Little Back Story

 I was fresh out of high school and started trying longform directed by the longform king of Vancouver Alistair Cook. He had a wonderful space called The Vancouver Little Theatre. This was my first taste of improv outside of a high school setting. I got to tech as well as perform. An amazing experience that helped shape the theatre I co-own today. www.secondstoreytheatre.com  Being that I was employed and from the outskirts, it made it difficult for me to easily continue being apart of this experience. I started looking for opportunities much closer to where I was living. I didn’t have to look far.

table23 (yes spelled with a lower case t) was formed in 1999. www.table23.com We came together for a one off show which sparked a chain reaction of events leading to the group coming together with 5 members. We immediately started performing. We did one big show every couple of months that had sketch, film as well as improv. We all came from very different places and experience levels. So we started work shopping. We started with very basic games in the beginning. This eventually grew into us being more comfortable with being on stage and being more confident in our ability.

We were asked to be in a Cage Match. This is a format where 2 teams come together to perform a longform set against one another. This was my first jaunt back to Vancouver as well as our first attempt at longform as a group. We were little fish in a big pond but we packed the house with as many people as we could and ended up winning 2 in a row. This was a great experience to really take in what longform was and where you can go with it. We lost our 3^rd time out to a much more seasoned group. If nothing else it started to change our shows from that point on. We also had started a regular weekly show at a café. The regularity really honed our skills. We began performing games first half, then longform second half. This was a proven formula that we really embraced. We had no official training in the format so we started creating our own language in order to make the format work for us. This is something we continue to do today.

We through trial and error found our way and really have enjoyed the artistic fulfillment that longform brings an improviser. We have since taken workshops and performed here and there with piles of groups at tons of locations absorbing as much as possible. With that said, I can’t help but feel a little proud that we are pretty much self taught. It made the experience much more organic and natural to me. We were able to make mistakes in front of audiences and really experiment freely with no one telling us how it should or shouldn’t be done. We really found our own style that I continue to develop with other groups like Gruper Soup and The Big Unit.

Every time I step on stage with table23 it feels so incredible to have such a great connection and feel such a huge amount of support. We really have become a family rather then just a group. We could have probably gotten here faster but I wouldn’t change the road we picked in a million years.