Given the prompts of "boring" and "TV," Jeffrey Schwab, who heads local improvisational theater troupe Beijing Improv, and two other players put on an opera with live guitar accompaniment.

It was just a practice improvisation game at 4Corners bar and restaurant in Gulou on a Monday evening, but they went all out. Schwab sang the role of an American wife who runs away from her home, intolerant of the husband's addiction to boring TV programs. Emily Foate danced a tango to welcome the liberated wife to South America. The yawning husband, acted out by Jeff Shi, helped drive the story forward and gave other members a good laugh without speaking a single line.

Schwab said at the upcoming Beijing Improv Comedy Festival, audiences can look forward to a lot of musically-driven improv. The two-week-long event, initiated by Beijing Improv and running from Thursday until April 21, will host 16 improv groups from around the world. The groups often made connections to one another through social networking sites. Besides five local groups, such as the bilingual Beijing Improv Group: BIG and the Chinese crew People's Republic of Improv, the participating groups include the Impro Mafia from Brisbane, Australia, Istanbulimpro from Istanbul, Turkey, and SPIT from Manila, Philippines.

Most performances will start with audience suggestions to get the performers going, like a location or relationship, and then the scene goes wherever the players take it, said Foate, a member of Beijing Improv as well as the festival's marketing manager. The festival will be an exchange of different humor, languages, cultures and ideas, she added.

Besides improv, the festival will also give the floor to the city's vibrant stand-up performers at the 200-seat Penghao Theater for a larger audience, and free workshops to encourage new participants.

The idea behind the festival, said Foate, is not about just sharing laughter and wild ideas with each other in the group, but with those in the theater.

"Everybody appreciates the chance to laugh," Foate said. "It's an escape from everyday life and you get to see some fun stories being created spontaneously."

Paying the laughs forward, all proceeds from the festival will go to Hua Dan, a local NGO that helps migrant workers develop life skills through theater.

Improv community in Beijing

Improvisational performance has been going on in the West for a long time. For Beijingers it's still a relatively new concept, though it has been gaining more of a following among locals in the seven years since Beijing Improv was founded. Now a majority of the members of the improv community in Beijing are Chinese.

"The thing I really like about the improv circle in Beijing is that you get people from all walks of life, and who haven't necessarily even heard of improv before," said Foate, also a founder of the bilingual group Plus One. "Lots of people just walk in and discover it. It's a feeling of a community."

"My general take is that the Chinese people who learn improv are liberated mentally," said Jesse Appell from the US, a member of Beijing Improv who also teaches his Beijing high school students improv skills in English.

"When you get up and go on stage to do improv, you probably are going to fail. The only way to get better is to fail and learn, and eventually you wind up having these people who get over the fear of failing and they start to learn from being up on stage and doing this difficult thing, usually in a foreign language," Appell said.

For the Chinese who act along with English-speaking improvisers, they are usually free spirited and open to try different things, he added.

"They try to have a fun. It's very different from the way Chinese are educated. The Chinese who invest their time in the community get a lot out of it," he noted.