Week 2 - Team Building & Playing Hurt

Playing hurt is a sports term and if your team is depending on you, you play hurt. You just can't back out of games for little knicks and sore muscles. Team depends on you, you play hurt. There is, however, a fine line between playing hurt to help the team and being so hurt that you hurt the team by playing. Last night I played hurt. There were times when I helped the team and times when I should have sat on the sidelines. A couple of hours before the class I was over at Mom's helping the remodelers and took a nasty spill. I pulled a couple of muscles on the left side right above the ribs and on the back of my left leg. However, nothing was keeping from that class so I went. Ouch.

Week two was all about communication and team building. Two things absolutely essential to improv. The exercises are going to be hard to explain but I hope I can give a good idea of what they were.

The first was "tied in knots ." This is a human knot. There were twenty-one in class last night, nine dropped out or weren't willing to play hurt. The class was divided in to two teams, one of eleven and one of ten. I was in the group of eleven. The teams form a small circle. Then you grab arms of other members of the circle, the trick is you can't grab the arms of either person next to you. You are grabbing the arms of the person two down or across from you. Imagine a major game of twister where everyone ends up in weird postions except everyone is standing. Then the game starts. The goal is to unravel into a perfect circle where you are holding the hands of the person next to you. In order to unravel you have to really communicate with each other, work together on who should unravel first, sometimes you might have to jump (physically step through outheld hands) through some hoops, and sometimes you might have to go back to the position you were first in. Our group did great. We formed a perfect circle within ten minutes. The other team took twice as long. We had great chemistry and amazing listening skills. What is neat about this game is everyone has to give up control, if one person takes control it is doomed to fail. Like the other team. Teamwork, listening, communication are good things to learn in life as well as improv.

The next two excercises had to do with the socks because they were fall into the river exercises and the smaller area you had with your feet the better chance you had to succeed. Almost everyone in class kept their shoes on. The first exercise was called "chocolate river". The chocolate in the river was poison. If you fell into the river you died. Fifteen class members were chosen, I was one. The room is roped off into quite a large area (river). Then you are given about twenty pices of tile. The goal is to use the tiles to get all fifteen members of the team from one shore to the other shore without losing someone. You basically have to form a line. You can stand on a tile but if any part of your foot isn't on the tile you fall into the river and die. The first person sets a tile down and then puts both his feet on the first tile, he then sets a second tile in front of him and puts one foot on the second tile, so he has one foot on the second tile, and one foot on the first tile, the next person puts his foot on the first, tile, and keeps his foot on the shore until a third tile is put down and person one moves his foot to the third tile, the second person moves his foot to the next tile and so on. You really have to communicate with everyone in line because with one foot on one tile and one foot on another tile it is imposible to turn around and see what is happening. It is also easy to lose balance when you have on foot on one tile and one foot on another so you have to put your hand on the person in front of you to both let him/her know you are there and ready to proceed so the next person can get off the shore. Fourteen of the fifteen made it safely, we only lost one person. This was a great exercise, teaches you to give up control, depend on others, coummunicate, plan with the group (we devised a plan together before starting), and teaches you teamwork.

The last exercise was Lassie and Timmie. You divided in to teams of two. A small area of the room is roped off. Several tiles are placed in the middle and up and down the roped off area. This time the goal is not to step on the tiles. The roped off area is a river, the tiles are loose rocks that if you step on them you fall into the river and die. One of the two members is Timmie, in peril and needing to be saved, who stands at the far end of the river. The other member is Lassie whose job it is to save Timmie. The trick is Lassie is blindfolded. The other trick is that you only have sixty seconds to go from one side to the other. Timme instructs the blindfolded Lassie where to stand and step until he gets all the way to Timmie's side and saves him. In this exercise the failure rate is extremely high and according to the instructor it is rare for one team to make it all the way across to save Timmie, let alone the six that we had. Unfortunately, when I was Timmie Lassie stepped on a tile and died. When I was Lassie, I stepped on a tile and died. This exercise was to teach trust and failure as a team. When you bomb in improv. you bomb as a team. When you bomb in standup you bomb alone. The standup being much harder and much harder to recover from.

It was a fun but painful class. I can hardly wait until week 3, when the focus will be on story telling!

This is how I dressed for the class last night. I wanted to show the posters, readers, my Mom, my sister, and my sister-in-law that I am quite capable of dressing myself. In order to be a rebel I used the day cologne for the night class.













Hope this will be a great day for all of you!