When you think of improvisation, you might think of quick-witted funny people popping off hilarious lines of our seemingly nowhere. If you know Playback Theatre, you know that we have a different entry point to improvisational magic. And while we may achieve quick-witted surprising brilliance, to be our best improviser, and I would suggest, human, we need to start with a nearly opposite kind of energy.
Silence.
Stillness.
Stillness is where we access a resonance with those around us. This is where we fully empathize and connect with a story — without being swept away in surfaced sympathies.
One of the opening exercises we learn in River Crossing Playback Theatre is called, “Small Dance,” an exercise by Contact Improv founder Steve Paxton, that invites very nuanced awareness of one’s physicality and nearly imperceptible movements. If come to this class looking to do fast-paced verbal exercises, Small Dance can be startlingly boring…at first. Once we slow down and tune our focus within, a whole new universe of awareness opens, an awareness unseen by the ultra-high stimulation of our screen-based visual and verbal world. The transition is stark. But the reward is great.
In a recent workshop, one participant told a seemingly innocuous story about trying to ride a bicycle as an adult. And while the actors played out the humbling comedy you might expect in such a story, they also enacted a kind of dance that allowed the teller to see the ways that “learning to ride a bike” was a metaphor about something far more serious — and painful. This only comes when we as improvisers loosen our cognitive grip on a story and maximize our resonance.
Accessing our own “small dances”, which can be done at any time in improvisation, helps to tune into the subtler physical and emotional dynamics around us. Many in the Playback Theatre community use the word “resonance” to describe the way we pick up deeper notes unspoken in the stories around us. Listening with resonance is not to be confused with interpretive insight; it’s often felt — and acted out — from the gut. Resonance is perhaps the core Playback Theatre skill, the way we inexplicitly access deep realities that a storyteller did not say or even know consciously.
Resonance is not just an improviser skill. It’s a life skill. Recently, after introducing the Small Dance to a group, I realized how rare of an experience it was for people to be supported to develop this kind of resonating somatic awareness. I saw how participants were much more grounded in their own bodies and able to connect with others. When I practice this kind of resonance, I experience a wave of calm, groundedness, resilence and listening sensitivity to whatever comes next with those around me.
Curious? This is an embodied practice that comes out of live experience. I can only use so many words. You must try it to know it.
And this fall, we’re opening another series of five Playback Theatre workshops (August 23 and second Saturdays in September through December) to work and play with “resonating stories,” learning the art of Playback Theatre, and the art of improvising life.
I’d be honored to have you join us! And I expect it to fill so register early to guarantee your spot at: Resonating Stories.
Chris Fitz
Founding artistic director
River Crossing Playback Theatre
