Who the hell are we?
Anananas & Pampamplemousse is the international improv group composed by Dan Seyfried, Gael Doorneweerd-Perry and Cédric Marschal.
Formerly named after the company we co-created back home, La Carpe Haute, we rebranded ourselves to offer a fresh, juicy-fruity improv experience, with always the same fun! 
Here you can find a little bit more info on us, our shows, some pictures and videos of our past festivals, shows and tours in the last few years, the other projects we are part of individually, the future events to know where to find us, and of course all the info you need to contact us if you are interested to have Anananas & Pampamplemousse in your community!
Gael Doorneweerd-Perry
Gael practices improv for about 12 years in Strasbourg and he is co-founder of Anananas & Pampamplemousse (formerly La Carpe Haute). He’s also co-founder of the SIN, an international network of improvisers in Europe.
He is travelling and created formats to continue to explore and share, including with his partner on and off-stage, Laura Doorneweerd-Perry. After their tour around the world to teach and to perform their show Object of Affection in 2019-2020, he settled in Amsterdam where they created Flock Theatre together.
Gael teaches improv and loves it! He travelled in Europe and over during the past few years, performing and teaching, and found a thousand ways to improvise. His dream is to combine it to be a multifaceted crystal of improv! Now, he shares this way of acting around the world, physical and noisy, kind and silly, emotive and crazy.
Dan Seyfried
Dan is member and co-founder of Anananas and Pampamplemousse. He’s also a member of European group Ohana. He started theater at the age of 9 and discovered improv shows in 2007. He loved it instantly !
He had the chance to travel in all french speaking community and later internationally, traveling to teach and/or play in more than 20 countries around the world. With Théâtre de L’Oignon first and with La Carpe Haute, The Fraltons, Origami Swan (duo w/ Ella Galt) and You&Me (duo w/ Alicja Dobrowolna). Now, a new adventure begins with the rebranding and their new names Anananas & Pampamplemousse.
What he loves especially in improv is the connection between the partners, the sincerity and the playfullness, enjoying the whole spectrum of improv : from silly to dramatic or non-sens to smart. He remains an improv nerd, all styles of show can make him happy. And that’s what he loves the most, it’s that the journey is infinite!
Cédric Marschal
Cédric has been playing and teaching improv in different companies in Strasbourg (France), he’s a member and co-founder of La Carpe Haute, now Anananas & Pampamplemousse for the international experience.
His idea of improv is to share and learn as much as you can, that’s why he has been travelling around 17 countries in Europe and beyond, playing, learning and teaching. Back home, he gives courses on a regular basis, and specific workshops on the topics he loves. His style and the one of Anananas & Pampamplemousse could be described as explosive, sincere, physical and silly.
He loves miming, clowning and playing with the body, that’s what he wants to bring in his performances and workshops.
Where to find us next?
Just Play
Just Play is our world-wide reknown freeform show. With objects, our bodies, the music and more, the show is exploring smoothly plenty of different worlds. Crazy, visual, poetic and full of energy, be ready to scream, laugh and cry!
Switch
Switch our latest format: a science-fiction narrative longform. What if in the course of evolution another species would have taken over the world and humans where just considered an animal?
The Fraltons
The Fraltons is our show featuring our brother Morgan Mansouri. In a totally wordless play, the four French Bandits will show a rocambolesque story full of guns, horses and whisky in the Wild Wild West.
What is Just Play?
Just Play is a freeform show, full of energy and variations, in which the inspiration will come from objects picked in the audience, the music, the lights, the bodies, and everything that might happen in the moment.
More videos are available on YouTube.
What can we teach you?
A Journey in Freeform
In this workshop, Gael, Cédric and Dan will give you keys to enter the wonderful world of Freeform. The 3 Frenchmen will give you their insights on how they practice and love to play on stage.
Love each other, play as one in the group and use everything. With all these elements brought together, come and have fun with us in the infinite playground of freeform!
Individual workshops
Click here to have the list of the workshops we are teaching individually: physicality, characters, connection, genres, and so much more to explore!
→
As individual teachers, Cédric, Dan and Gael have been active for years all around the world, to bring their skills and visions to eager improvisers.
Cédric is for instance teaching ‘Your body can create 1001 characters!’, ‘Mime and object work’ or ‘Raise the stake!’. Click here to see the entire list.
Dan is for instance teaching ‘Unplug your brain’, ‘Here and now’ or ‘The power of a silent line’. Click here to see the entire list.
Gael is for instance teaching ‘Soundeffects and Noisy People’, ‘A French lesson in Physicality’ or ‘Improvising Miyazaki: Miyazaki’s Kingdom’. Click here to see the entire list.
Workshop list – Cédric Marschal
Mime and object work
This workshop focuses on a side-skill : miming and object and space work.
Having a clear vision of your environment, the objects and furnitures that are around, the size and weight of the mimes you use, is an helpful friend to make your stories more true to you, your partners and the audience.
Let’s take your mime in hand !
Your body can create 1001 characters !
Change your voice, play with your face, transform your attitude, your body is a formidable metamorphosing tool !
Through guided exercises based on Lecoq’s work, we will discover the power of every muscle and the thousand forms your body can take to personify characters you didn’t imagine playing. They are all at hand, let your body embodies them and let yourself incarnate playfully new ranges of characters.
Raise the stake !
A couple, cooking and talking in the kitchen, we’ve seen that start 15,000 times. But how can we go from that « common » beginning of a scene to unique and memorable, without the need to bring space monkeys and zombie T-rex ?
Let’s go back to the very basics of a story, of improv, of acting, the stake of a scene ! Step by step, we’ll take our scenes apart to the bone, to magnify what seemed banal, and make it touching and unique.
Be silly
Our brain is an amazing story-making machine, but sometimes it makes us feel too heady and it becomes our own trap, our only barrier. During this workshop, through guided exercises, we will unplug that brain to allow us to explore what our body language, intentions, emotions and imagination can suggest. Step by step we’ll say goodbye to rational and let absurd and stupid guide us to new playgrounds where new amazing stories emerge.
Workshop list – Dan Seyfried
Here and now
Why do we improvise? What do we really want to share with the audience? Stories of course… but not just any!
In this workshop, inspired by meisner technic, we’ll discover all of it with our feelings, our body and our instinct. Step by step we’ll find what’s really matter for the characters and why they are playing these scene. To be sincerely improvising here and now, with our partner.
Unplug your brain
Our brain is a formiddable machine to create and imagine, but sometimes it’s our own trap, our only barrier. This workshop aims at unplugging our brains, to explore what our bodies have to suggest. We will train not to be heady or too rational, to allow your scenes to be silly, to accept and play the nonsense. Let your bodies surprise yourself and embrace their strong propositions, to just have fun, play like kids, discover new places, characters and relations, to follow the inspiration and your instinct.
The power of a silent line
“bla bla bla, bla bla bla”. That’s what a scene too often looks like. As improvisers, we often fear the silence because we think that nothing is happening anymore. That’s not true ! Many times silence is the best line we can tell !
Don’t panic, we’ll talk in this workshop ! But we’ll also learn to answer by silence. A living silence meaning much more than a verbal line…
Side-coaching !
From constraint, freedom is born!
It is often said that the improviser is, at the same time actor, author and director. It transcends him but it can also limit it because it has to think of everything.
In this workshop, we will focus on directing and being directed. On stage, the improvisers will only have to think about his primary role : being an actor.
Everybody says I love you!
Love. The most powerful feeling! We like to feel it, we like to give it and it’s always beautiful to watch it on stage. Why ? Because everybody feels it and know how good you can fell when you say or hear I love you!
In this workshop, we gonna explore the intimacy of love. Not only first kiss or breaking up, because love is way more! It’s also everyday life, good news, bad news or platonic love.
At the end, you won’t be shy to say it at loud on stage! You’ll see, it can be magical !
Atomic improv
We are made of molecules. They react to each other, they have no choice. Most of the time, we know what will happen, but sometimes, it’s a surprise !
In this workshops, we’ll train to do. Just do. Experiment and see what happens, essentially through body movement and emmotionnal reactions. First, we’ll train to react in a predetermined way and have fun with that. And step by step, letting ourselves to be more and more free and surprised !
Workshop list – Gael Doorneweerd-Perry
Miyazaki’s Kingdom
The human world can be a dark place. Can also be simple and uplifting. In fact, nothing is ever black or white. We go through everyday life looking for moments of magic. What if we switch it, and look for everyday moments in a magical world?
We’ll learn how to build Miyazaki’s stories with heroes who care: about the world, about nature, about the human part of us, about our soul.
The best way to understand what it means to be human, is to not be one.
French physicality
Your body isn’t just a vehicle to go from a place to another. Your mind isn’t just a control tower, slightly connected to your body by your spine. You are entire, so BE entire.
This is a workshop about connecting the mind to the body, to recreate what should never have been separated: you. Using crazy games to create an instinctive reaction right from your body, you will learn to develop your physicality from top to toe, and to be conscious of it.
Accept to lose control, your body knows how you feel!
Man is a wolf to man
Stop crying like a pussy! You have to be strong! Be a man! Just a few things that are said to young boys. And suddenly as adults we forget how to cry, how to be soft, how to be a man.
This workshop (addressed to men—cis and trans) will explore modern masculinity, and create a safe space to experiment and share experiences. We will explore the whole range of emotions, situations and relationships between men. It will take us to a way of improvising: with depth, care and variation.
Let’s build a better world, by being better men.
Sound effects and ...
The stories, the emotions, the relations can be created by words. They can also be created without them. But between speaking and keeping the scene silent, isn’t there a world of opportunities?
This is a workshop about supporting your acting using sounds. Realistic sounds, crazy sounds, annoying sounds, but the most important: your own sounds! Through different techniques and exercises, we will work on layering the imaginary world around you with sound effects to make it deeper.
Unmute your mouth, and let’s be noisy!
Improv toolbox: Freeform, scene edits and organic transitions
We all love to see movies with smooth and gentle transitions. To see different pieces of a jigsaw fall in place, echoing previous themes in parallel dimensions. To follow a camera moving and jumping from a character to another without the viewer noticing it.
This is a workshop about transitions and edits, to create organic freeform shows, without any break. Using different techniques (from classical improv edits revisited to movie shots), you will learn different tools you can use to improve your freeform, longform or even shortform shows.
Boundaries aren’t limits, they create playgrounds!
Improvise a silent play
Everybody knows Charlie Chaplin’s movies, Buster Keaton’s or more recently the French “The Artist”. How beautiful, strong and even engaged are those movies without using a single word!
Based on space object work, emotional movements and using music, it will lead the group to learn all the tools to create a good silent improvised play.
Make your audience dream without having to explain them how.
What do people think about us?
Anananas & Pampamplemousse has infectious energy and they take incredibly creative risks that pay off each time. The show is fluid, fun and I recommend you one of their shows yourself!
Gael, Cedric and Dan, with their show, “Just Play”, are a reminder of the artistic value of enjoying what we do on stage. They are like three wise, playful children, trapped in adult bodies, sent to this world to make it a bit sweeter and happier.
Anananas & Pampamplemousse is one of my favorite improv comedy groups in the world! As a performer and festival producer, I have the opportunity to see many different companies and they continues to be one of my favorites. Their imaginative physicality, larger than life facial expressions and hilariously charming scenes make for an unforgettable show that reminds you of the joy that is live improvisational theater. As an audience member and producer, I cannot recommend them enough!
Imagination, freedom, trust, great joy and playfulness. Everything is possible when this ensemble is on stage! I love it!
Anananas & Pampamplemousse excel in playful, physical theater. Their scene starts can be boldly absurd, and the team enthusiastic and committed support of each other makes for very enjoyable storylines. They’re a lot of fun to watch.
Something impossibly magical happens when Cédric, Dan and Gael step on stage together: eyes widen, smiles broaden, bodies lean forward in their seats. Their playfulness and joy is matched only by their incredible skill as improvisers and ability to pull the funniest thing you’ve ever seen from mid air. It’s quite simply some of the best improv I’ve ever seen.
Do you remember?
