Thanks to Mississippi Valley Montessori School for their support. Located in West St. Paul since 1967, they’re an AMI-accredited Montessori school serving children up to age 6. Email us for more info.
West St. Paul is hosting one of seven stops on the inaugural Sketches of Minnesota traveling “civic improv comedy” tour. It will happen on Thursday, June 8 on the opening night of the third annual Explore West St. Paul Days. The event is free, but space is limited so register early.
- Who: The Minnesota Humanities Center and Danger Boat Productions are bringing this unique event to life. Danger Boat has done policy-inspired improv comedy shows since 2011. An MPR story from March has more on the Sketches of Minnesota tour.
- What: The event is an evening of community conversation and improv comedy. The evening will start with a free locally catered meal. Trained volunteers will lead conversations around civic topics important to the West St. Paul community. Then the Danger Boat Troupe will put on an improv comedy performance drawing inspiration directly from the community conversations.
- When: Thursday, June 6 from 6-8 p.m.
- Where: The West St. Paul Sports Complex
- How to attend: Registration is required for this free event, so register online to secure your spot. Childcare for children ages 4 and up will be provided.
How It Works
“Each show will both help tell a story of a place and reflect back for that community real conversations that are happening in that town,” said Tane Danger, co-founder of Danger Boat. “We never punch down with our comedy. These shows will be sincere, and sincerely hilarious.”
- The facilitated conversations will ask audience members to share what makes West St. Paul great, what they think people get wrong about it, what local divisions concern them, and what future they imagine.
- The improv team will listen in on the conversations.
- Then they take everything they heard from residents and bring it to life on stage through an entirely unscripted improv comedy performance.
Why?
The aim of Sketches of Minnesota is to foster understanding within and across communities, celebrate the state’s diversity, and showcase what residents cherish most about their corner of Minnesota.
Community input: “We need to, I think, democratize some of our democracy work or bring back to the people some of our civic work,” Trygve Throntveit with the Minnesota Humanities Center said in an MPR story. “Rather than the Humanities Center and Danger Boat Productions coming into a town and saying, these are the issues need to care about, and we’re going to walk you through how to solve them, I think we need to come in and say, We care about your community building its own capacity to think, learn, and work together across differences.”
But make it fun: “We also need to make that work fun,” Danger told MPR. “Like, it shouldn’t be drudgery to come together as a community. … We’re actually going to lean into hard stuff. But if we can do it in a way where you can get a group of people together and they are laughing together in a community, that they are going to see the humanity in one another. And that is going to take us a long way to that depolarization.”
What’s Next?
The wider Sketches of Minnesota tour will go six other cities across Minnesota—Winona, Duluth, Glencoe, Waite Park, Emily, and Morris—and then a yet-to-be-announced final performance. This grand finale will weave the best parts of each show into a “whirlwind tour of Minnesota through sketch comedy, song, and story.”
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