Friends and family are crucial to one’s life. As the most basic building blocks of an individual’s community, they have the potential to make people feel like they are a part of something bigger or conversely make them feel absolutely alienated. In this triple bill which asks “How do we find where we belong?”, we turn to look at stories with a strong focus on tangled friendships and complicated families, and the impact of these friends and family when it comes to providing the members of their community with a sense of belonging.
Featuring:
Improv Queensland (Australia)
What is something you wish friends would talk more openly about? Join the cast of Improv Queensland for ‘Mates’, as they take a look at the secret lives of men and women, navigating masculinity and femininity in the modern world. Conversations and experiences collide to bring out new and interesting perspectives (both funny and moving) on friendship and mental health as these mates come together to discuss difficult topics that they normally wouldn’t with each other. Improv Queensland was founded in 2004 in Brisbane with the goal of spreading and celebrating the joy of improvised performance and unscripted theatre.
TYPECAST (International)
Sitcoms are a popular choice for entertainment across multiple cultures. FRIENDS, HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, BIG BANG THEORY and many others are widely available and popular long after they have ceased production. TYPECAST reaches into this nostalgia with a fully-improvised sitcom featuring relatable character archetypes (the overachieving cousin, the matchmaker aunt, the get-rich-quick brother-in-law, and the complaining Karen) and explores the basic motivations of each character from a point of authenticity to create warm, funny, and relatable show.
SPIT Manila (Philippines)
“Family Few” showcases scenes echoing and resonating with each other by rebuilding and reframing realities. Scene after scene, one character either disappears or reappears, thereby resetting truths in the dynamics of the improvised kinships. As our players improvise the realities of each scene, we seem to ask: When a relationship gets erased, do residual feelings borne from it remain real? When a family member reemerges, how do we sustain or reimagine the truth we built without them? The show explores the complexities of relationships in extended families, and in the families we choose to create and keep.
SPIT Manila is Asia’s premier improvisational theatre group. They founded the first Manila Improv Festival in 2012 and its school Third World Improv in 2015. The troupe firmly trusts that truth is what is most important to improv, and that truthful theatre creates communities bound by courage rather than fear.