Death and Life and Improvisation ……
By Shawn KinleyAhhhhhh Bogota Colombia. My time has ended here but the memories give birth to inspiration and new ideas.
One of my fondest memories was the show on Friday night. If you have never heard an audience connected in varied states of emotional reaction then you haven’t really felt the power that improvisation has.
It was a bit of a theme at La Gata’s festval. Life and Death. The idea was born it lived a great life and with its ending I hope it will inspire new life and new growth.
There were moans of sadness, screams of anger, oceans of laughter and other varied pockets of emotions for the show last night. It’s what an improvisation group would hope for. The audience left with big smiles and a warm glow. Many audience members stayed behind to meet the cast and hang out with each other at the front entrance of the theatre. Creating the environment where people don’t want to leave means they will likely return.
One of the nice elements in the show was the balanced fight for the integrity of the scene versus the playful nature of the improvisers. It’s exciting when there is danger that the whole train might go off the tracks and over the edge of mayhem but it is pulled back just in time.
The improvised play where a man battles death and finally embraces it after a long battle had the audience emotionally engaged on all levels. Equally engaging was the gibberish play in Japanese of a man looking for the meaning of life and finding it in love only to lose it and find it again in death.
During one of the workshops, one of the students came to an understanding that Improvisation can be more than gags and cheap laughs. He asked how they could re-train their audience to see the worth of a complete meal of improvisation when they had become used to evening of just candy.
I suggested they shouldn’t be scared to kill their audience. By working towards what would inspire themselves to grow, they might lose some audience members but would eventually gain a crowd that would come back more healthy week after week after week for something that fed them on many levels rather than something that became predictable.
The Theatresports match on Thursday was a great learning experience for the audience and cast. The show built slowly and in a perfect arc that shows should happen. The audience went from passive theatre watchers, to people who yelled at judges and cheered for their favourite performers.
Seeing people who have never performed before bravely risk standing on stage was a pleasure. And I hope that there was a realisation that the show was for the audience. Where the performers can sacrifice their ego and fear to enhance the audience experience, then the improvisers will have moved to a stronger state.
Now it’s done.
What comes next?
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Sábado 8 de octubre de 2011
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Viernes 7 de octubre de 2011¡Argentina presente !
Quedan dos dias más del Encuentro Internacional de Improvisación de Bogotá y para cerrar este evento con todo el estilo del mundo llega Omar Argentino, otro gran invitado internacional que estará en las tablas del teatro R101 compartiendo y creando historias.
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26 de Septiembre de 2011Taller con Nadine Antler
Teaching Colombians was a great experience. Compared to Germans they are much more playful and don’t seem to have so much fear to screw up. So they are more likely to just jump into scenes and try out ideas. I had the pleasure to teach a wonderful group of 9 to 11 open and warm improvisers of different experience levels two days about storytelling. I shared exercises and my experiences from different teachers around the world that have been an important influence on my way of playing impro-theatre today. It was interesting to see that some of the exercises that have been very basic for me and that have crossed my way very early in my life with improvisation were pretty new to most of the people here, while other games that are more difficult and foreign to German improvisers are common knowledge to the improvisers of Bogota.
Me gustó mucho el taller de Story-telling de Nadine. Sentí que nos explicó muy claramente una metodología a partir de la cual se facilita la narración de historias improvisadas. ¡Ojalá haya muchísimos más talleres !
Alejandra Suárez
Que bien que hayan talleres de impro, estoy enamorándome cada vez más de la improvisación ahora tengo muchas ganas de leer muchas cosas y tener más informacíon.
Daniel Valderrama
Maravilloso el taller! Si, la metodología estuvo maravillosa y Nadine es muy linda y clara. Gracias miembros de La Gata por traerla y acogerme. Abrazos.
Paulina Zuluaga
improbogota 
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