Iowa City performance series offers opportunity for improvisation

IOWA CITY - Painting in a studio or practicing an instrument alone is a very different experience than doing both together, in front of a live audience.

Iowa City musician Curt Oren wants to explore the artistic possibilities of live art. So he's created a new improv art series to do so.

He wants artists - musicians, comedians, actors, painters and others - to gather on stage at the Trumpet Blossom Cafe in Iowa City once a month.

After that, he - and the audience - will just have to wait and see what happens.

They won't have scripts or set music to play. They'll be making things up as they go along, reacting to each other and the audience.

'I've seen a lot of improvised music series in places like Baltimore, Brooklyn, Chicago, Milwaukee,” he said. 'It's something I'm very much interested in, but from what I could tell, it wasn't happening too much in Iowa City.”

So in August, he gathered some friends and fellow artists for the first impromptu performance. That went well, so in September they had the first official event. He plans to keep organizing them on the first Wednesday of each month.

At the September performance, a painter created art while people were performing onstage. Oren said that created a unique dynamic.

'Because of the environment you're in, you're interacting with other performers who are doing things based on what you're doing,” he said. 'It's not just you by yourself in a studio making something you always make. It just creates a larger environment of ideas and people feeding off each other.”

Oren, who plays the saxophone and tours both solo and with different bands, said he hopes the event creates connections between artists that could lead to future collaborations. He also likes that people might come to see one type of art and end up being exposed to different mediums. At the first performance, for example, the Iowa City improv comedy troupe Paperback Rhino brought in their fans, who then also heard Oren and his friends' music.

'It's great to have an event that's totally improvised, because a lot of people think improvisation is something only jazz musicians do, but really you can do it with any type of art,” said Dana Telsrow, an artist who performed an improvised stand-up comedy act at the September event.

He said live improvisation creates a very different type of art than what he often does, which is record videos to post on YouTube.

'Improvisation most closely mimics life,” he said. 'You're acting on present challenges, oftentimes with no preparation.”