Unlike other live performance mediums, such as dramatic plays, music recitals or ballet, comedy shows tend to place high value on spontaneity. Nowhere during MICF will this be more evident than with the longform improvisation work of Bear Attack. The Melbourne-based four-piece willfully enter the festival without the faintest idea what their 12 shows will include. However, one detail is guaranteed.
“There’s generally at least one bear attack every show,” says Daniel Pavatich. “It’s a funny joke between us, like how good can we make the show before we kill everyone in it and then start again?”
“We don’t know what scene it’s going to happen in,” adds Justin Porter. “We don’t know who’s going to do it. Any of us could do it at any given time in any scene.”
All four Bear Attack members are seasoned performers, who trained at Chicago’s Improv Olympic. Having banded together a few years ago, last year they completed sold-out runs at Austin’s Out of Bounds Comedy Festival and the Melbourne Fringe. You’d think such crowd-pleasing success would prompt Bear Attack to reenact previous plot lines during MICF. However, that’s simply not an attractive option.
“We’ve never done a scene that we did in a previous show, nor will we,” Porter says. “It’s just the general rule of improv: you don’t plan anything, you don’t reuse anything.”
“It’d be harder to remember what you did and do it again than it would be to just make up something new,” adds Adam Kangas.
“The thing that makes me laugh is when you don’t know what’s going to happen and there’s like this really high energy, like ‘Woah I don’t know what I’m doing,’” says Marcus Willis. “If you were repeating it, it’d just be like ‘I know where this is going,’ and it’d get boring.”
In line with this attitude, you can be sure that no material conceived during Bear Attack’s MICF run will be repeated. Coming up with novel plot lines and fresh comedic twists night-after-night sounds like a creatively exhausting exercise. But these guys thrive in this situation.
“There’s always something new,” Porter says. “You have four minds that are dumping new energy and ideas into the show, so you don’t have to worry about running out of material, because you’re just going off of what’s happening.”
“Maybe you had a great day or maybe you had a bad day or maybe your grandfather died that day,” Willis adds. “That has to influence what you bring to the show that night.”
“When I was a beginning improviser, I’d think about ‘What’s funny? What can I do tonight that’ll get a laugh?’” says Kangas. “Now I don’t spend any time during the day thinking what’s going to happen in the show, because I know I can’t control it.”
Plenty of comedy fans steer clear of improvised performances, for fear of witnessing awkward on-stage behaviour or being bombarded by inane gags. Fear not, however, as Bear Attack won’t be dipping into such crass territory.
“At the end of the day we want to do a 50-minute show that you could write down and do again,” Pavatich says. “It should stand on its own. The improvised element is not what’s funny about it. It’s the characters and scenarios and moments.”
“The last thing you want is for people to walk out asking, ‘what did I watch – a bunch of random stuff?’” says Porter. “You want to tie it together in a way that at the end they’re like ‘Ah-ha! They made it up on the spot and it was beautiful and it all came together and made sense.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
