What do you do at these festivals?

What exactly were you doing at that improv festival?

One of the warm-up exercises in my workshops was finding someone who “has the same THING as you,” and my response would be, “When I learn something new, I immediately assume everyone knows it too.” And because I spend almost 60% of my life doing improv (I counted!) and have been to about 60 festivals, the question “How was the festival?” sounds like “How was school?” and the answer is typically “normal.”

And then no one knows what school was like.

So this time, I’ll tell you. I naively thought I’d shoot so much footage that I could edit an episode of a cool vlog, but instead, I ended up with a recording of the view from my room window, a minute of me talking about how I love Italians, two group photos after the workshop, and five photos from a costume party. And nowhere does it seem that there were 650 Italians around me.

The Pandora International Improv Festival is a massive event held annually in the seaside town of Carrara, near Pisa. For several days in June, around thirty trainers and over five hundred workshop participants gather there.

Our center was built during the fascist era; one participant recalled coming there for camps as the child of a Fiat employee. Why do I mention this? The building, seemingly innocent from the outside, is a panpoticon inside. You climb a tall tower in a spiraling serpentine path, searching for the door to your room. There’s no watchtower in the center, just an empty space, but I learned that in the past, there were no doors, not even walls, dividing rooms, so hundreds of children simply slept in rows of open beds, spiraling toward heaven.

You can imagine the acoustics of this place. Standing in the middle of the tower, on the ground floor, you could easily call someone from the 10th floor, which is probably why the organizers recommended bringing earplugs to help you sleep at night. This immediately stressed me out, because how could you possibly wake up to an alarm for rehearsal in the morning? But then again, what do we have social media for? They immediately advised me to set an alarm… on my watch, and it’s actually a brilliant solution, still a very strange feeling. Every morning, I woke up to the confusion of my wrist vibrating.

Sleep is a rare commodity at festivals, from getting up at 4 a.m. to catch a flight to performances that end at 2 a.m. (Italians!). Not to mention the fact that sometimes you’d like to chat with someone after the performance, as you’re rushing between workshops, rehearsals, and meals (pasta twice a day as the first course of two courses, Italians!). I must admit, however, that the Italian way of partying until dawn and getting up shortly after for workshops is like… Polish festivals. Next month, improvisers will be greeting the sunrise over the Vistula River in Toruń during the JO festival.

For the type of work where you normally lead workshops in the afternoons and perform in the evenings, a night owl chronotype and ADHD, with potentially delayed melatonin release, are ideal. As long as you don’t have to lead a rehearsal for a 9:30 a.m. performance. Despite this, it was a great joy to breathe life into the morning “Mikrokosmos,” which we rehearsed with international teachers: Katy Schutte, Tim Orr, Inbal Lori, Anne Rab, Jim Libby, Jacob Banigan (though he couldn’t perform with us in the evening because he had a solo), Daniel Malmqvist, Vincent Van Nieuwenhuyze, Lauren Berning, Gael Doorneweerd-Perry, and the festival’s artistic director, Hila Di Castro.

We played two evenings, with two half-teams, very different performances: a nostalgic story about growing up in a treehouse and a wild journey through literary genres in a library.

Mikrokosmos is a format I developed with my impro students at the University of Gdańsk after hearing the phrase “if you see dust on the table, it sees you” during my Free Form workshops in Italy at Impro Salento. My Polish workshop participants rightly expect that when a mother returns from a business trip, she’ll bring back new ideas, but in this case, they weren’t thrilled with the gift of a single sentence. However, we developed a format that gave us a lot of joy. In Poland, it took on a life of its own, beyond my control, and requests and reports are pouring in from all over the world, from Copenhagen, Athens, and Madrid, to the iO Theatre in Chicago, after our performance there, and from San Francisco and Princeton University. Simply put, it’s a story about human relationships and their reflection on other planes of reality. Emotions are reflected in the objects around us, our decisions influence our hearts and minds. Not only do we have opinions about our clothes, but they also have opinions about us, and our Guardian Angel will gladly share his thoughts on our actions, even though we can’t hear him.

The most beautiful thing is that this format accommodates every type of improviser. There’s room for deep, emotional scenes, as well as for wild, abstract scenes that will stir the waters and disappear. And what I love most is how improvisers who were in the audience come back after the performance, clenching their fists and saying that while watching the performance, “they wanted to be on stage with us so much.”

During rehearsal, Lauren asked if, as the director, I had any specific expectations for them, as actors, in fulfilling my vision. And I always answer the same: No. I give them mechanics within which they can do whatever they want, I build a playground, and they will enchant us by what they do on it.

I was offered the opportunity to play both nights (a great gift). However, while connecting the microphones on the second night, it turned out that in the heat of other performances, two sets had been damaged, so we lost both the spare and the one we needed. While I was discussing with the acoustics, the cast was waiting outside, and, looking at us through the window, Vincent said, “Gosia will be here any minute to announce that she’s giving up the microphone and won’t be playing with us.” I told Hila, “I’ll give up the microphone and won’t be playing with them. I’ll just open the show with a microphone in my hand.” There were a few hundred people in the audience, that was the only option. Hila asked, “But will the team be okay with that?” I said I’d go ask them. I went out… and announced that I was giving up the microphone and wouldn’t be playing with them.

I mention this for two reasons. During film directing studies, they always told us that, firstly, something will always fail on set, something we can’t predict, regardless of the scale of preparation. And secondly, a director has to make decisions quickly and decisively. So I did, took photos, and had a blast watching, thinking, “I wish I could be on stage with them.” So, it was still a win.

We spent most of the festival, however, on workshops. As a reminder, there were 650 Italians eager to learn, and 25 participants from abroad (Paweł from my workshop team was the only one carrying the Polish flag!). There were 12 foreign trainers at the festival and twice as many Italian trainers—that’s an army!

I led two workshops: “All by Yourself,” about moments when you’re alone on stage, how to avoid panic, how to invite audience and co-players into your world, and how to hack monologues. And “From Movies to Improv,” about film directing tools for improvisers, building a film narrative, OHO moments, good, evil, subtext, protagonists, antagonists, and sidekicks. After the first workshop, instead of hearing the initial “I’m supposed to be alone SO LONG on stage?” I heard “Wow, so short?” After the second workshop, we discussed what the stories were really about and dug up further meanings.

Interestingly, it’s standard practice in Italian workshops for trainers to be assigned a translator, and for exercises and scenes to be conducted in Italian. After a few visits, I got used to it, but catching important moments in a scene as they happen is still a challenge with simultaneous translation. I see this as additional motivation for learning Italian. Sometimes I even throw single Italian words into English sentences, but not necessarily appropriately, because Chiara, my wonderful translator, kept using other words, adding that it made more sense.

What we mainly did outside of the workshops was eat. What was most heartwarming to me was that twice a day, for lunch and dinner, we were given pasta as a first course. Because, as everyone knows, a whole plate of pasta is a primo. And there were three pastas to choose from. I asked for small portions, and they asked, “That’s how much?” I said, “Yes, that’s how much,” and they would serve twice as much, because you can’t eat that little. And when I complimented the cake, saying, “Good, not too sweet,” it turned out to be the most Polish thing I could say.

Well, that’s how it was at school.

And today is the finale of another academic season and the final show of my four Polish workshop groups. I’ve been running Improv Theatre at the University of Gdańsk since 2007, the year in which some of the students from Young Impro group were born, but that is a story for another time.