We Can Be Heroes
In years past, a passage by Vicki Noble, a healer of sorts, really had struck a chord with me. It had to do with her approach to cancer. In the passage, she said that she didn’t focus so much on attacking the offending cells. Instead, her energies were trained on awakening, enlivening and empowering the […]
A Culture of Play
A Culture of Play This new book is a collection of my research and writings on improvisation. Some of the chapters are familiar, but there are several new unpublished works in these pages. Please take a look at the link. There is a preview. Happy New Year and Enjoy!!! Now I can sleep for a […]
Improvisation and Trance: an Experiment
Recently, while at the Applied Improv conference in San Francisco, a Dutch colleague approached me to collaborate on creating a workshop that was focused on bringing the participants towards a state of trance. She had some knowledge of neo-shamanism from reading and participating in some European personal growth workshops, and she wanted to collaborate with […]
What Connects Us? (Chapter 1, section 1)
In the Ever-Changing Maze: Introduction In Greek mythology, there is the story of Daedalus constructing a maze for King Minos of Crete in order to hold the Minotaur, a half man-half bull hybrid. The Minotaur was born from a union of Minos’ wife and a bull, which was payback from the gods for Minos’ greed. […]
Upcoming series: “What Connects Us?”
The Internet, Smart Phones, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Foursquare, Xbox, YouTube, Skype, Email, the Googleverse, international flights, highways, trains, cars: in a world more ‘connected’ than at any point in history, the human race seems to act or ‘is portrayed as’ more disjointed, factionalized, fragmented, and anonymous than ever before. For most of us in the […]
Improvisation and the Evolution of Memes
[This is a segment of an article in development] Variation, one of the essential parts of the theory of evolution, is all about mistakes. Selection is about those mistakes being discarded or used. In improvisation, whether a mistake is useful or should be passed on depends on the social and contextual environment of the current […]
The Human Brain on Improvised Theater
Here is the text to a 5-minute speech I gave at Ignite Portland 10: After performing and teaching improvised theater for years, I noticed two things. 1) in the best of performances, many of us would have this incredible feeling of ‘unity of thought and action’ as a side effect during the show, a sort […]
The Power of ‘Yes’
Currently, I’m doing some contract work with the United Way here in Portland. One of my tasks is to visit funded organizations and initiatives and talk to the people there to get their stories. Today took me out to an organization called JOIN that does outreach for the homeless to get them up on their […]
Thoughts on Status in Improvised Theater
The introduction of the notion of “status” was transformational for improvised theater. Keith Johnstone’s conceptual innovation took the art of improvised theater into even deeper territory in the 1960′s. Adding the idea of status focused improvisers more fully upon a person/character’s behavior and intention. It allowed them to meditate on what are the ‘key’ actions […]
Inspiring Words
I’m in the middle of doing research for another book in the works, and I came across this from Brian Sutton-Smith in his book The Ambiguity of Play: However, modern chance games and modern festivals have fallen away from religion and become secularized. Yet one can see that, along with all forms of play, they […]
