 POWER OF PLAY
... page 2 ...
Overnight I became a spontaneity addict. Never could I get enough of the exhilaration of creative activity. Playing the improvisation games, I felt utterly alive, amazingly focused, and astonishingly witty and imaginative. Anyone who crossed my path, including the door-to-door salesman, was roped into playing, and when there were no ready playmates, I adapted the games to writing and proceeded independently.
Gradually, I noticed my writing taking on a more whimsical style. I began expressing myself in sentences that had unexpected imagery. (Sara slipped silkily southward, sending silvery sooty shadows sideways and slickly smooched sluggish Samoans.) My talks to groups took on a more entertaining and unpredictable character. Clearly, when I allowed myself to play with words, sentences and ideas, I unleashed a profound sequence. When I am playful with my writing or speaking it stimulates spontaneity, which stimulates imagination, which stimulates creativity, which yields fulfillment--or wholeness.
Schiller wrote of a "watcher at the gates of the mind," who examines ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind "The intellect has withdrawn its watcher from the gate, and the ideas rush in pell-mell."
Keith Johnstone: Impro
Improvisation--or play, for our purposes--is based on the concept of offers and blocks. An offer is anything that is put forth by people or circumstances. We can accept offers and thus the action can move forward. If we block offers the action is stopped. In the POP (Power of Play) workshops we play the game of "Yes And" telling a story one sentence at a time. In it, we are accepting each person's offer of a sentence, literally saying, "YES, I accept your offer, AND this is what happens next--"
Just like telling a story one sentence at a time, our lives are stories unfolding moment by moment. Unfortunately, as children we learned, as Keith Johnstone writes, "never to act on impulse, and that whatever came into my mind first should be rejected in favour of better ideas. I learned that my imagination wasn't 'good' enough." Constrained by our fear of saying/doing it wrong or looking foolish, we became cautious, sticking to safe responses, recycling past patterns, acting out of habit, busily leaving the moment to plan ahead, and skillfully blocking offers so that our stories won't take us into difficult or strange territory.
It's horrible to be laughed at against your will. Either you suppress unwelcome laughter or you start controlling it. We suppress our spontaneous impulses, we censor our imaginations, we learn to present ourselves as 'ordinary,' and we destroy our talent--then no one laughs at us.
Keith Johnstone: Impro
By playing spontaneity games we get to practice, in a fun and safe way, responding to offers out of our intuitive rather than our contained selves. We reconnect with and cultivate trust in our first impulses. We experience the exhilaration of stepping beyond habitual and predictable patterns. We open ourselves to the unexpected, unplanned, unimagined ideas and responses lurking within us just waiting to be tapped. And, the joy of it is that we're laughing most of the time.
<<Return to previous page
|
