Even today, as you read the word improvise in the quote from Viola Spolin above, your reaction is probably similar to the one I get from most people: improvisation is something that jazz musicians, actors, or artists do. The word is often equated with some far-and-away skill employed by the creative sorts to communicate with their muse. It is a word that describes something that is out of the context of everyday life, or out of reach in our daily personal interaction and communication.

When I began 'the work', I was content to refer to it as improvisation. Over the years, I began to realize how "the work" was more all-encompassing than what the word "improvisation" suggests. I was always passionate about acting, performance, and theatre. I was doing orange crate, puppet theatre at age 10, did my stint in New York at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, returned to Wisconsin to co-found the Ark Improvisational Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin and performed with hundreds of players including Chris Farley and Joan Cusack.

After five years Ark Improvisational Theatre folded, yet my curiosity about paths to the intuitive did not leave. I continued to "teach" improvisation workshops while observing and experimenting with the techniques which seemed to lead players to an intuitive leap. I noticed how these astounding leaps into creative energy were just accepted as something that had happened. The players and observers could agree that something wonderful had entered with some magical result, yet did not know what it was, why it happened, or how to reproduce it.

In years of workshop work I watched and waited to net the illusive intuitive butterfly. In countless workshops we would set up an exercise that might lower that net to catch the butterfly, more often the not, the butterfly escaped without revealing the secret of its flight, leaving us in our non-playful gloom. Finally, after years of dedicated work by so many others, a network of paths began to develop. A series of tools and exercises surfaced that worked with consistency to capture the intuitive butterfly with some frequency which I have come to refer to as the work. Only recently, in the process of "claiming" a domain for this web site about "the work of meeting your playful self" and the resulting "net" or tools for discovering your playful nature, I arrived at a new description: "Meet Your Playful Self".

This net of tools and paths to the intuitive or playful is yours for the taking. Join the hundreds of people who are exploring their playful selves in workshops, and in thier lives.