THE POWER OF STORY: Notes of a performance workshop with Tom Henderson and Ginny Going

GESTURE CHOIR. Ginny Going leads a gesture choir at the InterPlay Atlanta performance workshop, "The Power of Story." In this particular form, members of the gesture choir, each took a turn leading and telling a story on the same theme. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

written by Ruth Schowalter, Leader-in-Training

On Friday, December 5, 2014, InterPlay Atlanta received a special treat--a performance workshop, "The Power of Story," with Ginny Going and Tom Henderson, national InterPlayers visiting from Raleigh, North Carolina.

Here's the description that Ginny and Tom gave InterPlay Atlanta to advertise the performance workshop:  

What makes a story interesting? 

Answer: Almost anything. The details of our lives are interesting because they connect to the universal themes of our human condition. We know this from the experience of babbling (performing for each other). What about a story in performance? Same answer, and the techniques are not so different. The most important thing is this -- be excited about telling your story! Even seemingly mundane stories can be entertaining if you're excited about telling it. If you're not excited, your audience won't be either. We'll play with ideas and tools for bringing fullness to your story telling thus generating engagement with your audience.

InterPlay performance is about stepping into our fullness said Ginny Going in her introduction at the beginning of the workshop. It's all about intensity. We step into our big body out of our ordinary body. We make shifts and create contrasts. She referenced our workshop, "Give Performance a Hug" with Phil Porter and how we worked with expanding our range from fast to slow, loud to soft, and big and small. Ask yourself, "How can I build contrast in dynamics?"

After warming up InterPlay fashion, Tom Henderson led us in a series of story telling exercises using 3 different techniques:

1. DISCARDING CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
First, we got practice discarding chronological order. We were given instructions to start our stories some where else other than the beginning. I stated my story in the middle of a July morning in the badlands of Montana out fossil hunting just when the 40 mile winds started blowing us down the hillside and across the rock encrusted terrain. What liberation to forgo details and jump into where the action starts! I could have started at the end when all the fossil hunters sat cloistered in a trailer huddling over their computers waiting for the hostile winds to settle down.

TEACHING BY DOING. Here Tom Henderson teaches the power story telling by telling his own story. Tom and Ginny brought 20 years of InterPlay experience to the InterPlay Atlanta performance workshop. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

2. THE GOOFY POINT
Then we had a chance to find a point in our stories where we could become inarticulate and speak in gibberish or a made up language. Tom demonstrated with a story of his own about the presence of a dangerous chemical in his work environment. The gibberish can express frustation, confusion, or anything that just fails to be expressed adequately using words.

3. THE LEFT TURN
This story telling technique allows story tellers to digress from the main plot of the narrative, to follow a topic that comes up in the story but is not central to it. The story teller can return to the main storyline or continue to follow the "left turn." 

Whenever telling these stories, we have been given permission by Tom and Ginny to leave the audience "hanging." In a performance, we do not have to complete the whole story. Often, InterPlay performers want to tell a bigger story than is necessary, they told us. Finding the end to a performance is a skill and finishing a story sooner is better than finishing it later. Leaving the audience wanting more from your performance is preferred to the reverse.

FINDING A UNIVERSAL THEME

UNIVERSAL THEMES. We were asked, "How do our stories connect with universal themes?" Tom records our theme words as Ginny supervises and supports. What a team! (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

Next, was identifying universal themes. Unfurling a roll of brown paper across the performance floor, Tom and Ginny asked InterPlay Atlanta workshop participants to name the first universal themes that came to our minds. We wrote down themes such as danger, love, adventure, change, chaos, loss, beginnings and endings.

Then they asked us, "How do our stories connect with these universal themes?"

What ensued was fun, stimulating, and just plain interesting. In pairs, we told one of our own stories connecting it to a universal theme. We had three minutes  to tell a full-body story playing around with contrasts using any of the previous techniques we had just practiced. I spoke on the universal theme of adventure and talked about my time in Australia, when I was searching for dinosaur tracks on the Victoria coast and had to scale down a cliff to Knowledge Creek fitting my feet into a wallaby trackway and holding on to shrubs!

Then half of us workshop participants were asked to stand up and to share our stories with all of the participants but condensing our three-minute stories into one minute!

After that, if we had had enough time, we would have completed this universally themed story telling exercise by reducing its telling to 3 sentences! Only!

As the workshop hours dwindled, we played with three more InterPlay forms: DT3's (dance talk, dance talk, dance talk), Side by Side Stories, and Gesture Choir.

SIDE BY SIDE STORY TELLING. Al, Jennifer, and Christine told Side by Side stories about high school. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

Key teaching points from these InterPlay forms included:

We can move our bodies to tell our stories.

A story exists in more than just a box in our heads.

When moving, a storyteller gets a fuller sense of the story at a cellular level.

GESTURE CHOIR. Getting a fuller sense of the story at a cellular level and so much more. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

Timing is important in a performance.

When working together with other performers, "sacrifice" for the good ending.

Let movement be movement.

Let the story emerge from the body.

Part of letting go is releasing the need to tell a continuous, linear story.

When telling a Side by Side Story, move around, do not stay in the same lane; interrupting is good, picking up words or phrases from other story tellers is good; keeping your visual focus on the audience and not other players is desirable.

THE POWER OF STORY WORKSHOP HAS CONCLUDED.  Participants thoroughly enjoyed Ginny and Tom's workshop and were sorry to see it come to an end. There was so much more fun to be had. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

Our two-and-half hours with Tom and Ginny was rich! We felt the fullness of our own stories and each others. Wahoo! Thank you! 

Blogs about other Performance Workshops InterPlay Atlanta has received:

Ecstatic Following with Sheila Collins 

Saying Yes and Finding the Thing with Sheila Collins

Creating a Container and Creating the Thing with Sheila Collins

Foundation and Decoration with Sheila Collins

Give Performance a Hug with Phil Porter

The Power of Story with Ginny Going and Tom Henderson

NOTE TAKING.  That's me, Ruth Schowalter, center, taking notes about what Ginny Going is saying in "The Power of Story" workshop. (photo by Callahan Pope McDonough)

GIVE PERFORMANCE A HUG: An Atlanta InterPlayer's Notes from Phil Porter's performance workshop

GIVE PERFORMANCE A HUG: PERFORMANCE WORKSHOP WITH PHIL PORTER (September 2014)--photo by Ruth Schowalter

Written by Ruth Schowalter, InterPlay Leader-In-Training

It’s an exciting time to be an InterPlayer! This October, InterPlay, a social global movement dedicated to ease, connection, human sustainability, and play, is celebrating its 25^th anniversary. On the eve of such an auspicious time, InterPlay Atlanta had the good fortune to host InterPlay co-founder, Phil Porter for multiple events—a performance workshop, Second Saturday, The Secrets of Leading InterPlay training, and a Leading and Following workshop.

PHIL PORTER

Here on this blog entry, I would like to share from my notes a few of the key ideas that Phil Porter presented in his workshop entitled, “Giving Performance a Hug,” to us InterPlay Atlanta performers who have just named our group, “Soulprint Players.”

Here goes...wheee...!

SMOOTHING OUT THE SCARY IN PERFORMANCE

We are surrounded by performance of high caliber and have immediate access to it, explained Phil Porter. Exposure to that excellence can be scary for us in some ways.

In InterPlay, he explained, we are creating endlessly every time we do something. He referred to the “nob of intention” which we can turn up or down depending on what we want to do when we are creating—and this IS performance!

Therefore, we can begin to smooth out the “scary” part in performance by thinking of everything we do as a constant process of creating.

EXPANDING OUR RANGE

When we acknowledge the aspects of our humanness, InterPlay performers can push or play with what they or “doing” or “creating.” We can pay attention to what part of our “performance” is consistent and expand our range from there.

For example, what might I learn about myself, my partners, my world when I talk loudly or softly, quickly and slowly, or in a high-or-low-pitched voice? Walking in an “unusual” way or path is another activity, which allows us to experience a wider range of possibilities when creating. “Ideas for walking are endless,” Phil said, “A pot full of ideas, living things, trying to crawl out.” He assured us that something--the “fullness”-- is there, inside of us.

InterPlay asks us what we are capable of doing.  And by expanding the range of our possibilities, we have more access to information about ourselves, thus enhancing our lives and performances! Hurray!

PERFORMANCE AS HABIT

As performers, we must be IN our bodies so we have access to it to perform. Phil describes the people in his InterPlay performance group, “WING IT! Performance Ensemble,” as “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

In InterPlay, we have a wide range of forms available to us such as “side-by-side stories,” “following and leading,” or “shape and stillness.” We play with them regularly so that they become a part of us and our repertoire as humans and performers opening us fully to our voice, movement, and story telling abilities.

THE IMPORTANT CONCEPT OF OPPOSITES

Ask yourself, “What am I doing? How can I do the opposite?” Performing allows us to make aesthetic choices. In the same way a painter who has used a lot of green on her canvas might add a splash of red for contrast, so might an InterPlay performer slow down or speed up his movement or speech. Opposites enhance!

“We tend to go back to the middle,” Phil Porter said. He encouraged us to play around with the range of what we think is possible.  In one vocal exercise, he asked us to play around with volume at either end of the spectrum of loud and soft. When we finished, he asked us to measure our “loud” and “soft” on a scale of 1-to-10. Then he had us do the speaking exercise again to try to increase our existing range on either sides of the spectrum. To support this change in behavior, we were asked to step farther apart from our partner and not be too concerned about what our partner could or could not understand. Oh, was that fun playing around with speaking REALLY LOUD and REALLY SOFT!

SIMPLICITY VERSUS COMPLEXITY

Other forms of dance like ballet might provide simplicity or structure by having the dancers look and dress alike. In InterPlay, which fosters multiplicity of voices, performers are all different sizes, shapes, ages, and races. Therefore, it is the structure of the InterPlay forms that provide the SIMPLICITY for a performance.

And the COMPLEXITY comes from individual choices that InterPlayers make. For example with the form, “Walking, Stopping & Running,” individuals can choose when to walk, run, or stop, to enter and when to leave. They can choose to move alone or with others, to go with or against them. The possibilities are infinite!

MOVING INTO NEW TERRITORY

By exploring the concepts of opposites, simplicity and complexity, and expansion, we can move into new territories of BEING. As we create, we expand, we connect with others, and the change becomes a part of ourselves. We discover that our willingness to expand has allowed us to grow.

Ta da! Expanding our humanness, expands our creativity, which enhances our performance!

 

MULTIPLICITY OF VOICES. Here are some of the participants at the conclusion of Phil Porter's performance workshop, "Give Performance a Hug."--photo by Ruth Schowalter

MULTIPLICITY OF VOICES

The beautiful aspect of using the improvisational tools of InterPlay is that it results in a multiplicity of voices being heard and affirmed. InterPlay performers are individuals making choices about how they want to BE in the moment either as a solo performer or an ensemble one—indeed a creative act!

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Summarizing my experience from Phil Porter’s workshop, “Give Performance a Hug,” I have these thoughts:

I love InterPlay! I love Phil Porter and my fellow InterPlayers.

I appreciate being “given permission” to BE more myself through play.

I find it exciting to think of the actions that I take in my life as an endless process of creating.

Being invited to expand what I know about myself through playfulness alone and along with my community excites me.

Finally, it just takes my breath away to think that BEING MYSELF and playing with others through voice, movement, and story telling can go to the stage and become performance!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Thank you to Jennifer Denning, InterPlay Atlanta director and founder of “Soulprint Players,” for holding the space for InterPlay to grow in Atlanta and nurturing it in numerous ways. Jennifer has lovingly cultivating a group of InterPlay performers in the past year, ensuring that we Atlanta InterPlayers get training from the best (see this blog, this one, and this one for performance workshops with Sheila Collins).

PHIL PORTER with Ruth Schowalter--photo by Christine Nichols Gautreaux

Thank you to Phil Porter from coming to Atlanta and giving us such an enriching weekend. Thanks also to Cynthia Winton-Henry, co-founder with Phil for developing such a rewarding way to live our lives playfully. Sheila Collins you have given us a wonderful foundation for “Soulprint Players” here in Atlanta!

INTERPLAY WORKSHOP #3 (May 2014) WITH SHEILA COLLINS: Creating a container and engaging the audience

GETTING IDEAS FROM THE AUDIENCE. Here InterPlay performer Christine Gautreaux takes notes as Pittsburgh InterPlayer Sheila K. Collins (far right) instructs Atlanta InterPlayers, (right to left) Jennifer Denning (Atlanta InterPlay Director), Kate Savannah (Asheville InterPlayer), and Sister Jewel (International InterPlayer) how to engage the audience. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

by Ruth Schowalter, InterPlay Leader in Training

Yes! We Atlanta InterPlayers are fortunate to have Sheila K. Collins, the dancing social worker, author, and seasoned InterPlayer instructing us on how to develop as an InterPlay Performance Ensemble. On her third workshop, we focused on how to develop our relationship with the audience.

"Create a container and engage the audience," Sheila explained. "Welcome people. Get everyone to breathe and invite them to breathe with a noise or a sigh. This is one of InterPlay's root practices--breathing. We improve how we feel using oxygen. We are all people, and we need to breathe." 

After breathing together with the audience, Sheila instructed us InterPlay performers to continue warming up the audience getting them to move in their chairs by stretching, clapping, and stomping. We could play with rhythm and noise, dividing the audience in half to do one or the other. This kind of audience engagement is part of the InterPlay practice.

Once the audience is engaged, it is time to delve into their creativity and get ideas from them on the theme. For our purposes, we worked with the idea of "wild places in nature," and we experienced what  the audience members might feel while generating the ideas. We came up with the following cues or triggers for performance: wisdom, cycles, birds, trees, peace, and fragile.

PLAYING WITH REPETITION AND SIMPLICITY. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

We reviewed InterPlay practices of ecstatic following and leading, simplicity, and repetition. We played with the side-by-side story, the gesture choir, the big body story, the dance-talk 3, and the three-sentence story.

THE GESTURE CHOIR. Here Sheila tells a story that is too large for one body to hold or express it, so InterPlay performers echo her movements. "It's a billboard instead of a flyer," Sheila described this InterPlay form. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

Atlanta InterPlay's third performance workshop concluded with these insights from Sheila: 

• The more we play together, the more our bodies work together.

•  The idea of the "aesthetic group collective" is that individual performers make sacrifices or choices that help shape the overall group performance.
• "The Mystery of the Still Point" is an incredibly fascinating way to create moments of newness said Sheila. Watch the group creation and ask "Where do I have to be for something new to occur?" Be in a place of stillness, "hanging out in the sanctuary." Allow your hand to move, create a shape, use your whole body. Four to five performers hold shapes as long as possible, experiencing the psychological edge. "Go into that place and have the next movement occur from that place."

INTERPLAYERS REUNITE. InterPlayer Marquetta Dupree and her son, Zaire, visited us at the end of our performance workshop. As Jennifer Denning builds our Atlanta InterPlay Performance Ensemble, we are collecting InterPlayers in the Metro-Atlanta area. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

If you want to read more about the Atlanta InterPlay Performance Workshops that Sheila Collins has conducted, check out these blogs:

ECSTATIC FOLLOWING: Learning what it means to be part of an InterPlay performance group! 

 

INTERPLAY WORKSHOP #2 (March 2014) WITH SHEILA COLLINS: Saying Yes and Finding the "thing"!

INTERPLAY WORKSHOP #2 (March 2014) WITH SHEILA COLLINS: Saying Yes and Finding the "thing"!

THE ATLANTA INTERPLAY PERFORMANCE GROUP.  This is our March 2014 InterPlay Performance Workshop with Sheila Collins. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

By Ruth Schowalter InterPlay Leader-in-Training

“InterPlay is a big ‘YES,’” proclaimed Sheila Collins at the second performance workshop she facilitated for Atlanta InterPlay (see this blog about our first workshop) at the Mask Theater in the Little Five Points Community Center in March 2014.

Sheila instructed us to look for the “Yes” in our own bodies and in our troupe of fellow InterPlayer performers. In addition to taking “cues” for words from our creative movement, we also practiced “ecstatically” following one another in both movement and vocalization.

To build a performance, an InterPlay troupe works with a “theme,” one that is chosen ahead of time and then developed with input from the audience. For example, if a performance is being done for an environmental group, a variety of nautre-related words or phrases—such as relaxing, endangered, fun, climate change—might be gathered from the audience and used throughout the performance.

For our second InterPlay workshop with Sheila, we chose to play with the word, “creativity.” What might be our stories surrounding this word?

HELLO! MY NAME IS...I'M FROM....  Christine Gautreaux introduces herself at the beginning of the Pittsburgh form brought to us by Sheila Collins. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

We began playing with “creativity” using the “Pittsburgh” form—one that involves the entire InterPlay troupe. One InterPlayer begins a movement, which everyone on stage follows ecstatically. 

ECSTATIC FOLLOWING IN THE PITTSBURGH FORM.  Atlanta InterPlay Director, Jennifer Denning creates a new movement after introducing herself. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

Then one player steps into the “spotlight,” introduces him/herself (name and city), says something about the theme (in this case, creativity), and generates a new movement and leaves the performance space, after the rest of the performers, who have been “holding” a shape while the spotlighted performer speaks, replicate the newly introduced move.  These steps are repeated until each performer has introduced him/herself and said something about the theme.

SIMULTANEOUS STORIES WITH A THIRD PERSON.  Here two InterPlayers tell their stories about "The Scariness of Creativity" while Sheila Collins moves. (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

Next in our workshop, we played around with a form called a “Simultaneous Story.” In this form, two people tell their own stories, yes, at the same time—simultaneously! And to spice it up, Sheila added a "mover" to the two story tellers. This time, the performance theme of “creativity” gets approached from a different angle—“The Scariness of Creativity”! The two storytellers are instructed to speak playing around with the following ideas:

• repeating the words or movements of the other,
• traveling around the performance space,
• using silence, and
• finding an ending.

 Sheila advised us that making a story shorter rather than longer and that finding an end or resolution doesn’t necessarily mean a “happy ending.”

After the simultaneous stories, we had the opportunity to see how a group of five people could perform together on the topic of “The Fire of Creativity.” Two people stood on the side of the performance space and chanted while three people moved. The progression of this performance occurred in this manner:

• The players began by taking a solo shape then moving by themselves.
• The chanters started after the movement and in response to it.
• Then the movers found a way to interact with one another.
• The form was completed when stillness was found.

Sheila’s performance workshop concluded with a whole-group performance, during which we moved in and out of the performance space as we wished—everyone could be performing, or five, three, two or one could be performing, the number of players shift continuously.

PLAY WITH YOUR BASKETBALL BRAINS. When moving together as a group, we are asked to think about spatial relationships and are invited to create the "dramatic diagonal." (photo by Ruth Schowalter)

During this last form, Sheila reminded us to think with our “basketball” brains, asking us to see how we were creating a range of movements in our performance space and paying attention to concepts of the “dramatic diagonal” and “spatial relationships.”

The fun part of this last performance activity?  It is looking for what we are learning to call “the thing.”  As a “group body,” each one of us performers gradually recognizes “the thing” that emerges out of what we are doing together. Ecstatically following occurs and our performance gains a “rehearsed” polish while remaining improvisational movement!

Our performance workshop with Sheila ended with us being energized from experiencing an individual and big body YES! InterPlay is, indeed, a big YES!

YES and FINDING THE THING! Here I am between two InterPlayers from Asheville, North Carolina, and I am say "YES" and finding "The Thing." (photo by an InterPlayer Performer)

Atlanta InterPlay is forming a performance group!

At The Mask Center in L5P, Atlanta, Georgia (photos by Ruth Schowalter)

ECSTATIC FOLLOWING: Atlanta InterPlayers are learning what it means to be part of an InterPlay performance group! 

Written from the perspective of Ruth Schowalter, InterPlayer participant and social media facilitator

I'm so grateful for Jennifer Denning being an anchor for InterPlay here in Atlanta and bringing Sheila K. Collins to our beautiful southern city to help us develop an InterPlay performance group. Sheila has already facilitated the development of 5 InterPlay performance groups form (4 in Texas and 1 in Pittsburgh). And Friday January 24, 2014, was monumental for those of us in the Atlanta InterPlay community (visit our Facebook page)!

We got our beginning performance workshop in the series of four that we will receive over the next 8 months.  First, Sheila gave us a brief history of InterPlay performance groups. The first one was “Wing It,” which InterPlay co-founders Phil Porter and Cynthia Winton-Henry started in San Francisco more than 2 decades ago and continues to be vibrantly alive today. Then after the brief history…drum roll…

 

A BRIEF HISTORY. Sheila K. Collins (second from left) gives us a quick history of how InterPlay developed performance groups in different cities (see a list of InterPlay performance groups HERE).

…Sheila introduced the concept of "ecstatic following."  What a curious phrase--ECSTATIC FOLLOWING!!!

In Cynthia and Phil's book, What the Body Wants, there is a section about being a FOLLOWER when you are doing InterPlay activities.  Yes, you can be a leader as well, but an important way of being is FOLLOWING! This is a “charged” word to a citizen of the United States! We are taught to be independent and to shed other people’s new ideas like yesterday’s old skin.

In InterPlay performance and activities, however, FOLLOWING is essential. I leaned in to listen to Sheila because I had read about this concept of being a FOLLOWER several months ago in Cynthia’s and Phil’s book. Now, to hear about "following" again in the context of our newly forming performance group, my understanding of this concept heightened, deepened, and became evermore curious!

 

DEMONSTRATING LEADING AND FOLLOWING.

Did Cynthia refer to FOLLOWING as an "ecstatic" activity, I asked myself. Maybe…I will have to check that out later.  But for now, I am leaning into the concept of "ecstatic following." What does it mean for us—the Atlanta InterPlay Performance Group? For me?

Well, to perform improvisation using the tools of InterPlay, one needs to follow his/her fellow InterPlayers--that's what creates the awesomeness for the audience. The actions look rehearsed.   That is...if players are fully committed to following movements of other players. That means surrendering your own ideas, being vulnerable and present to others, and taking risks.

WHY would we want to surrender our own ideas, be vulnerable and present to others and to take risks when performing?  

Because we want to build a community not only amongst our InterPlay performance group but also in our wider Atlanta community. InterPlay performance groups are a form of activism.

YES! Artful play is Activism—making positive change in our communities!  So, right now, we Atlanta InterPlayers are needing to ask ourselves this important question:

What are the needs of our community?  

For now, that is all the time I have to talk about the first workshop of Atlanta InterPlay performance group. Stay tuned if you are curious about us. Maybe you will want to join us!