Day 396: Piu Piu

François

I got to plaaaayyyy today. At work and afterwards. 

Work was great. Lovely Sarah Lonton, one of my favourite people, as well as Neil and Anna from Frank. A really good forum theatre - thank you for changing my role so I got to try something different this time. Thank you Alec, for letting me do this day of work. I appreciated it so much! Whenever I do this work, there are moments of real excitement and change. I respect and admire people so much for going for it when they do their individual roleplays. So many of them are so willing to really put themselves out there and try something that scares them. It's brilliant. Very satisfying too.

This evening, my first rehearsal with the Alphabetties, a group of interesting, clever, creative women doing Chicago-style improv. There had been a rehearsal before, but I missed it. This week, we met with an almost full contingent for the first time. As if by magic, someone asked me to do do the warm-ups (wheeeeeee!). The first bit was just a load of old shite, different ways of moving and speaking, stuff that made me laugh a lot, though I wasn't quite sure why we were doing some of it. And then a gleeful round of Eastenders, where Pat and Frank took off in an unprecedented way and 'Ricky!', which is the failure celebration, was well used. 

Then we played: a bit of theory, then monologues, structured Harold games and unstructured ones. By the end of it, I was laughing a lot, especially when a few of us were being a woven rug or some chickens. And then (wheeeeeeee again!) I was allowed to suggest a few closing games. We did roar (ridiculous) and piu piu (sweeter than sweet) and it was just lovely. Thank you, Steve Jarand, amazing man who is full of games with that extra touch of softness and delight. 


After all these games, we revelled in the fact that we are fully grown up, and yet we've just chosen to spend our time roaring at each other and being baby chickens looking for their mother. Sometimes, life just delivers.

To top it off, it sounds like I'll get to speak to the most surprising of foxes on Saturday.