Something Creative

Do something creative 

every day

and feel how much wonder

comes your way.

-- doug smith

Attention Optimized

 

How is your attention? How is your focus?

Doing improv brings people to their full attentiveness, because without that you're lost. As Paul Sills taught me, that attentiveness and that improv work best when you get out of your head, when you "stop playwriting" and give the moment all you've got.

It's powerful. It's wonderful. It's ever so real. 

Great improv keeps us in the present. The past is too boring to play and the future is up for grabs so we must live every present moment tuned in, generating ideas, and sharing responsibility. Improv is life’s attentiveness optimized.

— doug smith

Quote Prompt: Opportunity

Topic: Improv 

Goal: Create a new and amusing scene using a quote.

Prompt: Use this quote to prompt your improvisation: 

Life is opportunity. What we believe can uncover -- or cover over that opportunity. What you believe is up to you.

Coaching:

• Create distinctions in the characters.
• Who sees opportunity in the darkest situations?
• What kind of situation are you creating?
• In the improv, find problems that you can solve together.
• Try turning conflict into collaboration.

 

Here We Are

Here we are -- until we go someplace else.

That is always up to you.

Improvise a new direction. Imagine a better beginning. Plan a wonderful close.

Go, go, go!

Here we are -- until we go someplace else.

-- doug smith

 

What's Good

Everyone is less than perfect. Why not enjoy what's good?

-- doug smith

 

Visualizer: Stare to Create

 

This is a visualizer. Practice your vision, provoke your creativity, delight your senses by staring at this with clear, fresh eyes. Let the visualizer see you as you see it.

Relax. Breathe. Take your time in allowing a story to form. 

The image will speak to you when you take your time, and it may tell a different story each time you look at it. 

I'll share many of these visualizers, frozen moments in time in a universe that never freezes that honors only constant motion. Artists sometimes (you, and I) take that motion and freeze it long enough to glean some meaning, some spark of wonder, some fabulous fable of life.

-- doug smith

Visualizer 3-2

 

Visualizer 3-2

There you are.

There it is.

Speaking to you.

Singing to you.

Sing along.

-- doug smith

Thank Tank Leakage

 

A business call that takes too long. A meeting that's rambling. Waiting for the copy machine. There must have been times when an odd doodle showed up and grew into something collecting, something expressing.

Here's an idea -- the next time you reach for your device to idly scroll, instead pick up a pen and some paper and doodle. It does not need to be anything at all. Doodle. Poke it. Prod it. Dress it up in your favorite doll house. 

You will not have wasted your time.

Think Tank Leakage - collage/mixed media/sketch by douglas brent smith, 1997.

Give It Time: Visualizer 3-3

 

out of order

all awry

start to laugh

ache to cry

waves of drama

surrounding us

broken dreams

rusted trust.

DEBRIEF:

What scene occurs to you?

Does this spark drama?

Do you feel comedy?

Is it a musical?

Give it time. Give your creativity time. Commit.