Mel Tonken

Tonken was working as a veterinarian in Calgary in the mid-1970s when Keith Johnstone, having relocated from England to teach at the University of Calgary, was searching for an off-campus home for his growing community of improvisers. Tonken and Johnstone co-founded the Loose Moose Theatre Company in 1977, establishing their initial base at the Pumphouse in Calgary, where they began producing weekly Sunday night performances.

The early productions drew on Johnstone's developing competitive improvisation formats, particularly Theatresports, which pitted two teams of improvisers against each other in scenes judged by an audience-selected panel. The early houses frequently sold out, and the company grew quickly, producing original performers and attracting students from across Alberta and beyond. Loose Moose became the institutional platform through which Johnstone's formats, Theatresports, Maestro, Gorilla Theatre, and Life Game, were developed, refined, and eventually disseminated internationally through workshops and touring programs. Original company member Dennis Cahill, who went on to serve as artistic director, recalled that the improvisation was what got people's attention because there was nothing quite like it anywhere.

From 1988 through 2019, Loose Moose hosted the International Improvisation Summer School, a two-week intensive that drew participants from around the world to Calgary each summer. The theatre also developed youth theatre programming alongside its performance and training work for adults. Loose Moose conducted workshops in the United States, Europe, and Japan, making it one of the most internationally active Canadian theatre organizations in the improv field. Tonken maintained his veterinary practice while serving as Loose Moose's co-founder and administrative anchor during the theater's establishment and growth years, combining dual professional commitments across disciplines that rarely coexist in the same individual's career. His veterinary practice, conducted in Calgary while Loose Moose developed as an international force in improvisational theater, represents the practical foundation that allowed the theater to develop without requiring Tonken to depend on it as his sole livelihood, giving the organization a financial stability that purely theater-dependent founders might not have been able to provide.

Loose Moose's development under Tonken and Johnstone's leadership extended beyond its Calgary home into international touring and educational exchange. The Theatre Machine, the professional touring ensemble based at Loose Moose, brought Johnstone's formats to venues across Europe, North America, and Japan, establishing Loose Moose as one of the internationally active Canadian theaters of the 1980s and 1990s and creating the practitioner networks that spread Theatresports globally. Tonken's organizational role in supporting these international activities gave him a position at the center of the global spread of Johnstone's improvisational formats.

The annual Improvisation Summer School at Loose Moose, which Tonken co-administered, brought practitioners from around the world to Calgary for two-week intensive training under Johnstone's direct instruction. The school created a practitioner community with shared formation in the Loose Moose tradition and gave participants a connection to Johnstone's methods that extended beyond the formats themselves to the pedagogical principles underlying them. The international alumni of the Improvisation Summer School carried those principles into improv institutions in dozens of countries.

Tonken's contribution to Loose Moose was primarily organizational and operational: maintaining the institutional infrastructure that allowed Johnstone's artistic practice to reach the scale and durability that the theater achieved over its decades of operation.