Improv games are used in team workshops to improve collaboration and facilitate healthy team dynamics. The skills you practice when you participate in improv games are the exact skills you need to participate as a contributing member of a healthy team.
This blog will briefly look at the next improv skill: STORYTELLING.
Storytelling is one of the learning tools that has stood the test of time. Our very existence is founded on the idea of a story. Your life is a story; your workplace has a story; your mind is full of stories about the characters you meet every day; and perhaps there are stories we tell ourselves hoping that we don’t have to face things that we know need facing…
When we work with story in improv theatre, it is at the heart of all the games. Every exercise draws from your personal narrative – a complex story of connections, feelings and beliefs which live within and find it’s way out through communication and connections. The difference between a list of events and a story, is connectivity.
As is the beautiful lesson in the profound TED TALK by famous author and poet, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the danger is in believing there is only one story. When we come together to play, we allow all our stories to show up, to connect, to tell itself and to listen to others’, all in the spirit of learning.
When we open ourselves up to the possibility of more stories than only my reading (or interpretation), that is when the story starts to become the gift.