I was once so scared of improv that I would run away and cry whenever someone tried to make me do it.

And as a person who grew up in the theatre, studied performing arts all through high school, and started acting professionally at 18, people tried to make me do it a lot.

If I didn’t run away, I would freeze. If my head wasn’t completely empty, every idea I managed to conjure up would lodge in my throat, immediately sucked back down into a whirlwind of self-loathing and negative thoughts.

If my arms weren’t hanging loosely by my side, they were folded tight across my chest. Maybe, I thought, if I used enough force, I would be able to squeeze myself invisible.

Image: Steph Crothers (L) and Alanah Parkin (R) on stage, photo taken by Alex Winner.

 

On stage, even if I did have a script, I could never figure out what to do with my limbs.

As a teenager, I used to set aside time to study the women on TV, in pursuit of a hidden knowledge they all seemed to share. How are people like me supposed to move their bodies?

Eventually, I got good enough at copying them to make a career out of it.

 

I love being an actor – but for a job entirely predicated on pretending to be other people, the work can be surprisingly limiting.

An actor’s physical appearance plays a huge part in the rooms they’re invited into. If you’re young, blonde and “look like a woman”, you’re going to find yourself doing a lot of auditions for “young blonde woman”.

But when your gender isn’t something that’s particularly easy to pin down, waiting for the people in charge to see you – in all the ways you see yourself – can be frustrating and demoralising.

 

In 2019, an actor I was working with brought me along to see an improv show.

I was sceptical at first, but throughout the show, it really started to dawn on me: in improv, you can quite literally be anything. 

In a single performance, you can be Dad, Nanna, the kids and the postie. You can be a four-year-old girl who loves bugs, a talking dog, the town goblin, an armchair or an elderly man volunteering at a bake sale.

And you don’t have to ask for permission from anyone.

 

Later that year, I enrolled in a six-week Improv for Actors course.

I had started to grow into myself – my queer, genderfluid, neurodivergent little weirdo self. Because this time, I didn’t run, I didn’t cry and I didn’t freeze.

Ideas pooled in my mind and flowed freely from my mouth. I didn’t care if I was saying the right thing, or holding my limbs the way I was supposed to.

I experimented with movement, posture and voice – embodying all sorts of characters I’d never dreamed I’d be able to play.

I wanted to do it forever.

 

Two years and a global pandemic later, I was helping a friend on their Melbourne International Comedy Festival show, when I met an improv comedian at the festival artist bar.

She told me The Improv Conspiracy was offering scholarships to prospective students from communities underrepresented in comedy, including queer and trans people.

She encouraged me to apply, and a few months later I had started classes. 

Almost immediately, improv had become the most powerful tool I had for exploring and affirming my gender expression.

As a delightful bonus, it also provided me with a big, beautiful queer community.

 

The community I’ve been lucky enough to forge through the improv scene has been a beacon of wisdom, guidance and encouragement.

We formed The Improv Conspiracy’s first all-trans and gender diverse improv team, Gender Blender, and secured a monthly residency at the theatre in 2024. A member of my team now organises free monthly improv classes for trans and gender diverse people at Cornershop Comedy.

Trans and gender diverse improvisers are lifting one another up, as we make our mark on spaces that have historically locked us out.

We’re flocking together to carve out spaces of our own.

 

I asked my friend Marnie Mills what improv means to her, as a trans woman who came out in the midst of her improv journey.

She told me she’d felt “lost and somehow disconnected” in her improv classes at first. One night, she tried performing a scene as a female robot, and “it flowed… uncannily naturally.”

“It was acting… but also, it wasn’t,” Marnie told me. “In that moment, it struck me that the person I was in day-to-day life – that was the person who was really acting. There I was, strutting in invisible heels, for the first time feeling like myself,” she said.

“It wasn’t a conscious effort to let this girl out. But improv gave me the gift of freedom to live in the moment – to be anything or anyone I wanted to be. And in that moment, I was me.”

 

Being embraced by the queer improv community – as both an artist and a friend – has given me the courage to keep playing in worlds I never believed I was allowed to play in.

It’s also given me the courage to make my own work, rather than waiting for gatekeepers to recognise and validate me.

So four years on from helping my friend behind the scenes of their Comedy Festival show, I’ve written my own. A solo character comedy. And for those twelve nights of the festival, I get to be everybody I feel like being.

I’m not waiting for permission anymore.

 

Alanah Parkin’s Garage Sale runs from 26 March – 6 April at DoubleTree By Hilton as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Directed by Isaac Haigh (MICF Best Newcomer 2023). 

About the show: Greg and Denise have too much stuff! Join Narre Warren South’s most notorious couple, along with a smorgasbord of increasingly unlikely characters at the greatest Garage Sale the south-eastern suburbs has ever seen! You’ll definitely find a bargain. You might even find out the big secret that Greg’s been keeping from his wife for the past few decades. Tickets available here.

 

Alanah Parkin (they/them) is a non-binary and neurodivergent actor, singer, improviser and writer living and working in Naarm. They perform improv comedy with The Big HOO-HAA! and The Improv Conspiracy, and have co-devised and performed theatrical works at La Mama, Theatre Works, Melbourne Fringe, and Adelaide Fringe. Screen credits include Still Me and Residence. Their debut solo show, Alanah Parkin’s Garage Sale, will premiere at Melbourne International Festival in March 2025. Their instagram is @alanahparkin.