show #1 at the Joker
short form comedy improv show
highlights:
-making fun of Christoph (who we then dubbed Christie... Oh jokes
-Dirty Dancing (nobody puts baby in the corner)
-Ghost knocking you up with a ghost baby (my womb is haunted?)
-seeing the stand-ups like it
show #2 at the Fakkeltheater
The first half was a “Tap-Out” and we tapped our way through stories about a couple of astronauts on a mission to save Earth. We saw the children of the astronauts and their problems in school. We saw the evil professor who made the robot (X-13) to go on the mission and how he had actually made the robot to destroy humanity. We saw the teachers at the school eventually fall in love. Love and poetry won out in the end.
The second half of the show was again the “Director's Cut”, which just seems to be the easiest way to throw together a quick improv jam type show.
The story lines:
1)Film Noir story with detective Dick and the femme fatale and the local bar “The Wicked Banana”.
2)The scottish epic with clan leaders, a mysterious man with no accent and the clan leaders daughter who fell in love with him.
3)The Horror story... that really was a fairy tale, but hey. A princess, a white pony, a prince, a white pony that turns into a monster... you know, the usual.
4)A Canadian tale of a woodsman and his battle with the Grizzly Bear that slaughtered his family. It also involved beer.
The show also had a Birthday of one of their number one fans in the audience so Tom (who just happens to be a world class Balloonist) made big balloon flowers for her. Lee tried to blow up a balloon, just to blow one up and could not. This was a great demonstration of “Natural Comedy” occurring in the wild.
It is always nice to play and hang with the Improfeten. Our old friend Jeron started this group after seeing it in a dream. He has been following the dream ever since. It is also inspiring to just talk to him, he always seems to have a project on the go. It makes me feel lazy and makes me strive to actually do something and to write something and to get my own projects going. Thank you Jeron for kicking my ass into something that will be productive.
Belgium isn't over yet...
We then took the train over to Leuven to teach some workshops with a group called Inspinazie. If Antwerpen is the striving for comedy in improv, then Leuven is where they strive for the art.
But hold on a second, I am getting ahead of myself here.
In Leuven I was also able to do some shopping. It turned out that Christoph (from Improfeten) was from Leuven and his mom runs a tuxedo rental store and was going to be closing it, therefore selling off the old pieces. Yes, I bought a 3 piece suit in Belgium, I am classy. The other bonus was that her English was so bad that we had to communicate in French. Merci Christoph.
We also stayed in a building that was a former Bordello... which of course is a classy way of saying a Whore house. Oh Belgium, when will the fun end?
Leuven, for some reason, has a statue in the middle of a square of a giant bug impaled on a huge spike. There must be a story behind.
Next stop: The world theme park of parties... Amsterdam!
