The Resistance

During Coup De Comedy, I went to a show in the little theatre where an improve group from LA was doing their show. They were a group of guys who did improv based on action movies and they were all professional stuntmen. They were entertaining, but what impressed me was the lights and sounds. The technical elements were all very astonishing, because they were not planned and had to be worked with on the spot. I am not sure who their lighting designer was because they gave us no information on their group, but he was spot on, and sometimes created the scenes. The lighting designer had to come into the space they had never performed in before and anticipate where the actors were going with the scene because it was completely improvisational. This shows that this group must have worked together for a long time to be able to precisely anticipate each other's moves without someone getting hurt.

For more context, they were improvising a western movie, and there was a part during their piece of constant flashbacks from a sunny, hot summer day to a memory during a cold, rainy day. So every time the actors insinuated a flashback, the lighting designer had that transition time between scenes to understand what the actors were trying to accomplish, and set the mood to the scene. So the lights and sound constantly changed from blues to reds and created the stark contrast between the sunny present and the rainy past. It was improvised lighting and I never thought that technical elements of theatre could be improvised, but it made the scene so much livelier and funnier because it gave so much more dimension to whatever scenario they were trying to play out.