Andrew Strano (right) and Charlie Sturgeon of Quiet Achievers. Credit:Simon Schluter Almost 30 shows are exploring the many possibilities at this festival. Changing Jennifers and Bear Attack are presenting long-form shows; one of Improv Conspiracy's three shows Now Showing: The Improvised Movie will create a film, and Play Like A Girl features an all-female cast. Impromptunes are creating musical theatre in both The Completely Improvised Musical and their family-friendly show Tune Your Own Adventure. In Madam Moonshine, Fenella Edwards' puppet character WhereWolf raps songs from audience suggestions; while both FNC and Dave Warneke have audiences interact using their smartphones. Originally from Perth, the Big HOO-HAA! present a competitive format in Gladiators, while Kiwis Snort With Friends have built their show on a New York-style format. The Quiet Achievers, debuting as a duo, are abandoning language altogether to perform physical comedy to a soundtrack of music chosen at random from a playlist of more than 500 songs. While most impro is ensemble or duo-based, highly regarded improvisers Lliam Amor, who has won championships in Europe and here in the 25 years he's been performing, and Sydney-based Rebecca De Unamuno, a World Improv Champion, are both performing solo improvised shows this year. Amor is presenting Revenge of the Ronin. "I was inspired by Chicago improviser Andy Eninger who pioneered the format and taught me some secrets," he says. De Unamuno reprises Open To Suggestion, first performed in 2005 when the show received a Moosehead, a comedy grant that recognises innovative and groundbreaking work. "I deliver a series of monologues, alternating between the characters. By the end of the show all three characters' lives have become intertwined," she says. "I love the fact that I can ask the audience to suspend disbelief ... and they will. No casting agent will ever cast me as a 75-year-old man but on the improv stage I can play that character and any other I choose, which is thrilling and thoroughly rewarding," says De Unamuno, who gave birth to a penguin in the final night of her run in the recent Adelaide Fringe. "For so long we were considered the toothless cousins of the comedy world, straddling both the stand-up scene and the acting scene," adds De Unamuno, who does see a shift starting to take place. She's not the only improviser to lament this situation.

Improv evolution: Rob Lloyd. "Improvisation receives little respect in the arts community, something we still need to work towards and earn. We receive little to no support in the way of funding or grants and interest from media is little," says Patti Stiles, co-artistic director of Impro Melbourne, Melbourne's premier improvisation company, who also run school programs, public workshops and corporate training. "We are invited to international theatre festivals and have launched many careers yet we are not viewed as legitimate in the theatre community," says Stiles, who will be onstage during Late Night Impro. The Quiet Achievers' Andrew Strano, a Green Room Award nominee with a background in acting and musical theatre, points out that despite the increasing numbers of improvisers registering shows for the festival, it is yet to be recognised as a category of comedy, either. "We're forced to go by 'Stand-up', which we aren't, and does a disservice not only to us, but also to the countless stand-up comics who spend hours upon hours crafting their material to be perfect on the night. Or 'Theatre', which we are, but not of the same sort as a scripted, rehearsed piece. Again, it's doing both the improvisers and the theatre makers a disservice to lump us in together," he says. Patti Styles. There is some blurring of the line between stand-up and impro, however. Stand-ups often improvise audience banter and retorts to hecklers. Michael Richards, Daniel Tosh and a fortnight ago, Ray Badran, are all examples of how that can sometimes go disastrously wrong. Ross Noble, on the other hand, has legions of adoring fans for his improvised, surreal stand-up. Festival favourite Fleety, aka Greg Fleet, will also be winging it in his festival show Ad Lib-Oration. A popular format that has emerged in recent years is "Set List" where stand-ups abandon the safety net of their written material to riff on absurd topics projected onto the screen behind them.

Another driving force of the Melbourne scene is Jason Geary, one of the co-creators of the Bingo Board of Doom format, which is one of the festival's long-running, late-night offerings. Geary says that while impro has always had a strong presence within the festival, the evolution of the craft now sees punters more ready to accept it as "a valid alternative" to other comedy shows. "There are more shows now than ever before because the audience is there," he says. Lliam Amor. The worldwide fame and adoration of 30 Rock's Tina Fey and Parks and Recreation's Amy Poehler, both celebrated improvisers, hasn't hurt either in raising awareness and appreciation. The pair are perhaps the two most visible proponents of impro at the moment. "Those women not only make me laugh, they also drive an amazing amount of business to The Improv Conspiracy without even trying!" Adam Kangas says. However the main trailblazers are historically considered to be Viola Spolin, Del Close and Keith Johnstone, although impro arguably has its roots as far back as the 1500s in Commedia dell'arte where "roving players use stock characters and but improvise the dialogue and comic business for topicality," Amor says. Today, the two main styles come from Second City, where Del Close invented the long-form structure known as the Harold and what is often referred to as "Chicago style", and from Keith Johnstone. Originally from Britain, Johnstone moved to Canada to start The Loose Moose Theatre Company and developed his style, which included inventing the games known as Theatresports. It was this concept that first arrived in Melbourne, via Sydney, back in the 1980s and was wildly popular. Theatresports captured the imagination of performers and audiences alike, even being televised by the ABC and spawning the National Championships. "Let's not forget this, or downplay it in anyway. Theatresports was massive. Its effects can still be seen and felt right across Australia," says Rob Lloyd, who alongside Anna Renzenbrink, just won Impro Now's Clash of the Impro Titans at the Adelaide Fringe (his fifth victory in seven years).

"Impro Melbourne has been hugely influential in the Melbourne impro scene. Theatresports is having its 30th anniversary this year and Impro Melbourne is the company that produces it," says Stiles, who trained under Johnstone himself in Canada and is one of the people often cited, alongside Russell Fletcher, Christine Keogh, Geoff Wallis, Jenny Lovell and Simon Rogers, for being key in nurturing the growth and development of impro here. "The evolution of impro in Melbourne has been a bit of a rollercoaster. It started extremely popular, then struggled with obscurity and has now crawled it's way back to being on the verge of the mainstream again," says Lloyd, who is doing three shows this year: a duo show, solo show Rob Lloyd Vs The Monsters plus guest spots in Gladiators. This latest boom in Melbourne can be attributed to a surge of new companies and performers. "If you look hard enough you can find improv on most nights of the week,"Geary says. Companies such as Impro Melbourne and the Big HOO-HAA! run regular nights, but the real recent spike is due to the entrepreneurial Adam Kangas, founder and Artistic Director of Improv Conspiracy. American Kangas trained with both iO and Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) in Los Angeles before opening Improv Conspiracy in 2012 after seeing a gap for the Chicago style in Melbourne. Rapid growth now sees his company running five different shows, two nights a week, year round; plus offering four different eight-week courses in their training program. Demand is such that he's just announced he's opening Melbourne's first permanent space dedicated entirely to teaching and performing improv and sketch comedy. Kangas has just signed a 2½-year lease for a space above Loop Bar in Meyers Place. "We've partitioned the space into three mixed-use classroom and performance areas, and we're calling it The Improv Conspiracy Training Centre and Theatre," he says. Classes will be starting there this month with shows opening in May. Like the form itself, Kangas is inclusive and collaborative. "It should be a big win for everyone," he says of his vision for it. "We have more than enough space and stage time to share, so we should be able to build a great community hub."

Renzenbrink, an esteemed member of Impro Melbourne's alumni with 14 years of local and international performance behind her, believes the new centre will help Melbourne flourish in the same way big impro cities like Austin, Texas have. "We have a much larger population than Austin, for example, which supports five separate improv theatres. The scene is at a crossroads but we need to become a roundabout. All of the groups need to continue to cross-pollinate and support each other," she says. Supporting one another to look good is one of the fundamentals in impro. "The best thing is being part of a wonderful global community of people who are predominantly positive, fun and generous," Renzenbrink says of life as an improviser. While impro is literally created there in the moment, audiences and performers alike not knowing what's about to happen next, performers train for years to be able to make this look effortless. Everyone interviewed for this piece has trained overseas, in addition to years of classes, workshops and actual stage time honing their craft around Australia. Within the world of impro, there is a strong culture of collaboration and mentoring. "In impro we develop crushes on fellow performers as easily as schoolgirls do on One Direction," says Renzenbrink, who lists her current idol as being Melbourne-based Sarah Kinsella. "She performs with such bravery and commitment every time she hits the stage and can switch from beautiful, tender emotional work to high energy brain melting," Renzenbrink says. Kinsella, a long-time ensemble member of Impro Melbourne, is one of only a handful of improvisers to make a full-time living out of it by adding teaching and corporate training to the mix. "People come to workshops sometimes just to learn to be more free and have fun and suddenly they are open to a whole new way of looking at things. Improvisers are by nature people who want to give you a good time. Who wouldn't want to be around that kind of energy?" For details of the impro shows check comedyfestival.com.au