Blog

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt. -Rollo May In this day and age, the word "commitment" has come to be synonymous with the word "choice." Now...

One of my brothers had a friend, John, who bought a car one day. When my brother asked him what brand it was, John replied, "Um, it's a... a Pedros." It turns out it was a Peugeot. Not remembering what kind of car he bought wasn't the biggest head-scratcher John ever...

What is "art"? ... It's an expression. You have something you have to say. You groan, you moan, and you say it. You paint it, you dance it, you sing it. You express it out of your own soul. "Non-art" is where you please people. Non-art is where you have very little to...

"I hate imagination," the woman growled at me during an innocuous exercise in a FIZ program I was leading. I wasn't expecting that. I'd never heard anyone say that ever, much less in one of the hundreds of course and workshop sessions I've led. A bit stunned, the most...

Over the past few months, I've worked with a variety of improvisers in class and performance situations and I've noticed that for a lot of them, it's very difficult to tell a story. Mind you, many improvisers aren't interested in telling stories. It's a stylistic...

Lately I'd been thinking a lot about that, not because I'd been having fun screwing up my life but because I'd been seeing people stagnate from avoiding mistakes. Then I got a wonderful holiday gift from my On Your Feet friends, Gary, Julie, and Brad. These are very...

It's just a thing... -Paul Sills Improv is about moving from the general to the specific—the more specific, the better. This isn't science so I can't prove that statement but it is a commonly held belief in the improv world and my experience certainly tells me it's...

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. - Rita Mae Brown Creativity and innovation were the big buzzwords at the MBA Leadership Conference presented by the Graduate Management Admission Council some years ago in Newport...

Too much concern about how well one is doing a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. - Daniel Kahneman Most of us want to do well at the things we attempt. We want to do them correctly. All our lives we're...

Improv is to scripted theater as jazz is to classical music, I've often said. In both improv and jazz you take the constructs of the classic form (which is not to disregard the essential elements of the African diaspora in jazz) and create something new and different....