Welcome to a special edition of Improv Corner this week, where The Spirit Of improv are taking over and taking the reigns with a special article. The Spirit of Improv are a team formed of Chester and Liverpool players and today Paul Quinn is telling us all about it.

“Spirit, some people hear it, some fear it. Spirit, some people just won’t go near it. Sure as I’m me and the skies are blue, the Ghostbusters are back and all brand new.”

 – ‘Spirit’ by Doug E Fresh & the Get Fresh Crew from ‘Ghostbusters II – Music From The Motion Picture’

We’ve taken a break between rehearsal sets. We’re all lounging about on chairs in the large function room above The Lock Keeper pub in Chester. There’s muffled music and the sound of clinking glasses coming from the patrons below, but we’re busy talking about Noel Edmonds.

David Escobedo, creator the The Spirit of Improv project, California native and resident of the UK for the last six years, has yet to encounter Noel. The rest of us are trying to explain the concept to him. It’s tougher than you might expect. Myself and Stu Hughes, the older crowd if I do say so myself, have memories of Noel’s House Party. Our younger counterparts, Charly Murgatroyd and Flo Pitt Knowles, use Deal of No Deal as their Edmonds touchstone. That only complicates things further. David knows the US version of Deal or No Deal, of course. But when he hears about the differences between that and the UK version, he must know everything. Making David curious is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Pretty soon we’re all launching anecdotes back and forth at each other: the time someone bet it all on a 1p box, the way the box-openers used to hold hands and chant before they opened them, Noel’s sexual tension with the banker on the phone.

After a few minutes of this, Escobedo pauses, and looks at us. There’s a glint in his eye like a kid who just spied his Christmas presents a few weeks early. “This whole conversation should be our suggestion to inspire the next set,” he says.

We jump to our feet, push our chairs to the side, set a time for 25 minutes, and just go with it. What follows is a fast paced, mad smash of scenes inspired by five friends just having a good old gab. When we’re done, we’re all aware something special just happened. 

Over the next rehearsal, we’ll play around with this concept until we arrive at an opening that we’ll use for our upcoming show at the Ireland Improv Fest: just the five of us chatting for five minutes on stage, before any improv starts, swapping stories about nostalgia and culture and stuff that makes us laugh. And then we’ll use all that to make some scenes. There’s probably similar openings, but I find this wholly unique because it’s like we’ve started a group chat there on stage, with five buddies and the audience. And in the space of five minutes we’ve built brand new inside jokes and references that we can play with in the twenty minute set that follows.

I had never been on an Improv team before this. I’m still not sure I have. Because The Spirit of Improv feels like a bizarre, amazing, closed doors experiment. David first approached me late last year, and asked if I’d like to get together with him and Stu and do some scenes, film them, and put the best bits online. An improv show online, post pandemic, with no audience, for no reason other than just to do it? Count me in.

But where does an idea like this come from. David was musing, as he often does, about what people consider as ‘success’ in improv, and worried that most considered it big crowds or getting huge laughs. “But I think most of us,” he says, “fall in love with improv because we have fun. It is a feeling of play. So the team was designed to include two people I really like improvising with. And also not focus on promotion or selling tickets. It is just about getting together and doing improv. Which is why in our online shows I make a point to show we are in an empty function room above a pub.”

Stu is no stranger to teams. As well as performing in several mixer and one-off ensembles, he’s been a member of the short-form group The Oickers since 2020. We all know short-form and longform are different beasts. But the vibe on Spirit of Improv felt different. “The scenes are wilder, weirder and stranger,” he notices. “There are a lot of talking inanimate objects, left field concept ideas, drilling pigeons, and meta moments. Spirit is more like being a gnarly explorer and my other stuff is running around the busy highlights like a wide-eyed tourist. Both ace and enjoyable, but very different experiences.”

When we filmed our online scenes in early 2023, we kitted out the pub function room as best we could. There were multiple cameras set up, tripods and ring lights, all at different points so David could have a variety of angles to edit from. But when we started improvising, I literally forgot they were there. I lost sight entirely of any recording that might be happening, any idea that other people might see these scenes. Because I was having too much fun. There’s a super silly sequence we did featuring a window cleaner being asked to climb through the window of a class he’s cleaning and take over teaching it, and it’s one my favourite set of scenes I’ve ever done. I can remember looking at David and seeing his smile begin to twitch, and knowing that if he started laughing then I would too, that Stu would soon follow, and then we’d just be three weirdos in a very well lit pub in Chester, laughing at our own jokes.

We put the scenes online and asked David to call us back when he wanted to do some more. And David did, but this time he wanted to go bigger. 

“We had a chance to perform in Ireland,” he explained.  “And although it could have stayed to just us three – I always think about giving other’s opportunities.  The three of us have a natural improv skill with each other.  We own that.  Now can we use that to make others look good. Other people who may not get a lot of opportunities to perform.”

Stu and I were game, and David knew exactly who he wanted to add to the mix. Flo had been a regular at the Chester Improv Collective, a weekly longform jam that the three of us had been a part of in 2022. She was a drama student who’d taken an improv class with David as part of her studies, felt she’d found something interesting, and wanted to follow it alongside her acting aspirations. Charly had joined on the tail end of the Chester Improv Collective project and we all wanted to work with her more.

Having done mostly course with strict planing, Charly found the rehearsal process for Spirit “really freeing. Usually there’s a style you’re trying to stick to but this time it was just fun and we went with whatever we felt like which felt kind of radical in terms of improv.

We rehearsed twice a month beginning in June, even though the festival wasn’t until October. We began with no real format, no real plans. David had faith it would develop and become clear in front of us, as we developed as a team. We learned how each other played, the difference in each other’s pop culture knowledge (not just David’s unfamiliarity with 90s British Light Entertainment hosts, but also Flo’s limited knowledge of the JFK assassination), and tweaked our styles and approaches to compensate.

“We got to explore different ideas during our rehearsal sets,” said Flo, “which would lead onto conversations about what we wanted the audience to experience and how we could achieve this. This then lead onto wider conversations about improv as a whole and the sense of community that is formed between the performer and audience.”  

I’ve never felt more ready for a show before. I trusted every single person on stage completely, and I was certain that whatever happened, it would be fun. David was right, that was the ultimate essence of improv after all.

The festival flew by. It was a blur of laughing and new friends and trying to find a pizza place open at 11:30pm on a Thursday in Dublin. We all count it as amongst our best improv experiences ever. It was even Flo’s first ever improv show, and she breezed through it like a seasoned pro. “And that all came down to the time and effort spent inside and outside of the rehearsal room,” Flo thinks, “in preparation to perform in a different country to a new audience for the first time as that group!”

“I cherish that so much,” says David, also casting his mind back to how he was given opportunities when he first started out.  “One of the ways I try to pay it back is by giving opportunities to others. And hopefully they give opportunities to others and so on…in a cycle of boosting each other up.”

We don’t know what’s coming next. Maybe we’ll do some more. Maybe we won’t. But whatever we all do from here on out, we’ll do it in the spirit of Improv.