This workshop offers a deep dive into how improvisation can activate emotional connection. Participants will explore the development of intimate, emotionally grounded, truthful relationships, both on stage and off.
Facilitated by two experienced practitioners -- Bobbi Block and Nicola Pauling -- who bring shared values to their practice of applied and performative improvisation.
As a professor and director, Bobbi's signature performance approach, 'Actors' Improv,' taps into the actor's true emotions and life experience to inform their unscripted relational choices. This method unlocks the possibilities of spontaneous performance; it elevates improvised theater to the dramatic integrity of scripted work, while retaining the tension and aliveness of spontaneous performance.
As a developmental specialist for non-performers, Nicola uses 'Deep Play' to activate an intimacy that creates profound social connection and emotional wellbeing. Her work with Seniors, those living with dementia, former refugees and new migrants, bypasses the normative 'tolerance of others' and moves toward the possibility of true togetherness and interdependence.
Together Bobbi and Nicola will guide participants through safe and comfortably-scaffolded exercises that foster vulnerability and enrich connection. The workshop explores how this practice can quickly and easily break down barriers within a group and enable deep connection, intimacy, trust and respect.
Bobbi and Nicola have been co-creating across hemispheres for 15 years. Bobbi in Philadelphia in the US and Nicola in Wellington, NZ. Each performs Actors' Improv with long-running companies, and each applies improvisation in a variety of spaces, guiding diverse populations on the value of connection.
