Six to see at festival
1. Really really smart people creating whole musicals
plays by Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King, or undiscovered works by Shakespeare: The Society of Strange, a new show by School of Night whiz kids Adam Meggido and Andrew Pugsley from London, England, joined by Edmonton improv star Mark Meer.
2. Norwegians:
Det Andre Teatret (The Other Theatre), who run one of the busiest all-improv/all-thetime theatres in Europe, have been known to perform in people’s living rooms in Oslo. In Forever Never Always Here you can find them in unexpected Edmonton places like Avenue Appliance (10041 82nd Ave.), the Burrow (Central LRT station), and Blush Lane organic market (8135 102nd St.). They’ll be summoning ghosts or revealing the collective memory of the room in this collaboration with Rapid Fire and the Found Festival. Their showcase production is When They Met, an improvised romantic comedy à la Woody Allen.
3. A live podcast:
In Stop Podcasting Yourself, a three-time Canadian Comedy Award-winning live weekly podcast that’s part of the Maximum-Fun network, Vancouver’s Dave Shumka and Graham Clark interview stand-ups, improvisers and comedians of every stripe.
4. Global Impro:
a Buenos Aires improv duo with a specialty in physical comedy and clowning. “I had a blast with them!” says Shostak, who met them at a festival in Bogota, Colombia. “One speaks perfect English; one speaks zero English.” Their showcase Un Dia Cualquiera (Any Given Day) is cued by audience member’s birthday, and triggers a series of scenes from history.
5. Steife Brise:
This 15-member collective from Hamburg has been known to rent a boat to do a zombie show. In Break, their Improvaganza showcase, Torsten Voller and Thorsten Brand spin stories of the past from the setup of two old friends revisiting memories. Steife Brise translates as “stiff breeze,” but apparently that can be misconstrued in German.
6. Folk Lordz:
Rapid Fire’s Todd Houseman and Ben Gorodetsky, of Cree and Russian extraction respectively, are here to answer the age-old question: What do you get when you mix an indigenous origin story with a Chekhov spinoff? In this improv quest they are assisted by a favoured audience member, and a genre chosen by the crowd.