Flourishing improv fest ready to make the ’Peg laugh

The Winnipeg Improv Festival runs until Saturday at the Gas Station Arts Centre. (Supplied)

FESTIVAL PREVIEW

WINNIPEG IMPROV FESTIVAL

Gas Station Arts Centre, 445 River Ave.

Opens tonight, runs to Saturday

Tickets and information at winnipegimprov.com

WHEN the first Winnipeg Improv Festival happened in 2000, its organizers had no idea what they were doing, or what the festival should look like.

After 25 years of making things up, they’ve mostly got it figured out, says co-artistic director Stephen Sim, who programs the festival with improv artist Caity Curtis.

Featuring a combination of local performers plucked from the Winnipeg alt-comedy universe and a roster of national and international guests, the Winnipeg Improv Festival traverses borders by mashing together new troupes to workshop, develop and present ephemeral, once-in-a-lifetime work to audiences at the Gas Station Arts Centre.

Sim doesn’t remember too many specifics about the first festival — he hardly slept and was in no state to take notes — but by the time the second edition came around, it became apparent that what made things felt “real” was the participation of improvisers from outside the city.

The festival, founded 12 years after the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival and two years before the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, was on an upswing prior to 2020 when the pandemic imposed a hiatus that theatre and performance organizations were among the earliest to adopt.

“It was more than putting things on pause. We knew we had a purpose, still, but we were wrestling with how to serve that purpose when the idea of going out for an evening changed. There was definitely some mutation of our own festival DNA,” Sim says.

The “in-the-room” liveness — the thing that makes improv a worthwhile pursuit for Sim and Curtis — was in peril. And the capacity to welcome visiting species of improv artists was limited: the Gas Station’s comedic laboratory was in code red.

But over the past four years, the improv festival, and its Osborne Village home, has been on the rebound. The Gas Station Arts Centre is in the midst of a large-scale revitalization project, receiving tripartite funding of $800,000 from the civic, provincial and federal governments, fuelling an expansion to its lobby, the development of an interior cafe and wine bar, and improvements to its technical theatrical systems.