The Improv club has long been an underdog at FVHS. The club, which meets in the faculty lounge on Wednesdays after school, has less than twenty members and does not advertise or participate in club events.
Still, the club’s members, which form a comedy team, enjoy being tight-knit.
“All of us can just feed off of each other’s energy,” according to member Biana Singer (’14). “We learn from others to be a better comedian or performer.”
Improv, short for improvisiation, is a form of theater where most or all of what is performed is created at the moment it is performed.
“Improvisation can be dramatic, usually in films, but for our purposes, they’re comedic,” club president Nikki Tran (’14) said.
In December, FVHS alumni RJ Brownfield and Greg Weinrich began coaching the team. As the original founders of the first comedy club at FVHS, Brownfield and Weinrich visit the campus every Wednesday to observe and teach.
Comedy Improv showcases their improvisation skills in performances open to the public. The coaches choose four people per team and pit two teams against each other. The team battles for points awarded subjectively by the audience.
At the performance, members play games such as “Freeze,” where a group of members act out a scene, freeze, and another group continues act an entirely different scene from the same positions as the last group.
“Whenever I perform in scenes it takes me to other worlds where I can normally go in real life,” Jeremy Flores (’14) said. “I feel that comedy is a mediator to the sad and an instigator to the happy.”
Tran believes the biggest benefit of being in the club is that it “makes you think on your feet a lot because you’re onstage…it really makes you overcome a type of fear and builds your confidence.”
“It might seem intimidating, but I’ve seen people who’ve never acted before, overcome the challenges, and well, anybody can do it really,” Tran said.
