be criteria that interest you regarding student retention?

Fuzzy from Chicago has been keeping track of improv groups, festivals, and the like at http://fuzzyco.com.

He can probably talk to you about the rate at which he's had to add groups and festivals to his ongoing lists.

Thanks for the link, Jose!

I didn't realize that list was so up to date.

Doesn't have to do with theatre, but this site might help your search.

http://www.city-data.com/