Changing the World, One Workshop at a Time

While on my Fulbright in Graz, I had the pleasure of leading a workshop with The Pennyless Players, a community theater group with exuberant, inclusive, and risk-taking spirit. The workshop was equal parts improv and Shakespeare, all parts greater than their numeric sum. 

Everyone in a workshop arrives carrying baggage. We take off our coats and put aside our cell phones, but carry with us destabilizing losses, crises of identity, the weight of absence - purposelessness and helplessness and exhaustion. We don't solve these things. We expand around them with joy and delight, connection and creativity, silliness and cleverness. We send out into the world re-minted superheroes, rejuvenated beings of power and empathy.

In a whitewashed room in a nondescript building on a side street in a Central European city, we played for two hours with story structure and composition. Riding a wave of grandiose aspiration and selfish desire, I asked groups to create stories wherein an environmental disaster gets a happy ending. It was a wildly cathartic 15 minutes in which scientists reengineered cars to produce glacier-saving emissions and plutonium hamsters solved world hunger.

How can we solve the biggest issue of the world in such a tiny form, in the space of a small moment, in this insignificant space? How is this space so institutional on arrival, so warm and friendly on departure?

We played with Shakespeare. Tempest, Macbeth, R&J. I led them in a rousing chorus of an out of context line from The Winter’s Tale. “Oh then my best blood turn to infected jelly,” we wailed and gurgled and melted into blobs of jelly and giggles.

Silly and surreal, there was a giddiness in the room of possibility. Such huge griefs and fears we carry about our future. We aren't looking to solve them in an instant, but we can't solve anything without healing a little first. 

With so little time to develop ensemble, to talk about safe space, actor neutral, components of instrument, breath and body - I assumed a level of familiarity and trust and built off that. Wondrously, everyone rose to the level of assumption. People are ready to step in, step up, step out. Sometimes a group can be led not from the highest common denominators but from the sum of the present fractions.  

Theater is time compressed and stretched - the outside world disappears but there's never enough time in the room. I brought in twice as much material as we had time for. My facilitation was like poetry or jazz, riffing off the energy of the room in fragments of context and snatches of theory. 

It was energy, inspiration, reconnecting with joy. "You made me rethink Shakespeare," said a shy non-native English speaker. But I didn't have time, my brain buzzes. I could have shown you so much more, shared a lifetime of knowledge, worked through with more diligence and specificity. But all I had time to do was show you the door, perhaps turn the handle and open it for you. We didn't even have time to explore all that was on the other side. I barely felt there was time enough to think, much less rethink.

But the power of the workshop is to rethink the point of time. Our purpose is purely the discovery of the garden, the door, and the Drink Me moment when we shrink or expand to just the right size to walk through. The possibility.

The Pennyless Players of Graz, and Me