About impro amsterdam
Everything you wanted to know about the festival
one of the oldest and biggest improvised comedy and theatre festivals in europe
IMPRO Amsterdam is an annual performing arts festival 30 years in the making. For eight days every February, hundreds of improvisers gather at Het Zonnehuis theatre in Amsterdam Noord for dozens of shows and workshops led by some of the best improvisers .
Whether you’re a veteran improviser, a student, or just a curious audience member, IMPRO Amsterdam aims to show you improv like you’ve never seen it before. It’s comedy and so much more - improv can be dramatic, abstract, musical, narrative, political, emotional, and anything else you can dream of.
a brief history of impro amsterdam
Let’s wind the clocks back to the dawn of the festival. Theatersports, a competitive improv format developed by Keith Johnstone in 1977, first came to The Netherlands in 1988. The format gained popularity swiftly, with local improvisers organizing annual tournaments.
One of the companies that grew out of this new arts scene was Theatersportvereniging Amsterdam (now called TVA Impro), who won the 1992 edition and created the Theatersport Championship in 1993.Despite the considerable hype, some improvisers in the scene felt that winning and scoring points had become too important. They saw an opportunity for change.
In 2021, the festival changed hands and venues. TVA and long-serving festival director Sven Lanser handed the reigns to a new production team led by Flock Theatre’s Gael Perry. At the same time, the Compagnietheater changed owners, requiring the new team to find another home for the festival. They discovered Het Zonnehuis in Amsterdam Noord and fell in love with it (it’s still our venue today).
TVA cooked up the idea to combine the success of its competitive impro spectaculars with more theatrical, longer-form shows and opportunities for people to learn how to get on stage and make stuff up. The company organized the first-ever IMPRO Amsterdam in 1995, bringing in performance groups and teachers from Los Angeles, New Zealand, Denmark, and, of course, The Netherlands.
Over the next several decades, TVA grew IMPRO Amsterdam into a bigger and bigger festival, inviting improvisers from all over the world and staging shows at some of the most iconic theaters in Amsterdam, including the Bellevue, Theater de Pomoen (now Bitterzoet), De Balie, the Rozentheater, and the Compagnietheater.
Three years later, the IMPRO Amsterdam production team appointed Erica Maity as the new Artistic Director. Erica
