Over an extended weekend (Nov 17-21) The Street
Theatre hosted Impro ACT’s Improvention 2017, five days of workshops and
performances.
There
are plenty of improvised theatre traditions in the world and ‘impro’ is more
than an acting exercise.
A brief visit on Saturday
night was driven by a curiosity about the work of visiting director Charlotte
Gittins.
Gittins is part of a company
in the UK that does Jane Austen improvisations and here’s a sample.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG2bHujctXc&t=24s
Saturday
night was only a small part of a five day programme of workshops and
performances. The first half channelled Homer, myths and legends and the
rhetoric of dozens of fantasy novels and films accompanied by percussionist
Gary France who gave such energy and atmosphere to the far more serious reading
of the Iliad a few months ago. It is hard to sustain the epic. I sometimes
think we have lost the knack. But there were strong moments and heroes and villains
and a great use of a mysteriously lit upstage platform behind a scrim.
The
second half had Gittins on a mike acting as a narrator for an Austenish tale of
balls, unrequited love and servants who know their place (but have a much more
interesting life below stairs than suspected.) She shaped the performers’ work
with good humoured and challenging suggestions for what the next scene should
be.
Part
of the interest was in watching the performers attempt to follow a style and
sustain it and keep it convincing. And that applied to the epic as well as the
Austen.
Part
drama workshop, part theatre sports and part of a much bigger tradition than
the one that depends on writing the words down.
And
even when the words are written down we still don’t know exactly how Shakespeare
did ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’.
