Everyone can learn to play at life!
Everyone can learn to play at life!
You do not need to spend a lot - raise your income - or change your career.
Dennis Kern leads workshops in self improvement
by sharing paths to Your intuitive - playful self
He has worked and taught in the performing arts for over 30 years.
His students include: Chris Farley,see Playful Past link)
Joan Cusack, Tod Hansen (an originator of The Onion newspaper), and Brian Stack (writer for the "The Tonight
Show" with Conan O'Brien".
Dennis graduated from UW La Crosse in Wisconsin and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
He worked in the conservatory at "Second City" and completed workshop training for "Play Back Theatre"
in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Dennis co-founded the ARK Improvisational Theatre in Madison,
which produced, improvised and scripted works for twelve years.
He is currently working with "Missing Pa*ts" in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Viola Spolin was one of the great teachers who was dedicated to guiding people to discover their playful nature .
She demonstrated the value, power, and transformative potential of improvisation as she created hundreds
of theater games through which she brought real and ordinary people to new awareness in workshop settings. She
worked with people who were interested in performing in the theatre before an audience, but she recognized that
the skills for doing so were not exclusive to those who wanted to perform. The very first sentence of her book
Improvisation for the Theater is - Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in
the theater and learn to become "stage worthy". Viola Spolin
Viola Spolin was one of the first great teachers to snatch the word "improvisation" from the hands of the
gods to place it in the grasp of everyone. Her work has been instrumental to me in thirty years of discovery
following the path she first cut through the forest of creative play.
Here is a link to the Spolin Center for more about her work.
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. Have Fun!
Happy hunting!
“

The beginnings of the Meet Your Playful Self workshops

“Anyone who wishes to can play in
the theater and learn to become "stage worthy". ”
-Viola Spolin