The Improfessor

“To be a child and yet to be able to escape all the punishments, all the dreary learning experiences, inherent in that condition is to be in a state of regressive bliss”

~ Film critic, Richard Schickel, on Charlie Chaplin

In the quote above, Schickel is referring to Char...

At the beginning of October, Dale and I took a two-day trip to the beautiful colonial town of Ouro Preto. While there, we purchased a soapstone Mask (see photo below). Soapstone is a type of “metamorphic” rock composed essentially of talc that makes it relatively soft....

“I used to enjoy physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it…. So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever. Within...

Meu fotógrafo (“my photographer”), cozinheiro (“cook”), and assassino de mosquitos (“mosquito killer!”)…Dale…traveled back home today because his U.S. passport only allowed for a three-month stay. I will miss him terribly, but my last month here in Brazil will be very...

“I know of one acid test in the theatre. It is literally an acid test. When a performance is over, what remains? .... When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself—then something in the mind burns. The event scorche...

“Only one capable in the language common to the clown and to children, a language distanced from sense, would understand the clown himself, in whom fleeing Nature bids a shocked adieu…. Nature, so pitilessly suppressed by the process of becoming an adult, is, like that...

“One status relationship that gives immense pleasure to audiences is the master-servant scene” ~ Keith Johnstone (Impro 63)

As promised, my post this week will begin with master-servant and additional status techniques we are exploring in my Impro System Lab. I will als...

“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” ~ Paul Klee, c. 1910

Dale and I went to the wonderful “Paul Klee: Equilíbrio Instável” (Unstable Balance) exhibit this week at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Belo Horizonte. Klee (1879-1940), a Swiss...

“A skilled clown has no need to think ahead, he trusts always that ideas will present themselves…. When people start to learn clowning they attempt far too much, they won’t allow the events to carry them, they think ‘I do this’ instead of ‘this happens’” ~ Keith Johnst...

I introduced “status” to my Impro for Leading, Collaborating, and Creating class this week, and I assigned Daniel Pink’s chapter on “Attunement” from To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others as a way to connect status to terminology that would resonat...