Toronto Improv Competition 2007

This past weekend, University of Toronto, hosted a small competition between 8 Universities. McGill Improv accepted the invititation and a bunch of us took the road trip down for the weekend.

My brother Mark happened to need to go back to Toronto the same weekend and had a rented minivan with space for some friends and I. In total we were three cars. Car #1 was myself, my brother, Jeremy, Holly and Chris. Car #2 was Fiona, Nestor, Auralie and Adrienne. Finally in car #3 was Arvind and Bryan (Arvind call his car Melissa).

The plan was to leave friday night around 5:30pm-6pm and leave from Toronto sometime in the afternoon. We hit our first snag when my brother Mark and I went to pick up the rental. When asked to suply my driver's liscence, I discovered I no longer had it. After desperately trying to remember what I had done with it, I recalled that recently I had gone to play some pool at a pool hall and had used my card for collateral for the pool balls, and I guess I never got it back. So, we were stuck with 2 cars and only 1 person legal to drive at the moment. My brother's solution was to give me his car keys so that I could go to the pool hall to pick up my own liscence and that i meet him at the house. So I drove without a liscence to go get my liscence. At the place, the guy looked through all the cards and mine was the last one. Phew!

Chris and the others showed up at my house at around 6:30pm-7pm due to traffic and we were on our way. We stopped at Kingston where we met up with car # 3 and had a deliscious PIzza Hut dinner. However, upon our arrival, Arvind recieved a call from car#2 claiming that they hit a WOLF. There was minimal damage to the car, but the wolf was dead and they had to fill out a police report. This became the recurring joke of the weekend, it was awesome.

After, dopping off my brother at his place, we all met up at our hotel room by 2:00am, to which we stayed up another hour or so drinking! (who needs sleep, we're on vacation!).

Saturday was a packed day. We got up and headed to Ryerson College where we met with the Ryerson Improv team and did a workshop together. It was great meeting new people and trying some different things. Afterwars we got free pizza!

Once the workshop was done, we headed over to University of Toronto fo another workshop. This one was run by Jerry Schaefer, an instructor for the Second City. He showed us some great exercises and games focusing on emotions and being physical characters. I enjoyed it a lot and felt exhausted after finishing the 3 hour workshop.

Next was dinner and then returning to U of T for the actual competition. The format of the competition was to have 4 teams compete on friday night and for on saturday. Each team had 25 minutes to perform their set. Any games were allowed. The points were half made up by the ratings of 2 guest judges and half by the audience. The 4 teams of saturday night were ourselves, Ryerson College, Queens University and our good buddies from Ottawa, the Carlton Improv Association.

The order of the teams ended up being CIA, Ryerson, Queens and finally us. The atmosphere of the night was really good. At first I felt SO tired but when went on, all this energy came out of nowhere. I had a blast! Everyone from our team agreed that we put on a good show and really kept the audience entertained. We were even introduced as the Wolf Killers.

At the end of the night the votes were in. Ryerson came in 4th with 19 points. We were 3rd with 29.5 points folowed by Queens with 30.5 points, which left CIA with 1st place with 35 points! In the end we were all glad we made it to 3rd because the 1st and 2nd palce teams had to perform the winners of the pervious night at the finals on Sunday at 7pm. By then none of us wanted to still be in Toronto, so it worked otu better for us. Plus I was glad to hear that CIA kicked ass. I hope they do a great job tonight (good luck guys!).

After the comp, we al lheaded to a nearby bar called O'Grady's and chatted the night away. Hopefully, a bunch of these gus will make it out to our Iprov Summit in March.

Sunday, I parted was from teh group to spend time with my brother and try to head back to Montreal a bit earlier. I got to see my nephew Charles in all his glory.

Somehow, we left at 3:30pm and got to my house by 8:30pm. No wolves were harmed.