Blog

Good Girls Don’t Improvise: There IS no right

GOOD GIRLS DON’T IMPROVISE: POST #2

One of the effects of the GOOD GIRL that I have noticed playing itself out in my improv classes is what I have called the “leaving your body” moment in a game or scene. You see it happen right in front of your eyes. The woman performing seems grounded and in the moment, having her ‘character’ engaged in a conversation with another ‘character’ (ie. co-workers at Pizza Hut talking about who complicated pizza toppings have become) when all of a sudden one of the women doesn’t know what to do /say next…you can imagine this would come up a lot being that it’s improv. …and what I have seen and have battled against all my teaching career, is that in this moment of panic, the response most often to this panic is that the woman leaves her own experience, her ‘self’, and you see her start to try to figure out what she SHOULD say, what the RIGHT thing to say is. And we have talked about this phenomenon in our all-woman’s class enough to see how universal this response is.
I am making the connection to THE GOOD GIRL because this is a structure that says to women, “when you don’t know what to do, just make sure you do the RIGHT thing, be

Read More

Being Post-Modern: PoMo vs. Integral

POST #3

At the EnlightenNext New York Center tonight, we had our 7th women’s study group discussion on Steve MacIntosh’s book on Integral Consciousness.

What keeps striking me after each chapter that we read, is that each stage of development is so radically different than what came before – the relationships are evident, they are just huge LEAPS forward, addressing the shortcomings and pathologies of the previous culture and beliefs.

And what made me want to come home and write a post is to just begin to grapple with the inevitable truth that INTEGRAL is going to be – for arguments’ sake – polar opposite to our current postmodern culture and beliefs. OPPOSITE. A leap forward, a rejection of! Not a gentle cascading forward but a consciousness-shattering, surge ahead. I see a group of humans in the very near future, arms crossed, looking back on us postmoderns thinking “Man, did they have any idea how crazy it was getting before Integral came along?”

That’s where we are. We see the faint hints of a new way of being and seeing the world but it’s FROM postmodern.

So what IS IT about being postmodern that Integral is going to address, to take on, to “fix” so to speak?

Andrew

Read More

Being Post-Modern: “I Think, Therefore I’m Right”

POST #4

At first I didn’t even notice it.

A few days ago at work a group of us gathered around the TV to eat lunch and watch the news regarding Obama’s trip to Buchenwald. We were captivated by the scenes, Obama’s outward display of seriousness and the significance of the event itself. And then Elie Wiesel – the 80 year old Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner – spoke so beautifully, “Mr. President, we have such high hopes for you because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place… It’s enough — enough to go to cemeteries, enough to weep for oceans. It’s enough. There must come a moment — a moment of bringing people together.”
So it was a powerful moment to say the least.
And there was a 20-something assistant editor in the room, really nice guy, who sort of scoffed. I asked him why. “I don’t know…I don’t know why everyone is making a big about this visit, I really don’t.”

No one really said anything…I could tell we were going to move on and speak about something else. Then it hit me. Of course he was entitled to his opinion. But what seemed crystal clear to me was that this guy was equating his own reaction as being more informed and more significant than Elie Wiesel’s! I mean, he wasn’t

Read More

Good Girls Don’t Improvise

GOOD GIRLS DON’T IMPROVISE: POST #1

A few months ago a female improv student of mine approached me about starting a day class. I told her if she can get together a group I’d teach it, which luckily didn’t take her long to do. However it wasn’t how fast she pulled it together that was most noteworthy, it was that, by sheer accident, the class ended up being only women…spanning different ages and backgrounds. I walked into the room that first day and thought, “Wow, you’ve got to be kidding me…!” I was overjoyed!

So I decided to bring in everything I have been learning, seeing, and experiencing in my many years as not only an improv teacher, director and performer, but also with a recent exploration I’ve been involved in which is looking into the structures that make up “WOMAN”…not just our psychology but our biology, our cultural identities, our consciousness, beliefs and definitions of “self”, “other”, “right”, “wrong”, “man”, “woman”, etc.

I started by asking the 10 women if they could relate to my experience as a teacher – that the women are usually very, very strong in class…noticeably so; they usually take to doing characters and getting really emotionally connected to each other very quickly…but then when the pressure is on during

Read More

Being Post-Modern: Our Ideas of ‘Heaven’

POST #2

Postmodernism: what does that really looks like, feels like, and “is” in as, as us, in the world.

I just completed teaching my first Evolutionary Enlightenment Course in Philadelphia and was been struck by the angle Jeff has to keep making over and over to get us to see how our postmodern conditioning of designing most of our lives around our psychological and emotional comfort IS our version of ‘heaven’.

Most of us don’t believe in a ‘heaven’ up in the sky, a cloudy Club Med filled with our loved ones, angels playing harps, ancestors in while togas, and a huge old man – God- dropping by for a visit. BUT this notion that there is something better than what we have now, the idea that we are working towards something ‘out there’ that will make us happy, content, and fulfilled is VERY much alive and kicking in us. It’s a powerful point that Andrew has made in several retreats and is part of the course’s material.

So this idea that we spend our lives – our money, our time, where we put our ‘stock’ and our energy is in the future…things will be better when___. And we will go to great lengths to ensure our emotional and psychological ease and comfort. If we make a pie graph of what we spend our money on, we can see how much we value comfort, ease, peace, looking good, feeling

Read More