MEET YOUR PLAYFUL SELF
Playful Past
| MEET YOUR PLAYFUL SELF Playful Past | |
 HOME  GET  the BOOK! 47 complete workshop exercises Meet Your Playful Self a book to play with and enjoy. blog Join the Meet Your Playful Self discussion The schedule for workshops and projects is ever evolving and developing. The happenings of the on-going workshops are posted here. VIDEO and Video Projects Chris Farley & Roots of the work. You can find a short bio of Dennis and more about the people and places where the paths and tools of Meeting Your Playful Self evolved. | In Memorium Chris was a raw talent, a man that could spin most any situation into a raucous, funny event and would go to any length to do so. He could go to the very edge of rude and crude only because he could do so without malice since he carried with him a giant loving heart. He made his first steps into harnessing this tremendous energy into the skills of improvisation at the Ark Improvisational Theatrein Madison, Wisconsin. After working there for about two years he went on to Chicago to work at Improv Olympic and Second City. I was sorry to see him go. My feelings about his departure are quoted in the book The Chris Farley Show and I will quote them here: I was happy for him, but at the same time I thought is was too soon. I thought that he needed to be more in contact with the source of his creativity before he went to try it on the professional level. I always knew he would make it, but I don't know that he was grounded enough in the technique of acting to have something to hold on to. He was immensely talented, but that talent was sort of at the whim of whoever needed the next laugh. I ran into Chris over the next few years and he always beamed with gratitude for his years at Ark. Hearing of his death was surely one of the very worst of times. I learned so much from Chris. I think of all the people I have worked with over the years as a collective we. Chris remains a vital part of this collective we, and his energy can best be passed on by sharing with you the lessons he left behind. He was one who could awaken the playful self in all those around him. The picture above is from the book taken at the ARK | The home of first Workshops The observations developed into a series of exercises that consistently bring people into an intuitive place where “what is happening” is not being directed by the intellectual process but as an intuitive shift into the moment. As more people experimented with the process it became apparent that the leap/shift was not only for those who wished to perform in front of an audience, but also for people to simply experience a freedom from thought; a playful creativity while communicating with others; when what is happening, takes on a life of its own that is as exciting, and often as funny, as it is unpredictable. Well...it is sort of like meditating on one's feet! It was in the course of teaching at the school house that Dennis began focusing on improvisation as a craft and experimenting with specific techniques actors could employ to get into and stay present in “the intuitive”. Over the next three years he taught classes in which he experimented and examined the specific techniques involved in improvisation as presented by Viola Spolin, Sanford Miesner, Kieth Johnstone, and many other writers and teachers with an objective: to whittle down, hone in, to focus the techniques into the simplest possible tutorial. This experimentation with technique evolved new approaches which seemed to enable his students to be better improvisers and improvisers to be better people. Finally, in 1999, Dennis began to put together a company to bring this work before an audience. The first company to be formed as result of this experimentation was ARKtoo in Madison, Wisconsin.
|
Link to Wordpress blog .jpg){kind=small}
