Polyglot kings of the improv ring

[Photo/China Daily]

Where free spirits reign, the adrenalin, fun and laughter flow.

It ain't about if he knocks a guy out. It's about how he knocks a guy out. It's the style, the improvization.

- Don King, American boxing promoter

The improv comedians of the world, those whose business it is to deliver knockout punchlines, would no doubt say amen to that.

For most of us the idea of getting up in front of an audience of a few hundred without at least a script to fall back on is the stuff of nightmares, but for the improv artist the very unpredictably of it all is what keeps the adrenalin pumping.

Add to that the twist of an audience many of whose members do not speak your language, and you have the raw material for a whimsical evening that is liable to head off in any direction, and usually does.

This is the stage that improv artists in Beijing step out onto, parlaying an art form born in ancient Rome, refined in Europe and the US and passed on to the rest of the world to do with it what it will.

Beijing's contribution to this potpourri comes by dint of its being home to tens of thousands of people from every nation on the planet. That means the lingua franca of improv comedy in the capital is a zany hybrid of Chinese and English, with other languages sometimes thrown in for good measure.

"Switching back and forth and playing around with the language is fun," says Jeffery Schwab, an American who is a member of the Beijing Improv Bilingual Group, who has lived in China for 10 years.

Beijing improv has always been in Chinese and English, and then a bilingual performing troupe was "naturally born" about five years ago, he says. It now has 12 members, half Chinese and half those of other nationalities.

Anete Elken, an Estonian, says that when she arrived in Beijing 18 months ago she shared a hotel dormitory room with an American in town for the third annual Beijing Interactive Arts Improv Festival. She was invited to watch and joined the group later.

"That was my ultimate yuanfen, meeting the improv people," Elken says, adopting the patter of a Beijing improv performer, in which English and Chinese are seamlessly woven together to suit the communication needs of the moment, on and off stage. (Yuanfen conveys the idea of meeting the right person at the right time in the right place.)