the ripple effect of small choices
Transcript of this video:
I ran a session earlier this week with some
of the students here on the subject
of bringing an improv insight to ordinary
and sometimes difficult conversations.
And we did another activity, which I really enjoyed.
I haven’t done it for a while.
We got two people to perform as little scene
and the scene consists of two lines each,
a very mundane dialogue.
It’s a scene set in a greengrocer’s
and it goes: “Good morning.
Good morning. Have you got any oranges? No, we’ve run out.”
So I got the two people to play the scene just as was,
and then I’ve got ’em to do it again
many different times, but each time I gave one
of them a little card with a side coach on it, asking ’em
to do something slightly different.
Some of the coaches were just physical:
tip your head slightly to one side, lean back a bit,
raise a single eyebrow.
Some were more kind
of felt: like there’s a stone in your shoe
or you urgently need to go to the loo.
And some were a bit more relational:
You really like the other person,
or the other person looks like someone from a wanted poster.
you saw this morning. Each time they played the scene,
that little tilt changed the whole scene.
The whole feeling of the scene, not just
for the player who’d got the coach,
but for the person responding to them.
And then the game was to ask the audience
what they thought the coaching tip was.
And although sometimes they kind of narrowed in on it,
often they came up with very different interpretations.
So, you know, in the scene where we asked someone
to lean back, it was, oh, well he’s really less engaged.
Oh, he’s quite aloof. Oh, he doesn’t like the other person.
And so it was a great exercise in seeing
how the tiniest shift in, if you like.
The starting conditions of the scene produces
very different kinds of drama
and crucially, I think different dramas
for different people in the audience.
And I love this exercise.
It was, first of all, it was very, very entertaining
and fun that never does any harm,
but also I think illustrates a quite profound point
that there’s so much more going on in our conversations than
the words we are saying in the, in the information,
if you like, that we are exchanging.
Photo by Jonathan Petersson on Unsplash
