Misha Glouberman has taught a lot of what he calls “unuseful classes.” He has been the host of the Trampoline Hall lecture series, where people have publicly spoken on subjects they know little about, and conducted a vocal improvisation performance for non-musicians at Nuit Blanche that was attended by over 1,000 participants. He also claims to be Canada’s foremost charades instructor and has developed a course called How To Be Very Good at Playing Charades.

His latest masterclass, Terrible Noises for Beautiful People, is a five-day group workshop at Dancemakers that includes aspects of theatre and game-playing with an emphasis on improvising with the voice. This “unuseful class” is open to anyone, so long as they are willing to make a lot of terrible and beautiful noises. “The interest in the voice is accidental,” Glouberman says. “I’m more interested in the process of people doing these things together and engaging in improvisation.”

What inspired you to develop this masterclass?
I'm interested in music. I'm interested in how people make choices together and how they interact. In theatre everybody takes turns talking, but in music you are all making sounds at once. You can have people all expressing themselves and listening at the same time, which is really exciting.

Seeing as improvisation is about spontaneity or performing without preparation, how do you teach someone to improvise?
People always say it is a paradox, but I don't think it is. You can learn it. It's a skill. A lot of it is about learning to find pleasure in different situations, learning to find pleasure in being surprised and not being in control. There's one approach to improvisation that happens in all disciplines, where people try to develop a bag of tricks they can draw on, so that they are prepared and they can do something impressive. That's sort of the opposite of what I'm interested in. The idea is to genuinely surprise yourself.

How do you teach people to hear sounds?
It's about listening in different kinds of ways and spending time attending to sounds that might normally be perceived as cacophonous. You'll have exercises where people do the simplest, most ridiculous and most silly things. In theory, there's nothing musically interesting, but it's actually very beautiful to listen to, if you are doing it and are inside of it.

Do you use legible words?
One of the things I like about music is the abstraction of it and I think once language comes in a huge amount of possibility gets taken away. The wonderful thing is, is that everyone is a virtuoso of the voice, even if they can't sing; everybody already has a hundred different things they can do with their voice. It's very easy for them to learn 500 more and it’s also different from person to person, so not only are they virtuosos but they are also individual stylists.

So the workshop must be quite an exhilarating experience for the participants?
Yeah, it really is. Some of it's very exhilarating, cacophonous, crazy and raucous but there are also parts of it that are very contemplative or sad. It's pretty intense and a lot of fun for people. It's startling to unlock these pleasures that you don't necessarily realize you have or want, and that's always weird for me. Like a lot of times at these classes, even for me having done this a million times, I think, why would anyone want to do this? And then once you get into it you remember it's the most fun and interesting and engaging thing in the world.

Are most of the participants from a performing arts background?
One of the things I'm really proud of is that my participants come from a broad range of backgrounds. So I intentionally program my classes that way. So with what I’m doing now I will typically get a few people with a strong musical interest. I'll get a few people who are interested in other arts, anything from dancers, to writers and actors. I get a surprising number of academics and I get regular people. My main target is regular people. What you get out of this should be what you get out of any art experience. I want to give people an experience, as opposed to giving them the skills required to give someone else an experience.