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Coming soon to a small island far, far away, a new improv show is blasting off. Exploration Blank, the Improv Centre’s latest production, promises to transport audiences to another planet of comedic creativity.

Imagined by Alan Pavlakovic, the new artistic director of the performance space, Exploration Blank is a fusion of everything that falls under the sci-fi umbrella.

“I grew up consuming all kinds of sci-fi TV shows, books and movies, everything from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to Red Dwarf and Spaceballs,” he says on a recent video call. “In my head, all of those are in the same world, just at different points in the universe.”

He adds that the show will include the usual unpredictable gravitas one can expect from an Improv Centre production.

“What you’ll be seeing with this show is not a Star Wars or Star Trek parody, but something much more like a space opera,” Pavlakovic says.

Exploration Blank will begin the same way every night, with a crew of space travellers waking up from a cryo-sleep on their way to some distant planet. Any predictability ends right there, as the show devolves into the hoopla and mayhem improvised theatre generates.

“Players might be a robot, mutant, earthling or alien if that’s the point of view they want to have for the show,” Pavlakovic offers. “We’ll also farm suggestions from the audience that will give us more depth and more direction in those characters and their potential plotlines.”

While the setup will remain the same each night, the journey, characters, plot, and action will be entirely up to audiences to decide.

“I’m very aware that I don’t necessarily want to dig too deep into any specific IP because I also have reverence for the people that live and breathe those genres and those stories,” Pavlakovic says.

He suggests that the contrast of “what you have control over and what you don’t have control over” is frequently where the absurd amusement of improv is born from.

Exploration Blank is Pavlakovic’s first original production since taking the helm of the Improv Centre in September 2025, and his enthusiasm is clear.

“A lot of the work that we do and a lot of the greatness that comes out of it is from us being challenged or challenging each other,” Pavlakovic says. “With improv, you might have a really great show, and then you might have like a softer show, and it’s then learning how to make the successes more regular—that is the challenge in my role as artistic director.”

To organically curate the conditions for good improv (think riotous, clever, dynamic, and fluid), Pavlakovic says pushing boundaries while creating small, arbitrary, and essential structures is important.

To help the improvisers tell their story, there is a heavy investment in stage effects and sound design. The technical elements become essential to establish the atmosphere and tone of the show, while also providing a few tools to nudge the plot along.

“When we’re talking about sci-fi, it’s such an effects-​heavy genre,” Pavlakovic says, “so everything from whistles to red alerts, to transporter sounds and ray guns, needs to be heard and felt a lot more by the audience.”

Exploration Blank was conceived as a long-form improv production, distinct from typical theatre sports in that it does not tell 20 small stories, but instead one big story over the entire hour-and-a-half showtime.

But obviously, the foundation of improv, and perhaps the reason the art form itself remains endlessly entertaining, is the unpredictability—that ephemeral chemistry when cast and audience reach a mutual symbiosis.

“Honestly, one of the biggest things that makes improv so important as an art form is that it teaches you how to fail and move on,” Pavlakovic says. “It’s just such good resilience to have as a human being that you won’t always be right, and that’s okay. Improv is a place to go and be yourself.”

That’s true whether you’re performing improv or watching it—and whether it’s set on this planet or a distant one.

Exploration Blank is at the Improv Centre from April 9 to June 27. Tickets here.