Courtesy of PROJECT Project

Next Week the Combustion Festival, Toronto’s alternative, experimental, and innovative improv show returns to the Comedy Bar for its third anniversary. Our resident comedian John Hastings sat down with Festival Curator, Julie Dumais (also the co-founder of local comedy troupe: PROJECT Project), to talk about what exactly is going to happen from May 24th-29th.

Pony: How is the Combustion Comedy Festival different from your traditional festivals?

Julie: First of all, Combustion features almost totally out-of-town talent, so it’s not an amalgam of who’s in Toronto alone. We also let them present work they’ve been honing in on outside of town so the shows are more polished but the ideas and concepts are still new to the audience.

*She pauses to sip her iced coffee, and suddenly sends an exaggerated finger point my way.*

Julie: The big difference though, in my mind, is the broad enough appeal between the people who live and breathe improv every day and the people who just want to watch something funny. For the past two years, the performers have really embraced each other while the audience gets to be included in their conversation.

Pony: So what is PROJECT Project, and how is it different from the run of the mill improv troupe?

Julie: Well, we are constantly introduced as progressive, which is a funny word haha. The cast is four people so we have streamlined from this big cast akin to the Wu Tang Clan of Toronto comedy, and morphed into this group that looks to go somewhere new and create something different. We don’t want to be redundant – we make concise choices not be stalled in some format. Perform more, produce less. We are unafraid to nerd out and we continuously want to work at it to make it better. I’ve always been a nerd and a keener, and there’s nothing I like more than nerding out over improv.

Courtesy of PROJECT Project

Pony: When putting together this festival, was it hard to both perform and produce?

Julie: When producing, my performance level is not as optimal. I think about the show as a whole, and when the production levels are higher, it just outweighs my energy as a performer. For that reason, PROJECT Project will only showcase once during Combustion – it just ensures we can do both jobs as best as we can.

Pony: What do you feel are some of the must-see shows at Combustion this year?

Julie: I think we have an amazing array of talent such as Parallelogramophonograph from Austin, 4Track from New York, The Rapid Fire Theatre Young Guns out of Edmonton, and the Tumbleweed Project.

*This next description is taken from the Combustion Festival website, because to be honest, this interviewer forgot to write down the details. He’d instead been repeating the phrase “that sounds awesome” one too many times.*

“The Tumbleweed Project is a crazy-awesome improv road trip that will literally blow across Canada in a big old van, picking up improvisers, throwing down shows, live blogging as it goes, before stopping off for a few days to percolate in a secret improv lab with some incredible mad scientists & directors… and, finally, rolling into Toronto just in time for the newly-minted cross-Canadian improv all-star squad to perform at the 2010 PROJECTproject COMBUSTION festival.”

– There… Sounds awesome, right?

Courtesy of PROJECT Project

For more information about the Combustion Festival, go to www.projectPROJECT.ca (tickets can be purchased there) or follow them on twitter @PROJECTproject.

– By John Hastings.