Hall is heading to Melbourne this week for the Impro Melbourne Classic, billed as a celebration of Australia and New Zealand’s best improvised theatre. The lineup is pretty impressive, featuring over 30 performers including Hall, Impro Australia Director and Sydney-sider Cale Bain, and former Creative Director of the Wellington Improvisation Troupe Christine Brooks. “The Classic has been big in Melbourne over the last few years,” says Hall. “It’s great – I’ve been taking trips to play with Impro Melbourne guys for almost ten years now and I just love it.”
Improvisation seems to be either loved or hated by fans of comedy and theatre, but most can agree that it takes a pretty talented performer to make it come to life. “Think about the process of creating visual art,” muses Hall. “If you say ‘paint a picture’, people just go ‘what do I do?’ Where as if you say ‘paint a house’ it often makes it significantly easier. There are some people who want to get something right in their head before they even start, and they don’t tend to do very well in improv. I’ve been doing improvisation for a long time, and I do shows now not to get them right, but to see what’s possible. I think Edison said ‘I tried 100 times before I got the lightbulb right.’ It’s a bit like that.”
As usual, the Classic is a big production. “It’s a really healthy scene – everyone works together,” says Hall of Australian improvisational theatre. As for the Classic, “for the impro community it’s a chance to get together and catch up with your mates. The artistic director of Impro Melbourne I’ve known for about 16 years and we’re great mates – but if you add up the hours we’ve spent together it might not be that much because of where we live. It’s great though, we just pick up where we left off and spend a few intense days together working on a project.”
Hall is directing one of three works to be hold on Saturday September 22, and with him at the helm Zeitgeist promises to present a unique and intriguing approach to improvisation. “I was always a bit of a fan of Bertolt Brecht,” Hall reveals. “I’m an actor originally and I’ve always noticed that when you mention Brecht to young people you usually find that someone at high school has destroyed what it’s all about for them, a bit like Shakespeare.” Inspired in equal parts by Brechtian theatre and cabaret and vaudeville stylings of the British trio The Tiger Lillies, Hall decided to try incorporating some of these techniques into an impro show. “Basically the whole thing [with Brecht] is all the time you’re aware that you’re watching theatre – you break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience. That’s kind of what we do in improvisation. We let the audience see the scaffolding which goes into creating the art. We ask – give us a scene, give us a character. In a way we’re kind of alienating the whole process.”
A spontaneity coach, Hall encourages us all to just let go a little and stop trying to control every aspect of our lives. “It’s funny you know, we operate our daily lives by schemata, by a sense of rules. That often helps with things like not getting us killed or getting us to work on time, but it’s great to try things in an environment like mine when all that’s at risk is a minor public humiliation.” When asked if his services as a spontaneity coach could help politicians behave a bit more like real people Hall replies emphatically. “Definitely. The thing I wonder about politicians is are they ever going to put down the rulebook? That could be a story in Zeitgeist it’s so foreign to us now. A politician puts down the rulebook and what happens to him or her? It’s lost the passion of the old-school oratory with a couple of Senators banging it out on the steps of Ancient Rome.”
“It’s basically like a dirty German cabaret freakshow,” states Hall, when asked to describe Zeitgeist in more detail. “There will be dishevelled people, macabre stories. It’s a little bit edgy, a little bit twilight zone. We want to give people something different. A guy I know from Perth is now living in Melbourne – he’s a piano player who specialises in ‘prepared piano’. Before each show, the piano is ‘prepared’ by opening it up and sticking tape and pegs and bits and pieces on the strings so that when he plays it has this outrageous effect. It ends up sounding a bit like Phillip Glass and a little like Tom Waits.”
BY JOSH FERGEUS
