Calling himself “a backpacker who got stuck” prior to moving to Australia in 2010, Adam Kangas was training with both UCB and iO back in the United States. “I had started improvising in 2006 in LA and I got into it just for something to do but realised very quickly that wow, this is something that I really wanted to do for the rest of my life,” says Kangas. “Now, one thing about Los Angeles is there’s so many actors there…every agent is telling their client to do improv so it’s a huge thing, so there’s probably 10,000 to 20,000 people who are really good improvisers in LA, it’s very hard to get stage time and make a name for yourself but the training I got was so good that when I moved here I was able to get accepted into every improv group I tried out for and start my own improv school with no competition there,” he says.
Kangas is founder and Artistic Director of The Improv Conspiracy. “Theatresports is really big over here but there’s so much more to improv than that and I saw a niche that was ready to be filled and so set up shop here in Melbourne and now it’s two and half years later, we have over 50 people in our performance ensemble and we’ve trained in classes over 150 people,” he says.
The Improv Conspiracy work in the Chicago style, first developed by Del Close, who Kangas affectionately describes as a hippy and an oddball. “In Chicago style, it’s all up to the performers do a good job and there’s no safety net for them if it’s not going well. Whereas in Theatresports if a scene is dying, an MC will blow the whistle and save it,” he says. “Other difference is that we only take one suggestion for the entire show”.
For this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival The Improv Conspiracy are actually presenting two shows. They run a weekly Harold night year round at Carlton’s Dan O’Connell, which will be continuing Wednesday nights during the festival, “but to make it competitive with everything else in the festival, we’ll actually make it free for those four weeks,” he says. “Then we have our flagship show called A Night in Chicago”.
A Night In Chicago will feature long-form impro comedy formats The Deconstruction (creating a realistic two-person relationship they then deconstruct), The Harold (a team presents a variety of scenes based on a single suggestion) and The Remix (truthful tales that are sampled and remixed). Improv Conspiracy have six different teams that rotate the performances at the weekly night and Kangas says they have “cherry picked the best members of all of those six teams and put them together” for the lineup for A Night In Chicago.
Suggestions from audiences, he says, aren’t always taken literally, which is all part of the Chicago style. He gives the example of carrot. “We might think ‘conceptually, what is a carrot? Something that grows underground and is hidden from the light’ Maybe the scene takes on some thematic content from that. It gives the players a lot more room to be intelligent and also the audiences, we don’t club them over the head with what’s funny about the show, it’s up for them to figure it out for themselves, so we kind of draw a smart crowd”.
BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD
