About the Festival
The Kansas City Improv Festival returns to Crown Center's Off Center Theatre for another rollicking two weekends of laughter, September 9-10 and 16-17. KCiF will showcase some the best in improv from the Kansas City area and across the country. With its eleventh production, the festival has become recognized as one of the best in the land.
KCiF is presented by Improv-Abilities, one of Kansas City's longest-running troupes who has performed their playful, high-energy improv comedy since 2000.
The History of the KC Improv Festival
How did the Kansas City Improv Festival end up with a legendary history before we were even 10 years old?
We were first.
In 1994, improv was just leaking into TV with the British version of Whose Line Is It, Anyway? Groups like ComedySportz and Theatresports gathered their franchisees from around the world at tournaments, but "independent" troupes were scattered all over the country with no opportunity to showcase their talents, see other troupes or get training from esteemed directors.
So Spontaneous Combustion - the first KC fest, produced by the now-defunct Lighten Up Improv Co. - got these groups together.
Groups from Minneapolis, Iowa and Lawrence shared the stage with locals (and the locals shared beer, thanks to a day-of-the-festival approval of their liquor license). The next year, "SpoCom" reached further out, with participants from Seattle, Boulder, Minneapolis, Frederick (Maryland) and our first Chicago troupes.
And then, because the rule of threes is a big deal in improv, things got great big in the third year. At the suggestion of one of our Chicago participants, Rob Reese (Amnesia Wars), the producers boldly invited the three top directors in the improv mecca to try something crazy: at the festival, each would take one member of each performing troupe in a cast and create a show in two days for the festival finale. The directors: Del Close (Chicago's heralded - or Harolded - improv guru), Mick Napier (Second City artistic director, Annoyance founder, and the man Del passed his baton to) and Armando Diaz (the guy who taught improv to NYC).
SpoCom continued for four years, until Lighten Up's directors split up and the players rebooted the festival as 5 and 6: The US Improv Festival. Their new troupe, Funny Outfit, kept the tradition going with new big-name directors, adding LA's Dan O'Connor, Chicago's Rebecca Sohn and Joe Bill, idea-instigator Rob Reese and improv's answer to Mister Rogers, Jeff Wirth.
Then things got quiet for a while. People grew up, became responsible adults, parted ways...and the festival took a hiatus for a few years. In the meantime, the folks who attended our festival as young performers went on to rock the improv world. They showed up at Second City (hey, Mark Sutton and Corey Rittmaster and Tim Mason and...ack, too many to wave at), on TV shows (hi, Jack McBrayer and Christina Gausas!), TV commercials (we're looking at you, TJ Jagodowski!) and beyond.
But like Karen Carpenter's lunch, it's tough to keep a good thing down. The upstarts of the City 3 Project - former students of the Lighten Up Improv Co.'s high school improv league - worked with one of the original producers to bring it back in 2007 as 7: The KC Improv Festival. With the national improv community more connected than ever before (and festivals all over the country using our model), the new producers decided to focus on KC and on what our community of performers needed to grow.
Members of Improv-Abilities - one of KC's longest-running troupes - had been involved in festival planning since its rebirth and took over as producers in 2009.
Many things have changed throughout the years, but here's what hasn't: our commitment to innovation (after all, the KC festival featured "long form" improv before it was cool), hospitality (nobody leaves without a belly full of BBQ and Boulevard Beer) and lots and lots of fun.