Continuing Styles
Continuing Styles is a scene game in which the performance style shifts at the host's command, moving through genres such as film noir, soap opera, Shakespeare, or horror. Performers must maintain the scene's established reality while instantly translating every element -- dialogue, physicality, relationships, and emotional stakes -- into the new style.
Structure
Setup
Two or more performers establish a scene with a location, relationship, and at least one established circumstance from an audience suggestion. The host prepares a list of performance styles or genres.
Style Calls
At any point, the host calls a new style. Performers immediately shift the entire scene into that register: their speech patterns, physical movement, emotional expression, and scene logic all transform to match the genre convention. The scene's underlying story continues; only the stylistic layer changes.
Style Bank
Common styles include: film noir, silent film, soap opera, Shakespeare, horror, musical, western, documentary, anime, nature documentary, Italian opera, children's television. The styles should be distinct enough in their conventions that each shift is clearly legible to the audience.
Conclusion
The host wraps when a sufficient number of styles have been cycled through or when a style produces a particularly strong comedic or dramatic culmination.
How to Teach It
Objectives
Continuing Styles targets stylistic range, the ability to maintain scene logic through external disruption, and the improvisers' knowledge of theatrical and cinematic genre conventions. It also trains the skill of translating the same underlying content into radically different forms.
How to Explain It
"You're playing a scene. The story keeps going no matter what. But when I call a style, everything changes: how you speak, how you move, how you feel. Same scene, different world."
Common Pitfalls
Performers often drop the scene's content when switching styles, starting fresh rather than continuing the established story. The game requires both: the new style and the existing scene. A second pitfall is performers who perform the style in isolation rather than translating the scene's specific content into the style; a soap opera version of a grocery store argument should feature the specific groceries and the specific argument, dramatized with soap opera conventions.
How to Perform It
Audience Intro
"Our performers are going to play a scene, but the style is going to change on my command. Every time I call a new genre, they switch instantly -- same story, completely different style. What should they be arguing about tonight?"
Cast Size
Two to four performers. The host manages style calls from outside the scene.
Staging
Standard scene space. Some styles may suggest specific spatial arrangements: film noir often plays in shadow and close angles, nature documentary requires a narrator posture, Shakespeare may require upstage-downstage formality.
Pacing
The game is strongest with a mix of brief fast styles and longer exploratory ones. Holding a style for thirty to forty-five seconds allows performers to find something genuinely within the genre before calling the next. Brief holds of ten to fifteen seconds create comic contrast when dropped into the middle of a developed moment.
Wrap Logic
End on a style that produces genuine convergence between the genre and the scene's emotional content. A horror or tragedy style applied to a mundane domestic scene at its most emotionally elevated moment often produces the strongest final image.
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How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Continuing Styles. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/games/continuing-styles
The Improv Archive. "Continuing Styles." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/games/continuing-styles.
The Improv Archive. "Continuing Styles." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/games/continuing-styles. Accessed March 17, 2026.
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