(Note: Video at the bottom!)
The past two weeks have been an amazing experience as Beijing Improv hosted the International Improv Festival. Troupes from all over the world, from Beijing to Shanghai, Tokyo to Istanbul, Xiamen to Hong Kong, Manila to Melbourne, all descended on Beijing to share their thoughts on improv, lead workshops, and put on shows that left everyone in the audience in stitches.
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The venue was the beautiful Penghao theatre, a non-profit theatre housed in a beautiful Beijing hutong alleyway. For me as a performer, some of my favorite time was spent backstage. The architecture has something of a Hogwarts-ish feel to me; one moment you’ll be in the break room, and opening the door leads to a narrow outside passageway with a spindly staircase leading up to roof. Last Saturday I locked my arms around my troupemates, forming a circle as the sun set over the horizon and the laughs of the show onstage beneath our feet rebounded through the alleyways. The connection with amazing actors in such a magical place is a feeling I will never forget.
Improv troupes from all over the world had come for the show, which meant that different cultures and comedy styles were one display from the get-go. Sitting in the lights booth and handling music, I gazed down at an Australian two-person show that interviewed a couple in the audience and then created a forty-minute Jane Austen-style rehashing of their courtship story. From the tiny seats in the front row of the jam-packed theatre, I saw SPIT Improv from Manila bring the house down with amazingly sophisticated improvised poetry chanted to the tune of the traditional Filipino poetry art of Balagtasan. IstanbulImpro from Turkey created a story through a conversation with an audience member, guided only by a deck of illustrated, tarot-like “Oh” cards used for psychotherapy.
It was an incredible journey, made all the more amazing by the fact that improv is probably the hobby that I have had for longer than any other. Nine years I’ve spent in theatres making up lines with no script. After spending the entirety of my adult life engaging in improv, to find so many groundbreakingly amazing performances in one week left me leaving the theatre every night feeling blessed to live in Beijing. This is a city that is like a butterfly leaving its chrysalis, wrapped tight for so long and now finally bursting free into the light and sound of the great world surrounding it.
Of course, my own troupe performed as well—the Bilingual Improv Group, or BIG. A packed house of hundreds of eager faces greeted us when we took the stage, and the energy drove itself through me when it came time to start the show. I strode up and down the stage, introducing our first game, and shouting at the top of my lungs, “今天给你们演一点双语的，大家说好不好？”(“We’re going to do some bilingual stuff for you today, what do you think?”)
We got a chance to go onstage and play our games, flow in and out of our mother tongues, and, in our musical numbers, sing in Chinese, English, or whatever language took our fancy. I achieved a personal goal of mine by singing several verses in Chinese. Unfortunately I had chosen a character with a raspy voice (any Kathy fans out there?) which made me harder to understand, but progress is never a straight road, and the audience had a great time.
I encourage everyone to take a look at the musical game we played, and listen to our attempt to sing an improvised, bilingual musical. Whether we sung well or not, the chance to be able to show improvisers from far and wide what Beijing Improv is up to was enough for me to call the last fortnight a success.
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/rs_n2qxwoQE/
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