Your First Festival

You remember your first festival.

The thrill, the discovery, the heightened occasion… and the anxiety.

We always get nervous. What if your comedy/whatever falls flat with the local audience?

My first international improv festival was Copenhagen International Improv Festival 2017. At that point, I had already played improv for more than 8 years. I had performed a hundred shows in two different countries in front of local regulars. But somehow there was still the anxiety. What if it doesn’t work?

The thing is, you do get wooed (or intimidated) by the home team. Copenhagen teams are FAST. They have insane supercomputers in the brain, gutting the scene and heightening game. That’s not how we play in Norway. We would have a scene at a fjord gutting a fish, not a scene.

There was no way we could play like those Danes.

When it came to our turn, we played a few slower scenes. Magnus and I just ran around with a balloon with Kristin (picture above), as two brothers and a sister. No dialogues.

Just balloons.

Yet, after the show, a Copenhagen local came up to us and said… that was beautiful. They don’t normally see that.

And that’s the point of festivals.

That’s when a community sees that there other ways of playing improv.

That’s why your act got invited.

Don’t change your game. Don’t worry about changing your game to please a crowd.

It doesn’t mean that everyone will like balloons. Some people will not like balloons. I can straight up say, that I had seen certain playing styles which to me are boring, pretentious, or disgusting.

But there is a chance that someone among the locals like balloons, and they didn’t know that that is a thing.

That’s why we do festivals.