Broadway Teacher’s Workshop
What I Learned from my Friend Harold
The last day of the conference is always more difficult for participants and for presenters. The participants are exhausted; how much can you force your brain and heart to contend with and master in three full days? The presenters know they are the last ones, and it is up to them to be even more inspirational and demanding than all the other ones before them. Kate Grant is just the right presenter for this time slot. She has had incredible experience, she is energetic and young at heart, she is wise, warm, engaging, and encouraging. Her experience with improvisational theater is extensive, and includes writing, acting, and also using improv to help people with HIV and other serious health issues.
Mike Myers said, “Harold is more than a game-It’s a way of looking at life.” Kate got us “looking at life” right away. We did a walking exercise, in two groups. You walk intentionally, slowly, and then you walk again and if one person stops, you all stop. After this, one person has to move at a time, and no one else can move if someone else has begun. You enter into an agreement with Harold Improv technique. You will play the game by the rules. Once you have settled on the rules, you take a random thought or word or phrase and you weave them into a whole. You try to create order out of chaos.
Kate explained the basic tenets of this form, and then she encouraged all of us to try it. Almost everyone got up to try the different games, but I wonder what the experience was like for those people who didn’t get a chance to work with the material. It appears that Kate is accustomed to having much more time for these workshops, because she talked very quickly and glossed over certain topics when she realized how little time there was left. It is frustrating to imagine a presenter fighting for time when there is so much to say and to share with the group. It is complicated by the importance of getting up in front of an audience and trying it, when the audience is so huge and the time is so limited. There was no time for processing this experience either, which is emotional and full of risk. If you get up in front of a large group of people and tell a spontaneous monologue about your life, it would help to find a safe place for sharing about the experience. It would make the workshop more memorable as well.
She gave out a paper at the end of class with the principles of Harold and the recommended resources to learn more about the technique. She spoke a great deal in the beginning of the class, and with this handout, she didn’t need to speak at all. If she had handed out this page at the beginning of class, we could have read it quickly, and she would have had so much more time for the experimentation of the technique. It was such a wonderful experience to work with the patterning game and then the monologue, I wonder how it might have been if we all had tried it and been able to process it afterwards.
She didn’t leave time for questions, although people asked a few of them along the way. There was a sense of intention and focus at the beginning of the class, but there was no sense of closure at the end of the class. There was a lot of creativity happening with the different groups, so when we went overtime, she didn’t want to stop us. This presenter creates a safe place for playing the Harold, and she has a wealth of knowledge to share with a group. There is not enough time allotted for this class. The presenter has too much to share, has had too much experience with the material, and needs more time for a large group to come up in smaller groups and experiment with the Harold.
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