Walking the Streets

by educ95si

I lived one of my dreams yesterday. Of performing without preparation on the street. I always thought street theatre had a kind of raw power that couldn’t be matched by showcased work on a stage. Its true. The connection you make with people on the street can be very very moving. If someone stops to watch you on the street, its an honor. A privilege because they dont have to. They do so voluntarily. On the flip side, if someone walks away, it might be a sign. Raw… thats the best way I can describe it. Stripped of all decorations. 

So here’s what we were doing. 4 person free-form improv on the street at Lytton Plaza in downtown Palo Alto. We had a guy from out of two watch our whole show and give us suggestions. We had two teenagers that asked to be in scenes and games with us of their own accord! We had a guy randomly jump in and join a scene midway. We had a baby and mother watch us doing a scene that had a mother giving birth in a hospital. 

Was definitely a win, I thought. We had people give us their email addresses so they could come back and play with us. At one point one of the teenagers was like “What is this?” … he was clearly intrigued. I loved it. 

 

I’ll post the date for the next event here on the blog in case some of you wanna come out and be part of it! Hope everyone is having a nice weekend. 

 

-Saif

Improv Game

by payalcshah

Unfortunately I couldn’t find the time to test out my improv activity until this Friday at the end of dead week. But I did do it! And I learned a lot. 

First of all, leading an improv game that invovles scenework with novice improvers is really difficult! So my emotion/mood label improv activity, models after very typical improv games like the “dinner party” game that we had in class. The thing about novice improvers, you run into a lot of roadblocks. Being Stanford though, I feel like the “embarressing” factor of improv doesn’t really exist.  No one really cares that much if they make a fool out of themselves. More so, the roadblock is allowing your mind to be free of inhibition. It’s definitely a problem that I have too in class.  I almost always break character just to allow myself to think about what I should say.  It’s not even to consider my options of what I could say and reply with the “wittiest” one to be considered funny and respected by the room, but it’s honestly just having something, anything to say in response.  

Novice improvers feel the same way, but 10 times more because they’ve not played the little games that build the skill to be able to do it better in scenework.  

Anyways back to my game in particular.  So my main goal with the game was to make improvers me more socially conious of moods and personalities when they interact with people. Because in fact, in the everyday world, people come from social contexts.  Whether they’re jittery about a party they’re planning, or depressed over a recent family death, people are in a state of mind in every interaction they have with people. 

The game was definitely difficult for the novice improv goup that I did it with. Initially, I thought a two-person scene would be simpler than a three-person scene for the improvers.  I still think that judgement was a good one! But the first problem I ran into was when both players wrote an emotion/mood down, one person misjudged the game. The whole scene consisted of him portraying the emotion he wrote down rather than giving the other character hints to how they were feeling.

I thought giving the characters the chance to write down a mood made it easier for them.  Clearly, if it’s a mood they wrote down, it’s an emotion/mood they’ve experienced or can resonate with.  That connection makes it a lot easier to communicate it to your partner.  However, I think the way I led the game in class in which I just handed the players an emotion/mood worked a lot better, and left out opportunity for confusion. 

In class, I allowed the audience to pick a setting.  The same thing was done when I hosted the activity for the second activity, but as I led the activity, I made sure to tell the characters to pay attention to setting.  I’m sure they paid attention to me saying that, but I also think that because the scenes only consisted of two people, setting also become more important.  When there’s three people on stage, each player thinks about what mood he/she is experience individually, but also how to help their two partners figure out what they’re feeling, and on top of that pay attention to setting. It honestly gets to be a lot to think about.  Having two people on stage simplifies things a lot.  Now each player is only thinking about one other player, and suddenly setting became a lot more integral to the scenes. Being in the audience the whole time, I realized I could really see the scene playing out in real life a lot more when it clearly was defined by a sense of place. I enjoyed it more!  

After we did 4 runs of the activity with two people in each scene, I asked the people what they thought about the activity. They all seemed to share a sense of difficulty of balance during the scene.  Either the players were primarily focusing on communicating to the other player what they were feeling (mainly this one) without any regard to what clues they were recieving to uncover their own emotion, or vice versa.  

In real life, this is the case. Given a social interaction between two people, each person individually has his/her own mood occupying his/her mind. However, after speaking with my novice group of improvers, I realized I would make a change.  

For those that are interested in leading my game to a group of novice improvers, I would start with a simpler version of my game.  The simpler version would entail one-way traffic, before they dive into two.  To clarify, only one character of the two in the scene is given the emotion.  So each character now has a separate role, but they both must pay attention to setting.  One character’s main role is the give clues to the other character to what emotion they’re feeling, and other other’s is to slowly figure out what they’re feeling and really inhabit that emotion.  

Once the players master this game, then the two-way traffic game (in which each player performs both roles) can be followed!

But overall, everyone really liked my game and there was lot of positive energy.  

As the creator of the game itself, I’m just really impressed by how easy it is to entertain a room of people with nothing but each other.  Most of the “adult” board games like catch phrase, taboo, hilarium, etc are improv games! What people don’t realize is that these games are very easy to self-lead. Having created an impov game definitely has inspired some low key but fun party-activities to do with my friends in the future!  

Testing out my Improv Game

by jloftus1189

Hey everybody,

This weekend, I decided to try out my improv game that we played in class last Monday. In case you don’t remember which one it was, we all were assigned an individual of either upper, middle, or lower class status, but had no idea who the person actually was. We were forced to figure out our own identity through observing how the other people involved in the scene interacted with us.

I thought the game went well enough in class, but I was worried it would prove too difficult or intimidating for friends who had never had experience with improv before. I got a group of twelve friends together and explained the rules of the game to them. I sort of led the first scene and commented on what to do next while the scene was unfolding. Once everyone seemed to have an understanding of how the game was supposed to work, I let the first group of three give it a try on their own. To my surprise, the game worked extremely well! Everyone really found it fun and interesting, and a couple people even commented on how they gained some insight into social class perception and treatment. Most if not all of them were able to guess their assigned character by the end of their scene.

I was surprised that a group of improv rookies could tackle the game with such enthusiasm and success. I guess any group of willing people can improv with the best! I think it really helped that I didn’t emphasize the fact that it was an improv game. I merely told them that it was a party ice-breaker type of game. I think some people can be intimidated by the word improv, because they think the skill of improvisation is reserved for those who have either taken improv classes or are skilled in that area.

I also think the fact that I really tried to make the parameters of the game pretty tight, showing everyone how they should proceed if the game took various turns. With examples on what kind of questions to ask and how to respond to them, I gave everyone a templet to follow for their own acting.

However, it is always very important to emphasize creativity and spontaneity. I told everyone numerous times that if they had an impulse to say or do something, then they should go for it, even if they do not know how their action would turn out. I think this was one of the reasons everyone seemed so natural in the improvisational environment. That and the fact that we had all been friends since freshman year and felt comfortable around one another.

 

-Jason

Originality and Music

by payalcshah

This reading this week definitely startled the way I thought about creativity. LIke I had told Saif when he posed the question to our class, when I think of creativity and originality, I think new.  Some of the most powerful text of the chapter was towards the end in which association of new and originality is completely discounted. 

It doesn’t necessarily have to complete newness that is produced by you, but rather a truth that originates from your being. It can be inspired and even use the ideas of others, but as long as some aspect of it can be traced back to you.  To relate the quality of the piece produced by the piece back to other areas of the reading, maybe the quality (that attests to the thought given to the originated work) can be evaluated by how different ways the piece can be seen. 

In the arena of music, I’m very quick to judge pop music. Often when I hear songs like, “The Show Goes On” that have sampled the songs of the past, I immediately made a judgement like, that’s so unoriginal. However, the music industry is transforming today just as it did every other year of the past. Sampling music is just another original way of incorporating old art into new musical compositions.  In the 80s, it was video and dance that were other altering the music industry.  Many musical artists not only had to think about the songs that they produce, but also how it fuses with video media and how it moves with dance. 

And very recently, sampling, mash-ups, remixing etc have become the new media layer of the music industry.  In the end, The Show Goes on is a very different song than Float On by Modest Mouse. Although, both are high energy, and upbeat, The Show Goes On is resonates more of a “dive into life and experience everything” feeling for me.  On the other hand, Float On ultimately keeps me resolute yet calm. These songs can evokes so many different emotions and memories for people, and even though the one incorporates a strong layer of the other, the two are definitely unique pieces of creativity. 

 

Brief Reading Notes

by riegera

Nachmanovitch’s idea of resonance really struck me as well. The discussion of those things in life that just feel “right” or resound with one’s inner truth was fascinating. People in the arts and sciences have been yearning to understand this principle. Although this is a bit off track, what came to mind when reading was a research recently conducted to assess why Grammy award winning singer Adele’s song, “Someone Like You” infallibly reduced listeners to tears. While this song is not a tear-jerker for me, others, while listening are said to feel several “right” moments in the song that are insatiably moving.

The Wall Street Journal reported that when surveying those who were familiar with the song: “Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an “appoggiatura” An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. “This generates tension in the listener,” said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. “When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.”

It is fascinating to see this existential/philosophical analysis of the “right” that relays an inner truth analyzed in this manner. It is hard to know whether the Adele song accidentally employs these techniques or purposely utilizes these sonically dissonant tones to evoke emotion in the listener. Either way, this would be a fascinating phenomena to research further and I look forward to reading more into Nachmanovitch’s theories.

Retake Musical Fiasco

by riegera

Projects that are a bit rough from the start truly benefit from giving it a few retries while implementing helpful changes and adaptations. The first time I tried my musical fiasco exercise during out of our classroom, I had a group of too many people who were hyped up on pre-finals snacks and the exercise was difficult to conduct. Still, I learnt many useful things from this round that I was able to implement into my second out-of-classroom try. This time I had a digital catalogue of various instrument sounds in the form of a whole browser full of youtube sound clips. Surprisingly the “intro to musical instrument” videos aimed at toddlers were super inspiring as people quickly selected their choice of instrument. 

Lindsay’s comment on my last post regarding this exercise suggested that this could be a good exercise for musicians. Musicians who are keen in the world of free-styling and musical improvisation would do a variation of this exercise during jam sessions, however this could be a very helpful exercise for the more classically trained musician who is not as accustomed to spontaneous musical collaboration. I would love to try this and see if it could be effective. 

Overall the exercise was great. It was conducted with 4 of my close friends and therefore everyone was very comfortable in that everyone knew each other. I did not completely realize the way in which one’s comfort level within a group impacted the game. Therefore if I were to perform this exercise in a different setting, with individuals who were less familiar, I would definitely do an improv warm-up beforehand. The way in which the exercise gets “band members” to open up, and collaborate as a team can be immensley helpful in numrous environments. 

 

 

Subjectivity of Quality

by superambitioussoup

(Note about try number 2: 😦 So, I was also thinking along the same lines as Alfred and wanted to try my ice breaker game on my dormmates. Unfortunately, given how over the year, house meeting has turned into more of a get some free food and leave, I didn’t even get to explain my game this last Thursday…maybe I should have probably work more on publicity…or be more assertive next time…or not stuff my face with Chipotle…and with that, let’s talk about the reading)

What really got me was Nachmanovitch’s idea of resonance. I could never really explain why I sometimes would feel strongly about some art piece or some word at some moment in time, but “resonance with an inner truth” seems to hit it spot on. We can recognize quality because quality resonates with us.

Then I was thinking about subjectivity. Something which I believe to be quality might be junk in say…Saif’s eyes, but I think Nachmanovitch sort of brings this up with ambiguity. He goes on to describe how being true to oneself helps us get closer to a “collective consciousness.” Now is this collective the “human” collective (human as opposed to animals and plants)? If so, then this suggests there is a common ideal of what is quality, thus going against the subjective idea that I had of quality. In the same paragraph though, he mentions resonance with an “inner” truth which suggests a more subjective ideal of quality….not sure what to make of it…thoughts anyone…

Beauty and Originality

by theschan4

I liked the reading about the concept of beauty. Beauty seems at first to be quite simple, but the more one thinks about it, becomes increasingly hard to define.

The author’s idea of extracting the concept of beauty by addressing the idea of music is something that I can relate to, being a musician. While I generally tend to think of beauty as being generally aesthetically pleasing, beauty is much more than that. For instance, there exists a vast range of music that strikes the listener as beautiful; so then what is beauty? The author mentions that beauty is recognized when our being resonates with whatever it is at the moment, it could be a sound, a thought, an action,or a feeling.  

I also find there to be contrasting pressures for young artists. I can relate as I tried to compose some music once, that I felt compelled to either produce a composition that was “accessible” (what I thought other people would like), or to try to be so “different” from the past that I knew for myself that I was trying too hard. In this vein, there were a few closing thoughts I particularly liked: “Originality doesn’t mean being unlike the past or unlike the present, it means simply acting from your own being.” and “There is no need to alter your voice to please others.”

 

Being Your Own Audience

by savannahkopp

The Free Play chapter talked about not changing your art to appeal to people, not trying to make things more commercial or accessible or anything different from what you intend it to me. This dedication to your own artistic vision, an integrity based on preserving your initial intent and not “selling out” or dumbing down your art, is certainly valuable advice. But think of the art that you look at or watch or read or listen to that is just awful or highfalutin or inaccessible–the strange experimental music or the stream-of-consciousness-never-been-edited-written-on-a-roll-of-toilet-paper novel. For these obscure pieces of art, is all that matters that the person who made them is satisfied with what they made? Do we as viewers/readers/critics then have no say in the quality? I understand that most art has certain audiences and that not everything is meant (nor should it be) to appeal to wide groups of people. But I disagree with the chapter’s assertion that changing to appeal to an audience should be avoided at all costs. Preserve your original artistic intent, of course, but if you want to make an impact, or be received, at least consider your hypothetical audience–people who are probably like you in their artistic taste. I’m not saying create FOR an audience, but consider your audience–especially for other types of art, which go through revisions, perhaps in the first draft you write for yourself only, and after that, you find out what you’re trying to say and express it more clearly. Clarity is vitally important, in my opinion–maybe you have a great idea or passion but if no one can understand what you’re saying or showing, you may as well not have said it or showed it at all. Maybe I’m making this more simplistic than it is, but the point of my post is not that you should accommodate a theoretical audience, but that you should think of it, eventually, if it will help you find and achieve your purpose. Preserve your initial spark, but find a way to share it–because art is interaction. It goes on longer than it takes you to create it–and the power is that each person has their own experience with your art–so make it possible for them to experience it!

 

It’s A House Thing!! =0)

by adelena1

For my improv. game, “A Party With Trees,” I had already done it with the class, now it was time to do it outside the classroom, and what better place to do it then at the House I live in!

Now, to start out, every Wednesday, we have House Meeting, where staff member and residents convene together to discuss House-related events, upcoming affairs and other community announcements. So, on Wednesday, I thought it would be a perfect fit seeing that majority of the House would be there, and it would also be great thing to do.

The way I approached it was way different than that of how it was performed in class. So, the rules were explained and instead of implementing the changes of the improvements that I thought would help the game, I thought that maybe I should stick with originality. As it soon turned out that it was way better than the first time! (No Joke)

Approaching it from the same stand point as before, with a host and two party attendees. But since there were more people, I thought that instead of having two, three was a perfect match! Prior to House Meeting, the cards were distributed out to the residents; via emails, residents were somewhat informed of what the activity (game) was going to be about. Nearing the end of House Meeting, the game started with my RA as the host. Two people went up at first and then someone else jumped up next. And then from then forward, it was a huge success!! In truth, it legitimately went as much as I had imagined it would, maybe even better! As there was the host and the three improvisers as party guest; one thing that I thought was different was the fact that if the host was stuck, he/she would focus on one of the party improvisers and start giving details and guesses about the persons portrayal. For example, I was the host, along with Jacob, Jasmine, and Carly. For me, I thought I was going crazy, with all three of them moving around and doing their improvising. But once I cleared everything up and really focused on one of the party people, for instance, Jacob. Jacob (“the-phobia” [a person who is afraid of hearing “the” he would scream/yell and say “don’t say that”]) was a hard one to guess, because he kept on telling “Don’t say that dude!” and “AHHH!!”… but then I noticed that if I said “the”… a second later, he would freak. So, I thought he was afraid of the word “the”. Correct! And now, he was the host!! =0)

I think this game worked a lot better with the House than it did with the class. I think it was due to some changes between the two groups. For one, with the House, there are thirty other residents; there were more people than there were in the class. The idea that this game would be best for more people I think made the host and party improvisers a lot better oriented. For another, we all know each other and we have lived together in the house past the halfway mark; we are like a family, and I think that was what made the game really fun and exciting and successful!! =0)