Fear Is My Homeboy by Judi Holler

Author:Judi Holler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626346253
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Published: 2019-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bring a Brick

In improv theater, we are taught to bring a brick. The brick has a specific meaning: focus on what you can contribute and just bring one thing into the scene at a time. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement happening onstage in a live improv show, to want to build an improv house right away and dump everything you’ve got onto the stage. We see how amazing and fun and badass this house will be, so we grab whatever we think could be useful for reaching this goal and just show up with a bucketload of bricks, dumping them onto the stage floor and expecting our castmates to “figure it out.” Can’t they see the house that I see? Why can’t they make sense of the bricks I just brought?

This is a signature move of most early improvisers. Instead of focusing on the next thing, we try to bring the best things and everything, which means we bring way too much in hopes something will stick. This is a bad move because it immediately clutters the stage (and scene) with way too much information. It also means that the other improvisers don’t know where to start or where to go next, because there is just too much going on. Bringing a bucket of bricks is a fear-based action because you don’t feel that the one brick you have is good enough, so you bring them all to the party in order to protect yourself from having nothing to contribute. When really, if you’d just trust yourself (and of course trust the other players), you’d find that you already have everything you need inside you. Less is always more on an improv stage.

We don’t want your bucket of bricks; all we need is just one brick. Then let’s have some fun and build the foundation of the house together. You don’t need to build the entire house all by yourself. When you’re working and collaborating with others, it’s exhausting and not nearly as fun as when you try to do all the work yourself. Plus, you immediately isolate others from you because you cut them out of the process of building or creating or doing whatever it is that you are working on as a team. And the process is the gift. Trust that there is power in the collective group’s brainpower, and do not allow fear to make you doubt your unique contribution.

There is a classic improv exercise that helps with the concept of slowing down and focusing on one thing at a time. It’s called “one word.” This game is easy to play and teaches the lesson of only bringing one brick at a time and trusting that the brick you bring is exactly what is needed. This game is designed to help you think on your feet and be flexible, yet it’s mostly designed to teach you the power of just bringing one small contribution to a project. Your group will end up

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.