Facilitator-led organized play and storytelling
To varying degrees of commitment and duration, I participated in facilitator-led workshops and social group activities that incorporated embodied storytelling and the process of “getting out of your head” and into feeling and another state.
I put myself in new milieus – dance classes, participating in one-shot Dungeons and Dragons role-playing, and taking a five week-long introduction to improv class. To experience what I wanted potential participants to feel first-hand.
Playing improv
Improv is a group game that involves creating a narrative story together on the spot. I participated in a 5-week long improv program through Blind Tiger comedy in Vancouver. We were eight people in our group and each class was three and a half hours long.
Performing in front of others was exhilarating, and made me want to do more! I love making people smile, laugh and join in on the fun I’m having. This really hit all the marks.
It was the most enjoyable experience of creativity I had the chance to explore. As an adult, we don’t often get the opportunity to create freely and openly with other for the sake of it. similar to playing a game, improv has a set structure to follow. For intro to improv, the formula was simplified to this: First, we define the location, names of our characters, their relationship to one another. The we set the problem, the climax of the problem, and how it’s to be resolved.
Humour and improvisation really go hand in hand.
(Photos above: our improv group took photos during our last class together. Two members were missing, but our spirit was fully there!)
Playing Dungeons & Dragons
I had been playing Dungeons & Dragons since I moved to Vancouver in September. Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop role playing game where the Dungeon Master organizes a story for players that can last from one 3-hour session to several sessions over the span of months. I’ve met friends during these games and got to experience the fun of being a participant rather than an organizer. It’s more stressful to plan stories and deliver them to people than it is to have the story led by and organize by someone else.
These game spaces are fantastical in nature. The world of dungeons and dragons is filled with elves, warlocks, aberration, beast, celestial, construct, dragon, elemental, fey, fiend, giant, humanoid, monstrosity, ooze, plant, or undead, and other categories. Within those are skills you acquire as a player, as well as the interaction of your character with your teammates.
The amount of laughter and excitement for me comes from engaging in playful banter and experiencing the unforeseen surprise decision from my teammates, making decision as their silly, stoic, stubborn, unhinged, or even vain characteristics of their characters. Playing these games attracts a type of creative person who like impersonations.
I feel very elated seeing people lose themselves in another world or personality. The dungeon master has given people permission to be playful in a game.
People might play a game, but not necessarily be playful. Here, you have the option to add your flair of playful personality in what you do.
Dancing
I took a contemporary dancing class in February to explore playful movement. In the past, I’ve taken several contemporary dance classes, but I hadn’t dance in over two years.
It was an opportunity to explore movement, embodiment and expression.
Improv was movement-based as well, but emphasize oral communication between your scene partner and the audience. The dance had no formal performative element to it. The class taught us one routine form start to finish.
I was overwhelmed with the technical learning of the moment. I had to keep up with other classmates, when I needed more time to feel good about my movements. I ended up leaving before the end, as they were filming the routine that I kept messing up. Turns, dips, which foot was forward. It got too much for me.
I’ve taken dance classes before, but this was the first in years and the expectation of performance and to get the moves at a average pace as everyone else meant I didn’t have time to feel comfortable enough to play.
The dance studio purported themselves as inclusive, but nothing about the experience represented anything but a push to have us learn at the same rhythm and pace. It was more so an opportunity to be kind with myself as I explore retriggered emotions of performance and sense of inadequacies, even in what should be an environment of exuberant expression.
There is a different learning curve and more time required to experience a sense of freedom in dance exploration. I should keep an open mind that there can be other ways to be comfortable relearning a new skill.
Conclusion
My first-hand account of playful experiences were wide-ranging. Leading and immersing myself in playful stories like improv was a treat, and the suspense of disbelief experienced in both improv and dungeons and dragons has been entertaining. There is a different learning curve and more time required to experience a sense of freedom in dance exploration.
Playfulness takes time, and takes different time for everyone. It might be important to know, as facilitator and participant, that quickly trying a new skill might mean that participants learn it at their own pace. Then, maybe, can self-expression bud it’s way out.
Key takeaways
- There has to be a connection with the person for people to develop a relationship. Through creating our own stories, checking in with how we are and feel at the start and end, connecting through bonding vulnerable experiences, ensemble work, and coordinating how we express ourselves, we were able to connect.
- Connecting through exercises where we get to know people is more important that connecting through characters in a fantasy world. After a four hour D&D session, it seems like the ice wasn’t broken, I didn’t know who people were,
- A lesson in autonomy, self-led exploration and the pressure of quickly going through a learning curve before entering play through the flow-state. The contemporary dance class was too serious and complicated for me. It made me feel inadequate and flustered, and triggered social group traumatic experiences for me.
- Giving participants the capacity to decide for themselves what they should do, act, move was more enjoyable than following inflexible instructions.
- Some rules, or parameters, help enable playful expression. Improvisational games were narratively structured. These rules are flexible and allowed for participants to deviate as they wished.
- As a D&D player, and a visual story absorber, it feels liberating and enjoyable to be led through the colourful world of a storyteller/maker/dungeon master.
- A community of people who were all engaged in the same behaviour of learned risk, failing forward and with acceptance, was more empowering than meeting people only through fantasy characters.
Julie McIntosh 
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