Going to the movies during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival can almost be considered sacrilege but Impro Melbourne have found a way to let the people have their cake and eat it too with At The Movies. Completely made up on the spot, the show is created from the first five minutes of a B-grade movie that no one in the cast has seen until that moment.
Our "director" Sarah Kinsella provides us with the synopsis of two movies in which to choose from and based on an audience vote, the favourite is picked and we watch the opening scenes. In this instance, it is the 1985 film Desert Hearts, in which a New York professor divorces her husband and has
an affair with another woman in Reno, 1959.
With all the chatter about the upcoming Academy Awards, let's spare a thought for the films that could only ever dream of even being considered. During the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Impro Melbourne are doing just that with At The Movies. The group of highly skilled improvisers are bringing out their own Hollywood magic with audience members determining which B-grade movie they would like to see acted out. The catch is, the improvisers have never heard of the film and will only get to watch the first five minutes of it before taking over.
Director of At The Movies and ensemble member of Impro Melbourne Sarah Kinsella has previously performed this with Montreal Improv (who co-developed it with Vancouver’s Little Mountain Improv) and she is thrilled to be presenting it to Melbourne audiences. "I
played this format at the Montreal Improv Festival
and I had such a great time. It has a structure that is easy for the
Improviser to jump into playing and for the audience to understand," she says. "Explaining how improv works is often difficult, particularly if it's a complicated format but this one is incredibly simple and hilarious."
For
years now, the Earth has been a site of devastation with humans now forced to
live underground in various bunkers throughout the world. Cyprus Pod has been
home to a community of people for 15 years, and all is as normal as can be
until a Messenger arrives with a request for the pod to take on eight more
people. With her, she brings three of the eight who are given the task to
familiarise themselves with Cyprus Pod and endear themselves to the residents.
With limited rations and space, the survivors must decide if they will allow
these eight people to stay or turn them away. So begins Never Ending Night, an immersive theatre show presented by Libby
Brockman and Russell Sims.
In
this show, audience members are permitted to explore the pod and observe and
listen to the various conversations happening between the residents, the
Messenger and the Messenger’s guests. The nature of an immersive show such as
this is that everyone will have a different experience depending on who they
follow but the conclusion should provide enough information to put all the
pieces of the puzzle together even if they have missed certain scenes. In this
instance, I chose to shadow one of the messenger’s guests who tries to charm
and manipulate his way into the pod. While initially an interesting character,
his scenes and dialogue began to get slightly repetitive with his constant
advances towards his female counterpart and in his belief that a place should
be made for him because he is young, strong and fertile.
Fringe festivals are a time for artists to present new work and ideas and be daring in the theatre that they make. But it also gives a chance for audiences to experience innovative theatre and to step outside of their comfort zone as a passive audience member. Presented by Libby Brockman and Russell Sims as part of this year's Melbourne Fringe Festival, Never Ending Night is an immersive experience in which each audience member determines the journey that they will take.
Performed inside the Collingwood Underground Carpark, audiences enter Cyprus Pod, which has been home to a small community of survivors for 15 years. However, when 8 more newcomers arrive, the survivors must decide if they will accept them or turn them away. For this project, Brockman enlisted three writers, Bridgette Burton, Amelia
Newman and Keith Gow, to come on board and help create and guide the story.
"The collaborative process was really exciting, since all our writing
styles are quite different," Gow tells me. "I'm working with Bridgette, whose
work I have admired for years, and Amelia, who Bridgette has
been mentoring, and we established a general concept for the play and then
went off and wrote three different stories about life in this one pod.
The big question of the play is whether or not this pod of survivors
will allow others to come and live with them; they are so comfortable in
their lives, they are initially reticent to accept newcomers."
The Big HOO HAA! has been one of Melbourne' leading improv groups for eight years. In that time, the troupe has consistently sold out its regular weekly shows that are completely created from audience suggestions. For this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the group returns for their usual late night improvised tomfoolery that pits The Bones against The Hearts in the fiercest battle that improv has ever seen.
The show has its two three-player teams - Greg Lavell, Anna Renzenbrink and Jaron Why in one team and Elly Squire, Isabella Valette and Luke Ryan in another, on the evening I attended - battling it out to see who will be victorious in this improv death match. The
beauty of improv is that the audience and the improvisers never know what is going to transpire and it is simultaneously liberating and petrifying for both sides knowing that anything can happen on stage.
With all the chatter about the upcoming Academy Awards, let's spare a thought for the films that could only ever dream of even being considered. During the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Impro Melbourne are doing just that with At The Movies. The group of highly skilled improvisers are bringing out their own Hollywood magic with audience members determining which B-grade movie they would like to see acted out. The catch is, the improvisers have never heard of the film and will only get to watch the first five minutes of it before taking over.
For
years now, the Earth has been a site of devastation with humans now forced to
live underground in various bunkers throughout the world. Cyprus Pod has been
home to a community of people for 15 years, and all is as normal as can be
until a Messenger arrives with a request for the pod to take on eight more
people. With her, she brings three of the eight who are given the task to
familiarise themselves with Cyprus Pod and endear themselves to the residents.
With limited rations and space, the survivors must decide if they will allow
these eight people to stay or turn them away. So begins Never Ending Night, an immersive theatre show presented by Libby
Brockman and Russell Sims.