What Is The Point of This Exercise?

After an exercise wherein one player had to connect their movement and language while moving through the space and their partner had to respond employing only voice and movement, a student asked, “What is the point of this exercise?”

After 30+ years of teaching…

The thinking process is aligned of the brain’s desire to eliminate the unknown. As I am improvising, if I allow language to arise from a thinking place…

In my 30+ years of teaching Action Theater™ improvisation, I have trained hundreds of dancers/performers on how to use language as a body-experience and hold back on the incredibly strong attraction towards meaning. Very quickly we forget that language is a physical experience. It is a… Read More

I have been thinking about the word “talent.” I no longer believe people are “talented,” I don’t think talent exists. What exists is resistance — resistance to play, resistance to express yourself, resistance to take risks. Either you engage with the resistance, challenge it, wear it down… Read More

I’ve been thinking about why Action Theater is such a valuable improvisation training. It occurs to me that a genius aspect of AT is the awareness training inherent in the work. Once I become aware, more actively aware, of my body sensations I am no longer possessed… Read More

I have been watching my mind again. Or the brain, actually. How desperate it is to eliminate the unknown. And how much that creates my mind, my personality.

Riding my bike through Plänterwald forest this morning to take my son to school, I notice a new shape up ahead. Unrecognizable….