We did scene painting and building platforms for narratives last week. This game is called “Imagine if you will…” (based on the directing of Derek Flores) where we paint the setting of the scene giving specific incidental details for the audience. It was easy to start when you have a couple of ideas in your mind about how something should look like.. say a living room, I felt it became challenging once I had gone through painting a few things in the room, then I felt stuck. Words eluded me and I am grasping for something, anything to paint and describe in detail. What do you do when you think you have established things in the room, but you need more..?

The note for me was to use your body and not the mind, to trust the body more to discover things in space. To start speaking before you think you are ready. This is to get us out of our intellectual mind trying to think before we act, which stops us from being spontaneous. The next note was to use the ability of your mind’s eye as a camera lens to zoom in and zoom out on details to paint the scene. By doing these things it became easier to start moving in space, mimicking some shape and making sense of it. and then adding additional incidental details by viewing through a camera lense. A table appears, a wall shows up and a picture on the wall with a specific color frame and there are cob-webs on the ceiling. It starts coming up from nowhere, revealing itself like magic!

The more I played with these approaches, the easier it is to focus and add fine, mundane incidental details to set the platform. As practice I am starting to look at things from this perspective in everyday life and it is changing my perspective on how I see things. It helps me pay more attention to everyday small things, It helps add more vibrancy, and makes me appreciate things better. 

It adds magic to life.