Improv-ing Comedy

In a dark little theater tucked away on the first floor of a brightly painted building in New Orleans’ Bywater, a group of performers helped the audience imagine invisible props as they enacted a dinner party, with hosts and house guests about to receive a rotten fish foot bath and toxic sludge spa treatment.

“We’re just tourists in this charming little town, we want to live like the locals do!” said one of the women.

“They’re willing to let us put any of this stuff on them, so we should just keep dumping it on them,” ad-libbed the host to his wife.

“Is that a fish in there?” asked the houseguest, looking down at an imaginary bowl of foot soak.

“It’s just a portion of a fish,” the hostess responded. The crowd burst out in laughter.

A few of the performers were students, a few were teachers, all part of an improv performance collective called The New Movement.

Chris Trew and Tami Nelson brought The New Movement (TNM) to New Orleans from Austin in order to foster the growth of comedy in the city through intensive training programs. They also wanted to improve the reputation of the art form as a serious craft, a reputation that has been earned in other big cities. Chris Trew, who has a background in reality-TV production and standup comedy, explained that as the form has become more mainstream, it has also become more polished. “Just because you saw an improv show that you thought was corny or childish or whatever a long time ago, doesn’t mean all improv is like that,” said Trew. “It’s not like when you go and see a band playing and you don’t like the band—you don’t say, ‘I don’t like music.’”

The partners also wanted to create an inclusive and welcoming creative space. The theater opened in 2012 at 1919 Burgundy in the Marigny Triangle and expanded to a larger space at 2706 St. Claude Avenue this February, where it features writing labs, office space, a video production suite, and more classroom and rehearsal space—a good thing, since they have a waitlist of between forty to fifty potential students at any given time.

Trew is from New Orleans but moved to Austin after Hurricane Katrina; he and Nelson moved back to the city in 2012 to start the theater. Sporting dark-rimmed glasses and a huge, bushy brown beard, Trew said that after spending a lot of time in cities with thriving comedy scenes, like Los Angeles and Chicago, he was inspired to jump start the scene in New Orleans. The city has traditionally not had a major comedy scene, but rather scattered improv performances and the occasional big-name performer. “We wanted to come back home and make it happen here because we saw that too many talented people were leaving New Orleans,” said Trew. He hopes that by creating a conservatory-type training program that includes regular performances by students and also features big-name acts, like Wyatt Cenac, the genre will take hold.

Evidence of his hopes coming to fruition can be found at the annual Hell Yes Fest, billed as the Gulf South’s largest comedy festival since 2011. The festival, which provides a gathering space for fans of comedy and aspiring performers, takes place in New Orleans during the first week of October and features film, sketch, improv, and other media as well as some of TNM’s best comedians from both Austin and New Orleans.

Nicholas Napolitano, who has a day job at a local solar company, is a New Movement student and part-time marketing manager. He hopes to perform during Hell Yes Fest. He wanted to be a screenwriter until he signed up for an improv class at TNM. The training program improved his writing skills and also opened him up as a person, making him more open-minded and willing to take chances. Plus, it was just downright fun. One of his favorite exercises, and also one of the hardest, is called “ten and switch” where participants go up on stage for an unknown amount of time to complete ten mini-performances under the guidance of an instructor with a timer. “You’re by yourself on stage doing, essentially, character monologues. The world is open to you—you can do whatever. Doing that at such a fast pace sounds easy, especially being a writer and having those kinds of character concepts in my brain, but it caught me off-guard and changed how I thought about the form,” said Napolitano, who now hopes to be a full-time comedian. “Before that, I thought of it as a supplement to my writing skills,” he added. Now, he understands  that improv is a totally separate art form.

Trew believes in the value of improv beyond pure performance. “When you’re a good improviser, you’re able to communicate ideas clearly, you’re able to listen, you’re able to retain information better, and you’re able to work with anything and make it good,” he explained.

These traits are valuable no matter what your profession, he said.“The things that make our comedy special—and more importantly funny—are also the things that make life easier and more fun,” said Trew.

That’s part of the reason Trew and his colleagues believe that “everyone should have an opportunity to be exposed to improv,” as stated on their website. In order to make it accessible to all, they have a sliding-scale payment plan and sometimes trade labor for classes. They also have regular pay-what-you can performances, open to the public.

Napolitano, who performs with other students regularly, said that there are some rules to making good improv: “Always say ‘yes, and’” is a pretty well-known standard. There are five levels to the training courses offered by TNM, including vocabulary and character development as well as learning performance devices like tap-outs and new beats, which moderate the pace of the sketch. Their philosophy is based on the idea that scenes need focus and can be mapped out from the first several lines and actions.

The participants in the courses are diverse, ranging from middle-aged moms looking to have fun to young salesmen and doctors. Trew said that variety makes the workshops and performances fun and dynamic, which he hopes draws in the crowd. And it has: four years ago, shows were few and far between; now, there are two or three every night in different locations around the city. These days, clubs will actually hire comedians to run shows, many of whom are affiliated in some way with TNM.

Trew said the next step is for a few comedians to develop a really popular show and take it on tour, representing New Orleans’ newly thriving comedy scene to the rest of the nation. It’s only a matter of time.

Details. Details. Details.

The New Movement offers multiple shows each week at their New Orleans location, 2706 St. Claude Avenue.

Schedule at newmovementtheater.com.

Hell Yes Fest
October 1—11 at multiple venues throughout New Orleans. 

hellyesfest.com