Connectedness in theatre work

What have been your experiences of “connectedness”? The concept is an interesting one in life and in the arts. Feeling connected to the world around you. Feeling connected to your fellow friends and family. What does it mean to be “in touch” with yourself? On stage, a cast tends to be in touch when there…

Using Art and Theatre in Training

Recently I designed and led some arts-based training workshops, which made particular use of drama. These workshops focused on the issues of communication and customer care. The design philosophy centred around “exploration”, drawing on the often long experience of staff. The workshops made use of theatre performance to help participants do two things: 1. reflect…

Responsiveness – re-acting and pro-acting

How do actors respond on stage? Is it important for that response to be fresh each time, even with a scripted piece, or should the response be the same across many performances, choreographed down to the last detail? Unless we are conscious of them, are some of our on-stage responses conditioned from our past, and…

Dance of Breathing 2 – a pure improvisation activity

Purpose of the Activity  This is a standalone activity but can be linked to Dance of Breathing 1. This breathing improvisation explores the effect others have on us, particularly exploring closeness and vicinity.It also can be used to explore status, difference and diversity, as well as the simplicity of play. Process Work in pairs. The…

An exercise in falling into impro

Purpose of the activity Many facilitators of improvisation work with the metaphors of “energising” a group or “ice-breaking” early on at a workshop. A friend of mine, Jack Martin Leith critique ice-breakers because they assume there is “ice” – people in a default state of coldness, stuckness, and that they need “un-freezing”. I agree with…

A rather different Impro warm up

Process Needed – some large paper (perhaps flipchart paper), pens or crayons) A group of 3 to 5 people. Put the paper on the floor, give everyone a pen or crayon and ask them to gather around a large piece of paper. Touch each person on the shoulder and allocate them one of the following…

A Wonderfully Strange Improvisation Activity

A lot of impro games try to get you into the “spontaneity zone”, in the present, in the moment. Some bring you right up to the present moment, but still allow you a few seconds before the present moment to “make something up”. And, after all, a few seconds before the “moment” is so damn…

A neat little breathing exercise

Purpose of the Activity Sharing breathing is a foundation of all communication. This exercise is a great prep game for singing and generally for improvisation work. It is also good in conflict and communication resolution activities, as well as group and community building. This is another fairly minimalist activity whose power lies in simplicity. Breathing…

Scripted Improvisation

Purpose of the Activity You might be surprised that working with scripts can also be very improvisational, but it can! It also creates a useful bridge that is a relevant at work, where employees and managers often have to work to “scripts” and then depart from them in ad-hoc situations. They alternative between predicted and…

Finding Our Connection – A Simple Applied Improvisation Activity

Overview This is a very simple and powerful activity for people who don’t think they know each other. You might have played a version of it before, though not in this exact context. It’s really just a conversation exercise and can work well in small groups, but also with a group working the activity in…

The Institutionalisation of Spontaneity

Of all the fields of personal and organisational practice, applied improvisation and self-organising, emergent processes such as Open Space  are the ones that ought to be a space for very fluid, emergent, and probably transitory forms to come into being.   Networks are pretty structural and I would suggest they bind unnecessarily what is possible…

Sweeping Away the Cobwebs: Improvision and warming up

I’ve been interested for a while in the role of rehearsal and warming up in improvisation performance and practice. In my role as editor of FringeReview, I get to see and review a lot of live improv performance and to talk to those performers and companies about their work. Most improvisers rehearse! That might seem a…