Improv is collaborative, but before Excused Absence was born, Founder and Director Kristin Henn searched for a way to create the sort of performance she wanted to do and see.

Here's her story:

Once upon a time, I had two little girls and a whole bunch of stories to tell.

The little girls liked my stories, but I wanted a bigger audience. So, I decided to teach a class for them and their friends that would let us make up stories together. It was called Move Your Tale, and it was good.

But once we started telling stories together, I wanted to tell stories to an even BIGGER audience. So I began telling them at libraries and schools and wherever else they’d have me. Meanwhile, the classes grew and the stories grew and I needed more space and more interesting ways to tell and better ways to teach.

It was about this time that I had a great stroke of good luck. Three minutes from my house, a little improv theater called ColdTowne opened up and began to create wonderful stuff. I knocked on their door hoping to rent the space for classes, but instead, I found the most perfect way to tell a story.

Move Your Tale soon morphed into improvised storytelling and the classes grew and the shows grew and it was more and more fun all of the time. We even became the official youth program for ColdTowne. Both my little girls were still listening to my stories and telling their own, but they weren’t so little anymore.

We decided to have an Improv Festival for kids and teens and we called it Excused Absence Comedy Fest. My no longer little girls were happy to be a part of this more sophisticated comedy endeavor.

In 2017, Move Your Tale turned ten years old. To mark its passage from little to big, and to honor the youth comedy goals of our now yearly festival, we rebranded the ColdTowne branch of our work Excused Absence Comedy for Youth. Move Your Tale remains our touring and applied improv company, bringing shows and classes to schools libraries, and community events.

Since our founding and into the present, we have toured hundreds of libraries and community centers throughout Texas and California, performing for kids and teens who are sometimes seeing live theatre for the first time. In addition to our performance-focused Improv classes and camps, we deliver onsite Applied Improv & Storytelling classes to students K - 12 at countless public and private schools and provide educators and administrators with training that allows them to implement the tools of Improv into their non-performance work. We produce and host the only annual all-ages comedy festival in Texas (and some years in the entire US).

We tell jokes. We tell stories. We laugh a lot.

It’s a very good thing.