ABOUT SORRY NOT SORRY
Our Mission
To connect with our audience through shared experiences and interests, and to celebrate those interests with unapologetically fun and engaging improvised stories.
Our Vision
To forge connections and bring joy to our communities through accessible, consistent, high-quality improvised stories. To expand people’s perspectives and assumptions of improv, and to present improv as an art form.
Our Values
We Make Magic Onstage
From nothing, we create stories, characters, and worlds. From an inkling of an idea, we start a chain of events that grows beyond anything any one of us can possibly conceive. The stage is our ritual site, and the light in our fellow improvisors’ eyes is our spell component. We discover the story in real time, seeking to entertain, but also to connect and evoke emotional responses. Together, players and patrons alike bond over a shared ephemeral experience.
We Prioritize Safety and Trust
We are a collective of friends that support each other, listen to each other, and make each other look good, both on stage and off. We cultivate trust and make space to be vulnerable, to take risks, and to embrace failure. We prioritize keeping each other safe both physically and emotionally - while our characters may be in danger, we as players never are.
We Improvise With Our Hearts and Bodies
We build our scenes with nuanced characters grounded in the lived experiences of our cast members. We open ourselves up onstage to be vulnerable, and in doing so, embrace that a scene played “straight” has the deepest veins to mine, both in comedy and pathos. By exposing a part of ourselves through our characters, we do not restrict ourselves to gratification granted solely by laughter.
We further the creative possibilities of our shows by incorporating strong movement choices. Our bodies are storytelling tools, and thus we strive to stay attuned to our bodies and use our physicality to make choices that are interesting and impactful.
We Get Excited to Get Inspired
We draw inspiration from the sources that are exciting to us, including tabletop roleplaying, professional wrestling, anime, and countless more. We delight in exploring and twisting genres, and we always make room to discover new formats and sources of inspiration. Within our group, we have a wide variety of nerdy interests, and we love using those interests to tell novel and off-beat stories.
We Build Community
Though we may explore niche topics and nerdy inspirations, we never gatekeep or exclude. The subject matter of our shows may not be for everyone, but all are welcome. Our joy and excitement is meaningless if it is not shared by our audiences.
We are dedicated to removing barriers to accessing our improv, with a particular focus on the inclusion of the neurodiverse community. We promise to consult our audience on how we can improve accessibility to performances. We will strive to disclose common triggers that may arise in performances, outline space accessibility in advance, and host Sensitive-Friendly performances and workshops regularly throughout the year.
We Don't Apologize for Who We Are
Each player who steps onto our stage, and patron into the theatre, has a unique history and point of view. We strive to allow space for this diversity of ideas and perspectives, celebrating and supporting the individual journeys that bring each person into the theatre. We take pride in who we are and where we have come from, and we are unabashedly and unapologetically devoted to our craft. We are messy sometimes, because people and improv are both messy, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Sorry, not sorry.
Treaty Acknowledgement
Sorry Not Sorry Improv acknowledges that we work, live, and create on Treaty 6, Plains Cree Territory: the ancestral space of the Papaschase Cree. This land is home to numerous Indigenous Peoples and Nations including the Cree, Blackfoot, Métis Region 4, Dene, Nakota Sioux, Iroquois, Saulteaux, Inuit, and many others whose histories, languages, and cultures continue to shape and enrich our community. As we come together to perform, we celebrate their tradition of telling stories and recognize that we are all treaty people. Thank you for being present to share in these stories. Keep listening and sharing.