My Collaboration with Hip.Bang!
I have collaborated and created two shows with Tom and Devin: SURVEIL and HOME. Our work mixes improv, audience participation, technology and theatre. The productions are very paired down and focused on personalizing the experience for each audience member.
Hip.Bang! is a comedy duo from Vancouver whose playful, absurd comedy has delighted audiences worldwide. They were nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award for Best Improv Troupe. Tom and Devin have been featured at theatres and festivals worldwide, including the Comedy Central Stage in L.A., Just For Laughs Northwest, San Francisco SketchFest, Toronto SketchFest, NXNE, Rapid Fire Theatre’s Improvaganza, and many more. Both Tom and Devin are writers for CBC Radio’s The Irrelevant Show.
surveil
By Hip.Bang!
Featuring Devin Mackenzie, Tom Hill and Peter Carlone
Directed by Marie Farsi
SURVEIL is an immersive theatre show that confronts audiences with the reality of modern corporate surveillance and invasion of privacy.
SURVEIL is not the show you’re expecting. All audience members must sign a waiver in order to attend. The production is part subversive documentary theatre, part immersive comedy show, and part social experiment that changes every night. SURVEIL demonstrates and deconstructs the ways the world is watching us.
You are invited to join Charles and Daniel at the CES Technology Conference where you will have an opportunity to explore their new, fully integrated surveillance and life improvement system SPOT. Arrive early to sign the mandatory waiver and to prepare your belly for some deep, satisfying laughs.
“The show marks a bold new direction for a company that made its name in comedy with improv, sketch works, and full-length scripted shows like WHITE PANTS, but is increasingly hard to categorize. Along with exploring film series, Hip.Bang! is now traversing into solid theatrical territory, especially with director Marie Farsi at the helm of SURVEIL.”
Production History
rEvolver Festival 2019 (full production debut)
Vancouver Fringe 2018
Edmonton Fringe 2018
TOSketchFest 2018
Creative Team
Stage Manager Aidan Hammond
Assistant Stage Manager Maarten Bayliss
Sound Design Sara Vickruck
Intelligent Software Kory Mathewson
HOME
By Patrick Shannon, Marie Farsi, and Hip.Bang!
HOME invites you into a vision of your own possible future, and the ways your most beloved places could be affected within it.
Before attending the performance, you are invited to fill out an unusually beautiful and welcoming survey. Your answers and the answers of your fellow audience members are then woven in with stories from Haida Gwaii, the Okanagan Valley and here in so-called Vancouver. This personal, mischievous, and resolutely live approach makes each performance of HOME unique to the audience it is performed with.
“Audience members filled out a short survey about what “home” meant to them before the show, and elements from those responses were woven seamlessly into the performance. HOME consisted of real stories, imagined futures, serious reflections on climate change and, somehow, a whole lot of hope. If you ever get the chance to see it, I recommend it wholeheartedly.”
Production History
Historic Theatre – Cultch 2021
Skidegate, Haida Gwaii 2023
The Culture Lab – Cultch 2023 (full production debut)
Edmonton Fringe Festival 2024
Creative Team
Stage Manager Jessica Bournival
Lighting Design Alexandra Caprara
Sound Design Malcolm Dow
Video Systems Designer Andie Lloyd
Video Content Creator Cande Andrade and Patrick Shannon