Last week in class my drama elective students played a long form improv activity entitled, “Murder Mystery” and my Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) students played a short form improv game entitled, Most Valuable Player (MVP.)
I shan’t bore you with the inside baseball rules of those activities.
Don’t you appreciate my, against my nature, restraint?
What was super cool about those experiences was that (in my 24 years+ of performance and educational facilitation of improvisational theatre) the achievement that I didn’t prep the students for, but happened naturally, was transformation from a group of individual performers into a team sharing the group mind.
(Below) is a post from www.pantheater.com that discusses the miracle and bliss that is the improvisational theatre group mind in action.
Group Mind in Improv Theater (or the Inspired Cannibal)
Group mind is often spoken of in improv theater with an almost whispered awe. The members grok (understand something intuitively or by empathy) each other and the group.
Group mind is what makes long form improv theater possible. It all relates to and emerges from the basic improv ideas and games: the mirror, and speaking in one voice, following the follower, and give and take.
All of the basic improv theater skills merge in the performers and in the team to form a troupe.
Group mind is the ability of an improv team to intuitively react to each other. Troupe members can lead and follow at the same time instinctively.
It allows a group to instantly support a new idea and heighten a theme or moment without conversation or preplanning.
At the heart of group mind is listening to each other as a group and reacting as one.
Of the various improv theater groups I’ve watched, been part of, or coached – the After troupe developed this ability much faster than most. Their improv theater shows exhibited the constant strengthening of group mind.
The group consciousness of an improv troupe grows and strengthens with show. In the Inspired Cannibal episode of Tonight’s Town, the performers from the Afters were a pleasure to watch, and direct.
The character the main character of the episode Ethan the Inspired Cannibal, as his name would suggest, eats a lot. He eventually eats himself into a coma.
The show’s final moment and the group’s final eulogy to Ethan was a cannibalistic feast of Ethan as his body reached its final moments and he saw the light.
The entire scene worked because of the group mind. The performers all worked off of each other and were in the same space.
The scene, and the idea of group mind reminds me of Stranger in a Strange land. I think it is a very good book for anyone interested in improv theater and anyone interested in group mind.
You grok?
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When improvisational theatre educators and/or audiences are wowed by classes and performances, they are usually responding the class members’/performers’ elevation into a state of group mind.
When are participants are truly participating “in the moment” and not distracted in any way, they can achieve the group mind, and it is truly something to be amazed by and impressed with.
In my humble opinion talent (although it can most often need to be introduced, practiced, nurtured, mentored, modeled and reinforced) for some it can be just as strongly instinctual.
Some talent requires an unlimited expenditure of time and hard work.
Some talent, like the improvisational group mind, just seems to appear miraculously.
There is nothing the matter with the occasional miracle now and then.