Building Beloved Community Through Improvisation
Browsing Month
Performers – beginners and amateurs especially, but not only – seem to dread silence. After all, we’re supposed to be reciting lines, supposed to have things memorized and rehearsed and ready to run like a well-tuned engine with no sputtering. A lull in the back-and-forth of speech must mean somebody has forgotten something, and we do not want to look like we don’t know what we’re doing. Improvisors, even seasoned ones, go through a similar …
The evening’s exercise was a variation on one of Viola Spolin’s classic theatre games, the “space walk.” Our instructor grouped us into trios to begin shaping the space at the center of our circle. The task was to treat the space as a tangible “stuff” and build something together. The challenge was that we could not speak to one another, we could only agree with and amplify one another’s movements. The “lead” in our trio …