I’ve been a full-time improviser for three years now. Its the best professional decision I’ve ever made. I feel like I’ve found the secret cheat code to the universe. Like, I get up every day and I get to do this? For a living? It’s great.

That’s the short version.

It’s great.

The longer version has a but at the end and encompasses such topics as building consistent income, the nightmare of self-promotion and the heartache of working on a project for months, only to see it fail to catch anyone’s imagination and sink without a trace.

But really it’s a small price to pay for doing the thing you love. Mostly, I’m permanently on Cloud 9. But secretly, my improv world has had a hole in it since 2020 and this month I’ve finally done something about it.

One of my old improv teachers used to say:

To be a truly great improviser, play with a group you trust implicitly and rehearse with regularly, but you must also put yourself in situations where you don’t know what’s going to happen next. You need both extremes to become a fully rounded player.

Your improv playground. And your improv home.

I feel like I have part of that equation covered with Duologues, my monthly show where I play with an improviser I admire but haven’t worked with (we present the show as if we’ve been a duo for a decade). And obviously, I have my actual duo partner of over a decade, Katy Schutte, who continues to be an inspiration and creative bellwether for me (as well as an absolutely superb human being). But what I haven’t had recently is an ensemble. A big group of artists who challenge my preconceptions of what improv can be.

For many years, that group was The Maydays - a team I worked with for almost a decade. I left The Maydays in 2020 for the simple reason that I wasn’t having fun any more. The organisational reality of being The Maydays got bigger than the simple pleasure of being in a room playing with my friends. I’ve missed that ever since.

There are so many reasons to find yourself an ensemble. One of the biggest is the variety. Within your team you’ll have people that you gel with instantly and can improvise with without a thought. But you’ll also have members who will take a bit more work. And that’s a wonderful experience on the whole. What an honour to work with someone who you respect but don’t necessarily understand. And when you’re in a regularly rehearsing group, you have the time to build that bridge between your two improv practises - slowly, intentionally, with joy and discovery. And when you finally find that connection, the resulting improv is more nuanced. That’s something that ensemble-work gives you - the opportunity to grow your improv practice. To knock off some of those hard-edges, and have your own corners sanded down in return.

You can also look to create more complex improv shows. If you work on something together for months or even years, then the scope of what you can achieve grows commensurately. It’s like an improv laboratory where you can methodically work on your art - try things out, measure their success, make new choices with ever more data at your disposal. Happily Never After, a Tim Burton-inspired musical, is one of the best shows I’ve ever been involved with - but it took years of trial and error to get it to a place where it kind of became effortless.

But to work on something for years, you have to stay together for years. It isn’t easy.

I missed being in a team. I missed long drives to random gigs and sitting around AirBNBs making each other laugh. I missed board game nights and surreptitious got-your-backs in the wings of strange theatres just before we stepped on stage.

Something was missing.

But now, finally, I’ve found a new team to play with. And a show about my favourite writer of all time, Neil Gaiman.

And I get to start building my improv practise again.

Deep breath.

Something is starting.