Each night of the Improv Fest a director from NZ or overseas showcases a format after working with participants in a workshop during the day. This not only allows all the players to learn new skills and formats but to also then have a group from which the show can be cast. Thus the audience comes into contact with a new improv format with players who very much rely on their basic skills to form a coherent company.

If you’ve read my other reviews you know I’m very enamoured of the group of improvisers this festival has brought together, and this show is no different. Well, actually it is. Only in that it is a new format. 

The Circle of Sound and Story is Sydney/Nelsons’ Linda Calgaro’s showcase and she has gathered eight other participants from around the globe to join her onstage. Some are regular faces and there are some I’ve haven’t seen in other shows. It’s great to know the wealth is being shared around. That’s not to say it’s charity; each of tonight’s players have clearly earned their place.

The format is deceptively simple: the group improvises a (usually) wordless piece of music, picking up musical phrases, motifs and rhythmic offers, joining in with them and then beginning to play around with them and around them adding counter melodies and rhythms; a kind of modern wordless madrigal. The first and each of the following soundings (I’m not sure if that’s the term, but it will do here) highlight listening, as players pick up an offer and support it, and complementarity, whereby players vary pitch, tone, and other melodies that are different to the first offer thereby adding complexity and modulating the whole song.

Sounds tough? It is. The light heartedness with which this group accepts each others’ offers is intoxicating. Even when two players find themselves at interesting odds over a musical development and an eyeballing quickly becomes a duel, escalating to humorously vicious gestures that require other players to part them, all the while the group continues its sounding; all the while the audience is in hysterics.

Once Calgaro conducts this to a close the players randomly walk around the stage until one or more players meet and start a scene. So, scene, sounding, scene, sounding, etc. until Darryn, tonight’s op, brings the lights to blackout meaning the show’s time is up, much to the surprise of the participants and near capacity audience alike. 

The initiating offer for the evening is from the audience – the joy of being with a dog today – and from there we leap into our first sounding. Each of the scenes is handled with the aplomb and ease these players have shown over many nights. Early on the stakes are set high with a really delightful scene between Isaac Thomas and Sydney’s Cale Bain. Two seats become a taxi. Two people turn out not to know each other. Two seats are revealed as three really, but Bain’s character has decided to sit close to a stranger. Bain’s ease is complemented beautifully by Thomas’s dis-ease; the two players developing the narrative to its conclusion like a tennis match played between masters.

Later in the night three players start a scene naming each other (a basic skill/ tool/ expectation) but suddenly there’s an unspoken group connection/ decision (Calgaro, Clare Kerrison, Jaklene Vukasinovic) that only those names will be the dialogue and the subtext/ narrative will arise from the way the names are spoken. And so a simple skill becomes a risk, and as the audience clicks, becomes a dare and a delight. So then, off course, another player walks in to up the ante.

Sweden’s Peter Norstrand’s offer (based on a great lighting state offer), of “You will never see outside this room again”, is delivered to his son with such simplicity that it gets a sharp intake of breath (and also of delight) and at the end of the scene the son (Thomas again) quite naturally ends up making a snow angel – but in this case with blood not snow. This may sound off the wall but each scene created in the moment follows the clear logic of good storytelling so that the ends almost seem inevitable.

I think that the level of complicity and desire to risk that is enabled in the soundings follows through to the acceptance and development of the stories. These scenes are some of the best, most coherent and artfully delivered of the Festival. Mind you most of these players have had four or five days to work together, and there’s nothing like the last night of the Festival to let go and risk it all.

To quote Calgaro: “An unexpected delight.” And from me: “More please.”

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