No script, no rehearsals and certainly never seen before, Improv Mayhem by Improv Comedy Bangalore hopes to knock your socks off with a night of pure humour, all created on the spot. With a five-member cast that includes Abhishek Desai, Rohit Nair, Nasir Engineer, Madhu Shukla and Benson Chacko, we expect this will be a great way to unwind on a lazy Sunday evening.
“We are part of this outfit called Improv Comedy Bangalore, which came together barely seven months ago,” says Abhishek Desai, one of the founding members, who turned his back on a career in engineering to pursue this challenging performing art.
Promising an interactive experience, Desai explains that the performance moves forward with the help of a series of games, the cast plays with the audience. A scenario is given by someone from the audience and the entire show is built off that. As it progresses, different themes, challenges and games are introduced into the narrative.
“For example, there’s this one game that quite a hit. It’s called Story Story Die. There’s a conductor on stage and a bunch of actors. The minute the conductor points to you, you need to speak, without stammering, stuttering, ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs.’ The challenge is keeping it fluid and spontaneous,” he says, adding, “Sometimes we pause and ask the audience what accent they’d like us to deliver the dialogues in. Then there’s another fun game called Blind Lines, where we ask the audience to write down dialogues on pieces of paper. We pick up one chit from a bowl and use the dialogue we get in the scenario given to us. There was this one time when this guy had to enact meeting his mother for the first time and the dialogue he got was kitne aadmi the,” he shares.
While there are no rehearsals per se owing to the nature of the genre, they get together to strengthen their techniques before all shows. “We work on things like picking up cues, building stories and helping co-improvisers look good on stage,” he reveals.
Describing his style of improv as exaggerated and theatrical, Desai tells us that Engineer has a more serious, subtle and sarcastic vibe on stage, starkly contrasted by Shukla, who is a bundle of energy. Nair on the other hand, has a sense of humour that is intelligent, witty and slapstick and is the guy who “binds the performance together.” Benson Chacko is the man behind the live music that is incorporated into scenes and Desai calls him “the Dravid” of their group. “You won’t notice him but he adds so much to the team,” he says in conclusion.
The event is on March 6 at 7 pm at Alliance Francaise.
