IMPROFEST workshop: Improvising Stories - Raffi Feghali (TR)

Improfest Extended (a part of Improfest 2025)

Improvising Stories.
How would you feel about starting a story without knowing where it will go? How awesome would it be to be surprised with where the story is going at the same time as your audience? Better yet, how incredible would it be if your audience help you come up with the story while you’re performing it?
In this workshop, we’ll open a lab in which we explore ways to bring the skills of improvisational theater to storytelling. We’ll also look into different ways in which we can bring the audience into the story. Whether you want to improvise stories, improve your story creating/writing, or give your storytelling performance a boost, this laboratory is a great starting point.

Bio:
Raffi Feghali
Raffi Feghali is a theater maker, peacebuilding consultant, and trainer working mostly in Europe, USA, and the Middle East while being based between Amsterdam and Beirut.
As a theater maker, he draws on the meeting point of improvisational theater (improv) and storytelling (especially that rooted in the “hakawati” tradition) in order to inspire his performing, writing, directing/devising, radio dramas, sound design, and music making. He is a member of the Lincoln Theater Center Directors Lab 2018.
In peacebuilding, he uses listening exercises, the “Do No Harm” framework, and systems thinking in order to facilitate conflict analyses with communities and eventually strategize interventions accordingly - especially using Reflecting on Peace Practice methodologies. When he’s on the field, Raffi uses arts and especially theater as an approach and tool for peacebuilding. In that context, he’s an avid practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed, Playback Theater, Masar Theater (which he has developed and is still developing), and expressive arts conflict transformation and peacebuilding methods and techniques in dialogues and workshops.
Raffi is a trainer of various improvisational theater topics as well as other theater skills. He coaches multiple stand-up comedians, storytellers, and actors on performance skills and provides guidance in the development of their shows.
He offers trainings in different skills relating to peacebuilding: conflict transformation (especially through the arts), systems conflict analysis, dialogue and negotiation skills, Theater of the Oppressed, Playback Theater, and other.
Feghali has been a guest lecturer at multiple universities on the various topics he practices and trains on (University of Amsterdam, University of California, Irvine, New York University Abu Dhabi, American University of Beirut, LCC International University).
In business contexts, Raffi gives different training and coaching sessions on multiple soft skills, using improvisational theater and storytelling, especially with the company Perform.

(Workshopen kommer att hållas på engelska då Improfest är en internationell improvisationsteater-festival med inbjudna improvisatörer från hela världen.)