Sarah Jansen | Writer | Editor | Web Geek

Thanks to the folks at the BrizImprovFest and Impro Mafia I’ll be swanning around at the upcoming festival events trying to look all reporterly and important.

I’ll even have a dictaphone.

The fest will showcase the talent for inducing belly laughs that Brisbane’s improvisational theatre (AKA improv or impro) starlets have to offer. And I get to report on it all right here.

In a city where winter means a festival every weekend and most weekdays, It’s our first-ever festival to celebrate just improv.

Starting on Friday 22 June 2007 and speeding straight through the weekend to Sunday 24 June, events will be exploding across the Studio space at the Metro Arts Theatre, 109 Edward Street in the city.

More info:
www.brizimprovfest.com
www.brizimprov.com

contact@brizimprovfest.com

Media and publicity queries:
Call Natalie on 0418 728 425

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1. Ham, cheese and tomato is still the basis for a good sandwich.

2. There is such a thing as too much dijonaise.

3. A lot of the people who work in the city are grumpy.

4. In winter, Brisbane likes to try to move at a big city speed. It doesn’t quite get there.

5. Running my own website means I have complete editorial control over the content that gets published.

Friday afternoon, just hours before the first gig kicked off, BrizImprovFest HQ was a hive of activity as lights were positioned and soundtracks were checked.

Accents from around the globe flew around the Metro Arts Studio space as a whole crew of dedicated, passionate improvisers prepared to serve Brisbane up its first serving of festival fun.

There was an undercurrent of tension, however, as mingled among the group were members of both sides of the camp: people who say “impro” and those who prefer “improv”.

“’Impro’ is easier to say,” said Roadie Steve. “I just don’t like saying Vs.”

A profound point, but one that was swiftly rebuffed by NZ artist Steven Youngblood.

“’Impro’ just sounds wanky,” Youngblood asserted. “it’s harder to say because you have to cut the vowel off on its own.”

Performer Simon had more to add to the debate. “I say ‘improv’ more but I prefer ‘impro’. ‘Improv’ to me is American and whenever I say ‘improv’ I get flashes of fucking Drew Carey and American standups talking about themselves and defining what improv is.”

It looks like the jury is out on the terminology issue. although Roadie Steve implied that there would be some intense market research happening. “You’d have to speak to the management committee about that one, though,” he said.

The management committee was unavailable for comment yesterday.

More later. In the meantime, check out the program for tomorrow!

OK, so I was a little late last night. But they let me in anyway—yay!

I walked in on Gorilla Theatre doing their “Banana or Forfeit” game. It went like this:

# They had six or seven people playing

# Each one took a turn at directing a scene

# At the end of each scene the audience was asked whether we thought it was a “banana” (worthy of reward with a banana point) or a “forfeit” (not)

# Those awarded bananas by the audience got a banana sticker; those given forfeits had to a written instruction from choose from…
The Hat of Poetic Justice.
(That’s my name for it. I don’t know what the Gorillas call it.)

# At the end of the show (I think it was an hour) the player with the most banana stickers on them won

The Hat was definitely the funniest part. Like when one young New Zealander named Steven Youngblood directed a fairly dreadful scene. He got a well-deserved forfeit from the audience and the Hat told him to act all the parts in it. It gave me a warm glow in my tummy.

The Gorillas’ set was, in a nutshell, great theatre sports stuff. Entertaining, smart, hilarious. I ask nothing more from a theatre experience, improvised or not.

It was a tired yet buzzed group that took the stage on the final night of the BrizImprovFest last night. The group was Twisted Melon performing their long form improvised show Blank: the Musical.

The cast of seven (sidekicked by a young pianist whose name I didn’t catch) asked the audience to call out things that a musical could be about, and the one they settled on was…

Lightswitch! The Musical

The team had obviously performed this format before and jumped right into an overture that was harmonised and everything.

It started off a bit slow with fairly frequent moments of awkwardness and to begin with it was a little too obviously formulaic.

But after a few minutes the Twisted Melons pulled it together and the random threads of the story began to be woven together with great skill and hilarity.

They used the lightswitch stimulus in so many gorgeous metaphors for the characters’ lives, with lyrics like ‘there’s a blackout in my heart’, ‘switch on my mind’, and the best rhyme I’ve heard in ages: ‘ambassador/capacitor’.

It was classic musical stuff: the people looking for love who find each other, the perfect couple that goes through a crisis, and the struggling young artist who finds his muse.

And of course, all this was made even better when offset by the less classic archetypes of the deformed baby born without a spine and the martini-shaking dog, Mittens.

(It was less disturbing live than it seems written down.)

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Stay tuned for more post-fest articles, interviews and deconstructions.

One of the most intriguing and impressive elements of the fest was the music. The musicians were an integral part of many shows, contributing to the action, both following and leading the other performers.

One such muso is Dan Walmsley who plays with Melbourne impro group The Crew.

Trained as a classical pianist, Dan quit when he was 15 once he had reached grade 8 because the options for continuing down that path were decidedly narrow. “I didn’t want to go to uni and do music and I didn’t want to be a music teacher,” he said.

Meanwhile, he was busying himself writing and acting in sketch comedy shows at Monash University before getting into stand-up comedy.

Dan joined the Crew in around about 2002 as a performer of the non-musical variety.

“I did say to them ‘oh, you know, I can do piano too’,” he recalled of his early days. “But they didn’t really believe me.” That was until he jumped on a keyboard at the Kitten Club one night and bashed out a few tunes. The penny dropped and he became the troupe’s regular tunester.

These days, he provides the Crew with a soundtrack most weekends and meets up with members at random to do overseas shows.

“All the members of the Crew have stand-up careers as well, so sometimes a few of us will all happen to be at, say, the Edinburgh Fringe at the same time and we’ll throw together a late night show for the week.”

Oh the life of the international artist!

But artist’s life is not all fun and games as another of the festival musos, Brisbane pianist Tim Wotherspoon, attested.

For the talented musician studying jazz piano at QUT, the last minute gig playing this weekend was a godsend.

Tim wrote impressive on-the-spot scores for a few of the shows, including an interlude of the theme from Doctor Who, which drew hoots and cheers of excitement from the audience.

“That theme used to freak me out as a kid,” he said when asked how he knew it off the top of his head. “You probably noticed that I didn’t really get it at first, I kind of got it about half way through and that’s when everyone cheered.”

At the moment he’s working on an as yet untitled EP, which he says is jazz–pop–funk fusion. The album, Argo, is due out sometime next year.

Local muso Matt Hadgraft, who plays with festival sponsors Impro Mafia, got a great response from his instant rendering of Mozart to give one of the improvisors a clue in the game they were playing.

Unfortunately it didn’t help.

While Matt, an aspiring actor, plays impro regularly, he has supporting gigs teaching and writing radio copy.

He’s also a talented singer, having sung with the Brisbane Chamber Choir, Choir, Canticum, St Stephen's Cathedral Choir and the ACU Choir.

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Stay tuned for more post-fest articles, interviews and deconstructions over the next few days.