Celebrity Theatresports®: Julia Zemiro speaks to Alternative Media

Celebrity Theatresports®: Julia Zemiro speaks to Alternative Media

Thirty years of ‘improv’ comedy is on show this Saturday at the Enmore Theatre, with an all-star cast of Australia’s best and funniest Theatresports® stars. Julia Zemiro has been there (almost) from the beginning, arts reporter Greg Webster caught up with her about it all.

You’re a drama school graduate, but what role has Theatresports played in your acting craft?

It’s absolutely vital. I dug drama when I was 15 and then I got to Sydney Uni, was doing plays with the dramatic society there and Theatresports started up at Belvoir Street. Every Sunday night we would go and watch these people do these games and I was just fascinated. I did classes, figured out I knew how to do it and met all these amazing people who are still my friends today. I’ll be playing with two of them – Josie O’Reilly and Ewen Campbell – on the night. What other kind of training says you can get up, try to do a scene and if you fail it’s OK. The idea is to fail with a shrug of your shoulders and say, ‘Well that scene didn’t work, we’ll get up in a few minutes and try again’. We don’t live in a world where you are encouraged to fail. As an actor it was so great to pick up these skills where you figure out how not to panic on stage and even when you do panic, brilliant things can come out of that. For me, because I never did sport at school, it was the closest thing to a team sport. We had an all-girl team at the time called ‘The Indestructibles’. Josie O’Reilly was in the team as to was Robyn Butler, who created The Librarians and Upper Middle Bogan. We loved working as a team – doing it under the pressure of not knowing what’s coming next and in front of three hundred people.

Improvisation is a staple of drama class warm-ups, but how is it different doing ‘Improv’ in front of an audience?

Theatresports was originally designed to fit a time limit of a few minutes but not long after that I began to improvise ‘long-form’, where you have to sustain a story for twenty minutes. Remembering everything that’s happened is quite a challenge, so it becomes the ultimate listening skill. That’s what acting is – it is to listen and react to what someone else has said to you. When you are on stage and you don’t know what is going to happen, the most important person is the person on stage with you. So we are exposing this to an audience but we are showing them not to be afraid. We don’t mind if we fail and that magical things can happen when you least expect it. It’s important to play the obvious scene and not suddenly pull something out of the sky. You know, ‘two people breaking up’. What happens? Lots of things can happen. So you take your cues off the person and what comes into their head. The great thing about Theatresports is to say that, ‘OK we’ll do that scene but it has to be done in a minute and someone has to die by the end or you have to do it without words or you have to do it in accents’. All of a sudden it has all these other layers. I trained at the Victorian College of the Arts for three years and loved it but there is no doubt that the grounding that ‘improv’ gave me was just invaluable and still is now.

How does that transfer to television?

On Rockwiz, I’ve got a script for getting ‘in’ and ‘out’ of each segment but what happens between me and the contestants is totally improvised. Ninety percent of the time they are just so wonderful and they’re real cards themselves, so the harder I listen and the more open I am to them, the more lovely things can happen. It’s the same with Eurovision. I interview people backstage before the commentary and some of them don’t speak English. It is about how well you can communicate with that person. It is the same with Home Delivery. I know what I am going to do with the person but if they go off on a tangent, I am free enough to go off and follow that tangent – which is what happens with ‘improv’ – but then I’ve got to bring you back to the story, which is ‘the terrible time they had at school’ or ‘the great time they had in their first job’.

I liked you in Agony Aunts because I thought it was a different way of being real on TV.

Well Adam Zwar, who put the show together was asked what was the difference between putting together Agony Aunts compared to Agony Uncles and he said, ‘Well the women actually answered the questions properly and the men just told funny stories’. I think the women really took his questions on board and we really enjoyed going, ‘Hmmm. Let me think about that? Yeah well actually if I thought that, then I would say this…’ Yeah, it was a really fun first couple of seasons I have to say.

I’ve seen Rockwiz live and noticed just how much on stage material actually ends up in the final product. The retakes are really sharp and you move on, so I guess that’s the ‘improv’ skills coming through again?

Totally, and that’s a really nice thing you’ve been able to do there as a writer and a critic to go, ‘Well I watched it live and then I watched it back on TV to see what makes it in and what gets edited out’. My producers are always looking to try and include as much amazing stuff that happens on the night that isn’t script based. When Brian (Nankervis) does the initial perusing of the contestants he’ll come back and say, ‘Look we’ve got four beauties there but look out for Dave, he’s really going to be great value’ – and they are. You know, they’ve been waiting their whole lives to be on a show like this so you’ve got to honour them.

Indeed, probably even longer than that. Tell me have you ever had the terror of just a blank moment?

Oh of course. Oh my God, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh many. But is that so bad? Life’s full of difficult things. You can be in play and know all the lines and one night you dry. It happens. I remember at University doing a show and on opening night I completely dried in the middle of this big monologue and I never got over it, never found my way out of it and had to have someone sitting on the side of the stage every night because I never quite got my confidence back in that particular show. If I look back on it, part of it was not being quite prepared enough but you learn from that. When it comes to ‘improv’ you’re out there saying to yourself, ‘Oh my God that last team just did an amazing scene’, and we are sitting here saying, ‘Oh this is dreadful’. Then there is the technique judge who will honk you off stage – so you get off. I remember one season there was a great idea where if you wanted to, you could honk yourself off. There is nothing more freeing than being in a team and saying, ‘You know what? I’m in this scene and I know it sucks. OK, give me that horn!’ It is the ultimate in saying ‘My ego is so non-existent in this. Why should you have to watch a shit scene? I’m going to honk myself off and then when we come back to do our three minute game, hopefully we’ll be back on track’ – and often you are. The moments you forget completely and go blank are really important because usually it’s because you are not connected to what’s happening – you’re not listening. Or you’re very new at it still and need more stage hours.

Sounds like ‘dramatic euthanasia’. You’re reaching for the ‘improv pill’.

Yes, that’s right (laughing). I like that.

Why do you think Theatresports is so popular?

My belief, having watched it for a long time is that at first, people didn’t understand it. ‘Improv’ was used in acting schools, as you say, behind the scenes as a tool but it wasn’t a performance tool. I think the bottom line is that people sit in the audience, look at it and go, ‘I don’t believe that’s made up. I don’t know how you did that. I’m going to come back next week and watch it again and see you make that up from scratch’. Then when I get non-believers come up to me in the foyer, I would always say, ‘Have you got a minute? OK, how about you and I improvise a scene right now?’ This is someone who’s never done a class. I say, ‘Let’s pick a topic let’s do it,’ and I just coach them through it. ‘What would you say to this? What would happen now? What do you feel like saying now?’ It’s not magic but when you watch it and it is amazing, it is magical, there’s no doubt. Yet there are simple rules to follow. People sometimes ask why it needs rehearsing? How do you rehearse ‘improv’ if it’s made up on the spot?’ And I say, ‘It is like sport. You practice the rules and the skills. So you practice your story telling skills, your singing skills, your accent skills, you practice working with a team – who comes on first, second, third because some people love to be first and others like to wait right until the end because they have these ‘zinger’ one-liners to end the scene. Then the game is on that night, at that moment when the clock starts and there is a new audience in place. That’s why I think they call it Theatresports – you practice the rules and then get out there and play.

Theatresports has always had the fundraising side. How important is that?

I think this started with us because Andrew Denton used to play in one of the original teams called ‘Writers block’ – a fantastic team – and another person in our company, Julie Dunsmore, worked for CanTeen and her partner did a lot of stuff for CanTeen as well. Then Andrew Denton a few years ago did a show called the Topic of Cancer – a documentary about teenagers with cancer. It was a wonderful documentary that we’d never really seen before. Getting cancer is devastating but when a young person gets it, what are the differences around that? Andrew really got into it and so did we, but it was really by accident not by design. I suppose now, years later, the funding scenario is so dire, so full on, and so competitive. We are not going to raise a million dollars on Saturday night, we are going to raise what we can. It is not how much cash you raise – you can do that with $400-a-head dinners – but it’s all about bringing people together. For those thousand people watching us on stage it’s just a little reinforcement. We’ve just seen these active people doing amazing things on stage but this is something a kid might miss out on. We should be revelling in the fact that we have two legs and two arms and that we speak and we’ve got these amazing brains and we’re alive and we can do that. I hosted it last year and this terrific girl who was a sibling actually came up and spoke, and she was extraordinary. It is something that can tie in very nicely with the night. The point is to talk about it, to not be afraid of it then celebrate what an amazing body onstage can do. We also have a CanTeen team and they are bloody amazing. They give us a run for our money.

Saturday August 15, 8:00pm. Enmore Theatre, 118-132 Enmore Rd, Newtown. $28-68. Tickets & info: ticketek.com.au or 02 9550 3666.

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