bringing choices to life...
Transcript of this video:
I was at an event the other day where I’d been asked
to share some ideas about improvisation from theatre.
And whilst I was waiting on my turn,
the previous speaker gave a really interesting talk from the
world of sport, which touched on the kind of ideas
that I also wanted to share about the importance
of experimentation and of focusing on learning
and on relationships rather than just
achieving some outward goal.
So I decided that I would focus in my turn on sharing
an experience rather than giving a talk.
So pretty much as soon as I started, I said something like,
“I’d like six volunteers to come up to the front
to demonstrate an activity.”
And then I smiled, probably, and said nothing.
And then in the next few seconds, you could sort of feel
that something shifted in the room,
that there was some mixture of anxiety and excitement.
Some people thinking, “I’m not doing that.”
Others going, “Well, shall I Or Shan’t I?”
I find that moment hugely interesting.
If you were watching me
before I got up to make this video,
you would’ve seen me walking through Cambridge muttering
as I rehearsed in my head,
and sometimes out loud the sorts
of things I might be saying while I eventually switched the
camera on and started recording.
And I wonder if we need to pay more attention to that,
that liminal space, the Shall-
I-or-Shan’t-I space, the space where Schrodinger’s cat, as it were,
wonders whether it’s alive or dead.
Because there’s a certain aliveness in it.
And before I even ran any activity with those
six people, I asked people to reflect on
what had just happened.
Because that Shall-I-
or-Shan’t-I experience
for people was itself an experience of improv.
And everybody in the room wa,s like it or not, improvising.
They were making moment-by-moment decisions about
what or whether to do something.
Photo by Letizia Bordoni on Unsplash
