a first viewpoint

We stared Improvisation 1 today - a class I was/am alittle worried about because I don't want to be going back over the ABCs. Today was a good start in that the teacher, R., picked a number of exercises that worked well for beginners and more experienced improvisers.

The first exercise consisted of dividing up into three groups and each group getting a box that had stuff inside of it. After first examining the box we opened and saw a collection of things - paper clips, rocks, action figures, broach, many different things - then R. asked us to do different actions with our stuff. "Make a pattern." "Put like things together." "Make musical notation." "Make a narrative." We each got turns doing different directions - it was playful, silly and snuck in a number of ideas about composition, arrangements and such. We got to look at the different "narratives" that the groups made and each one had such a different feel - one seemed like a literal narrative, another surreal and my group's was symbolic-ish. Quite a nice way to get the group working together through fun.

It will be interesting to see how this develops and whether the differences in experience will become more obvious.