Festival Festival
DANCE COMEDY & PHYSICAL THEATRE
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TOMMY TIERNAN The 90s Perrier winner tells us how he took a leap into the improv dark
This improv show started from the knowledge that the best moments from any show are off-the-cuff ones, both for audience and performer. A comedian puts together a 90-minute show and people leave saying ‘that bit when he was talking to the woman in the front row was amazing’, so it sprung from an awareness of being fully creatively alive in the moment. I loved the idea of composing in front of a crowd and I started doing that in Galway as a lunchtime experiment. It was a little bit like being taken from the zoo and being abandoned in the Amazon: very difficult, very thrilling, very pressurised, but soon I developed a rhythm and a way of doing it. It’s not game-based, it’s
not suggestion-based, it’s a conjuring of some sort. At any moment in time, there is something that you want to talk about and it’s about finding that.
When a performer is pushed beyond themselves and out of their comfort zone, they rely on instinct and panic. I can’t demand when inspiration will turn up but I can ferociously dig for it. (As told to Brian Donaldson) ■ Tommy Tiernan Alive in Edinburgh, Gilded Balloon, 622 6552, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30 Aug, 7.30pm, £15–£16 (£14–£15); Tiernan also appears at the Gilded Balloon 30th Anniversary Gala at the Playhouse, 622 6552 / 0844 871 3014, 15 Aug, 8pm, £20 (£18). For a longer version of this interview, see list.co.uk/festival
13–20 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 37 13–20 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 37