Event

Collyard/Nelson, Chairs

Chicago Improv Festival's Experimental Category featuring:

Collyard/Nelson: Marketing executives Alex Collyard and Cody Nelson (with assistance from their intern Sami Martin) deliver an ad seminar detailing to their audience why they're the best in the business, sharing stories and knowledge about what it takes to be "Da Best".

Chairs: Melissa McNamara and Gavin Donnellan present "Chairs", a fully improvised piece that uses spacial awareness as the conduit to develop content. Given only 2 chairs to play with, the players weave in and out of scenes dictated by the distance and formation of these sole props in an otherwise empty space. Where the chairs are the foundation, the relationship between the two, McNamara and Donnellan, as improvisers and as characters that fully embody this space, is at the heart of each performance. They open with dualogues inspired from the audience's suggestion and transition seamlessly into moments built on space, timing and movement. At times quirky, and other times, heartfelt, the piece bookends itself with the original duologue to create a cohesive theatrical event.