By WALLACE BAINE
SENTINEL STAFF WRITER

We all know what improv comedy is, right? Skits with goofy, quick-thinking performers, sometimes with props, always with a punch line.

That’s the “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” stereotype, but that’s not how it’s done in Freefall, a Santa Cruz improv group that celebrates its fifth anniversary Saturday at the Broadway Playhouse.

Freefall works in what’s called “long-form” improv. That means they do an entire 90-minute play, without a script, without an outline, without even a general direction.

Comedy? Sure, sometimes. Melodrama? That, too. Tedium? Never.

“We’re going for authentic moments,” said Freefaller Marian Oliker. “We want audiences not to be just entertained, but moved or touched.”

The five members of Freefall — Oliker, Bob Giges, Arch Mott, Mathew Schreiber and Rebecca Setziol — have been together since 2001. But they spent a full year honing their skills before taking the stage in front of an audience. At the time, they had a sixth member, but when she left two years ago, the players were so creatively enmeshed, they decided that replacing her with a newcomer would be futile.

Inspired by San Francisco’s long-form troupe True Fiction Magazine — the Free-fallers first got together in a True Fiction workshop — Freefall is different from many other improv groups in that it doesn’t perform improv games — such as performing skit without using, say, a personal pronoun — and it doesn’t solicit audience suggestions for storylines.

Instead, the five performers walk up on stage and begin dancing or otherwise moving to a particular piece of music. Moods and in-the-moment feelings gestate into ideas and after a few minutes the music stops and the performers launch into an improvised drama. Ideally, the group hopes to create something wholly new with every performance. “Our goal,” says member Arch Mott, “is to do something like Arthur Miller one night, Neil Simon the next night and maybe Rodgers & Hammerstein after that.”

Still, Freefall members speak of their work as a kind of spiritual practice, a way to explore aspects of their personalities that might not otherwise see the light of day. They work from well-grounded improv precepts such as the “Accept all offers” ideal which allows each performers to build scenes through their mutual imaginations and “escape hatches,” a technique to wiggle out of a scene that, for one reason or another, isn’t working.

Mott, who worked in information systems in Silicon Valley for several years, said that the improv techniques have carried over in how he manages people. And Oliker said that her experiences with Freefall have forged some of the most meaningful relationships of her life.

“Freefall is the only group I’ve ever been involved in that didn’t just break down in terms of power struggles after a certain amount of time. We are a purely collective group.”

Contact Wallace Baine at wbaine@santacruzsentinel.com.