Remember when I said that we didn’t have a FringeFamous Five for you this week? LIES!! We were lucky enough to snag time with local improv extraordinaire, Butch Roy. Roy is busy readying the 2nd annual Twin Cities Improv Festival which gets going on Thursday evening.
Can you give us a little history on the Twin Cities Improv Festival? How’d it start? Why’d it start? Who started it?
BUTCH ROY: The short, easy answer is that it was started by myself, the members of Five Man Job and Jill Bernard to showcase Minneapolis improvisation not only on a national level but also to raise awareness of the Twin Cities improv scene locally.
The bigger picture gets much longer — The Improv A Go Go opened six years ago to try and both give a home and a showcase to the community as well as help audiences that were interested actually find improvisation, which has long been a well-kept secret in the Twin Cities — and when groups started getting out on the road for national festivals what we found was Minneapolis not only has a fairly distinct style of improvisation that got great response everywhere we brought it, but also some of the most top-shelf improvisers you could find anywhere.
So putting performers from the Twin Cities in perspective with the national scene it really brought things into focus. We’ve really got something fantastic here and it’s time we started showing it to everyone. So the short answer to the ‘why’ is simple — we love the performing community we have here in the Twin Cities and we think everyone here, and everywhere else, should know about it.
On the ‘how’ side of things — Once we decided to make the big jump into producing the festival I got in contact with The Onion, who have been great to partner with, the Brave New Workshop, who I have a long history with, and once we had a partnership with both it was a matter of finding the right time of year to bring people to Minnesota (so the 9 cold months on the calendar were out) and get to work. That was 19 months before opening day of the first year and we haven’t slowed down yet, in fact we’ve already started getting international submissions for 2009 so it looks like we’re just getting started.
For those who are new to improv or even unaware of the Twin Cities improv
scene, what should they expect if they decide to see a festival show or two?
BR: They should expect to see something pretty strange, uniquely energetic and they should be ready to get hooked on it.
We have a great variety of styles and structures on stage this year and I think it makes a fantastic window into the Minneapolis improv scene in general. While the core of an improv show is getting an inspiration from the audience and creating something spontaneous and new, there are many tools, mediums and formats that make each show a little different and the common element to all of them is that the audience gets to see something that has never been seen before and will never happen again — it’s a great connection between the audience and the performers that you can’t get anywhere else.
What do you anticipate to be some of the highlights of this year’s festival?
BR: Wow — that’s tough. There are a lot of big shows I’m excited about for different reasons.
Thursday night’s Stevie Ray’s/SCRAM show is going to be ten kinds of awesome. Friday night features the final performance of Five Man Job with longtime member Dan Hetzel, Coldtowne’s Minneapolis debut, Pimprov and not one but two improvised musicals (pH and Girls Girls Girls) as well as the final Neutrino Video Project for the summer. Saturday night we have the Onion Writers from NYC, the Josh and Tamra Show is high on my list of shows to see before you die and BASSPROV and Survivors of the Undead Plague are maybe the most different examples possible of a terrific improvised experience possible.
Wow.
Nationally speaking, what’s the improv festival scene like? Is this a relatively new thing…or just a relatively new thing to the Twin Cities?
BR: The Twin Cities actually had a festival in 1999 run by Stevie Ray which featured Del Close teaching an improv workshop in the Mall of America — which might be the weirdest thing that’s ever occurred in the world of improv. Since then it’s been pretty quiet as festivals go in the Cities, but it’s not “new” exactly.
Improv Festivals are everywhere now and each has a different flavor — Chicago’s huge festival (let’s face it, improv is a Chicago-centric world) is the big hub of activity, Los Angeles has a festival which has a lot of famous names and faces, New York has the Del Close marathon every year, San Francisco actually runs their festival over several weeks. They have been around for a long time (Chicago just hit 11 years) and have even been in Minneapolis before, this is just the newest incarnation.
What’s your vision for the TCIF? Ten years from now, what would your ideal festival be like?
BR: It may sound strange but in a perfect world the festival will become less and less important — that would mean that we’ve accomplished our goals and the TCIF won’t be the only time people from Minneapolis come out to see improvisation and won’t be the only time groups from around the country come here to enjoy what we have here, and the festival can just be our big annual party to celebrate that. That sounds pretty ideal to me.
Butch Roy is a founding member of Five Man Job and producer of both the Improv A Go Go, the Twin Cities regular improv showcase which just celebrated it’s sixth year in May as well as the Twin Cities Improv Festival. He has been improvising since 1997, after graduating from the Brave New Institute, has performed at festivals across the country as well as at home groups such as Five Man Job, Adorable, Resist Butch and HUGE.
A HOT TRANNY…SHOW!
I’m usually a little bit thrown when a theatre company advertises its own play as “ground-breaking”. It’s sort of like when you watch “So You Think You Can Dance” and they play a little clip of some young twink saying, “I’m fierce. I’m so going to Vegas. Fierceness begins here.” Then you watch them dance and you’re reminded of that time the Special Ed. kids put on a skit at the high school talent show.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a FringeFamous Five for you this week. Instead, I thought I’d toss out this fantastic Sean “Puff Daddy/P-Diddy/Puffy/Diddy” Combs 
