I had a fun time at the Edinburgh festival. We were a big group, pushing ten, who managed to stay on each others’ good side across the near-fortnight of flyering, performing and queuing for the single bathroom.

We did a Superhero show each night. A likeable loser found themselves at the bottom of a pecking order, encountered love and gained powers (chosen by the audience); meanwhile a villain – selected from a rogues’ gallery by the audience at the start of the show – began to fulminate against the world. Hero proves his worth – normally via a chase – the world faces jeopardy, the hero kicks ass and the villain is finally defeated, or causes their own undoing.

I found doing a dedicated run of long-form shows valuable; it came at a good time for me after a full year of classic short form scene work (with Improbubble). Don’t get me wrong, the shortform stuff was both exhilarating and the right training for the right time. I also witnessed the skills I developed over that time finding a home in the longer-form show stuff. Narrative skills within a scene translate to those across a scene.

Still, long form. I’ll be coming back to that before long. I’m interested in exploring different formats and playing with structure – we had a lot in ours, but quite unevenly distributed which I found disatisfying by the end of the run.

Good times, though. http://superheroimprov.wordpress.com/