This week was full of friends, competitive improv and SINGING.
Starting with another edition of the wildly popular Make Friends With The Stage
Wed, 8th July.
Our low-on-stress, high-on-fun jam where we invite people to give improvising on stage a shot. This week’s focus was on honouring our first instincts and playfully dancing with our fight-or-flight response.
Instead of being overwhelmed by it or trying to ignore it completely. We invited folks to play some of our favourite games like the No-S game (where improvisers carry out a scene without ever saying the letter S, forcing them to come up with alternatives), “Questions Only” (where improvisers carry on a scene keeping the integrity of the story intact, while asking only questions) and Blind Freeze (where improvisers are frozen midway during a scene and those off-stage, copy their physical positions, replace them and start a completely different scene).
All of these games are designed to push your imagination and creativity within seemingly “restrictive” boxes.
But as we like to say, “you can’t really think outside the box, unless you’ve studied everything that’s possible within the box”. And turns out we are far from exhausting all the possibilities in the box.
If you want to befriend the stage, or at least start out as acquaintances, we are back with another edition of MFWTS regularly - checkout sign up here.
Next we had our special Musical episode of The Silliest Show Tonight
Fri, 10th July.
Our weekly Friday show transformed into the Silliest Musical tonight - we did all things music-in-improv.
Scenes that spontaneously converted into musicals, rap battles, silent scenes scored by music from our resident musician Rohit, Hoedowns, and an Irish Drinking Song.
If there’s anything Bollywood has taught us, it’s that sometimes our feelings and dreams are too big for regular spoken words - they burst out of us, and that’s why we have to sing. Some memorable scenes included two contractors who were in jail for misunderstanding filling potholes vs feeling potholes, a Moby Dick-like search for a shark-octopus, a Latin office romance, plumbers working on a leaky pipe in three different movie genres - silent, murder-mystery, and romance; and finally a cab driver sans license commiserating with a crochet-loving passenger about unsupportive parents.
If you’re reading this and wondering how this is even possible - we’ve got you covered.
Our Wednesday jam this week is an improvised music jam run by Rohit himself. Perfect for folks with no singing or improv experience, he'll teach you some fun improv song-making secrets and games! See you there!
Last up we had an amazing night with Theatresports
Sat, 11th July
Right, Saturday night. The great part about TheatreSports is that it raises more questions than it answers - most of our audience were attending the show out of curiosity.
So, what in the world is TheatreSports? It's competitive improv. It's teams of improvisers trying to outdo the other with the 'best scene'.
The 'best scene' is a wholly subjective metric, determined by the audience present - most relatable, or most entertaining, or most cohesive story, or even the most funny. Anything really. The audience get to pick which scene they liked the most, and that respective team gets the point.
This goes on for a few rounds till we have a winner. Winners take home bragging rights - we haven't made room in our expansive budget for a trophy, yet. (If anyone knows the good folks at the sponsors of award shows, please send them our way!)
This TheatreSports segment came down to the wire with Team Okay defeating Team Alright in the final rap battle tie-breaker.
In the second half of the show, we invited some brave audience members to join us on stage. We played The Couple Game with a couple, where we enacted their first Facebook Messenger interaction. The couple gets to 'ding' (positive) and 'beep' (negative) throughout the reenactment, and it's just a whole bunch of fun for the actors to discover the story as they act it out!
We closed the show by serenading an audience member with an improvised song - little icing on the cake for a well-rounded show.
We have fun. Come on Friday - we've got more audience games lined-up! We promise, we won't make you perform; you just have to play along from the comfort of your seats.