Lives In Progress

This hand-out supports live in-person workshops at Lifestage, Inc in Smithtown, NY
Lifestage, Inc, SW CPE is recognized by the New York State Education Department?s Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #0270. Go to www.lifestage.org for a schedule of courses for social workers, counselors, psychotherapists and educators. 

Applied Improvisation borrows from the concepts and practices that make theater compelling and a force for good in the world: the telling of stories, sharing of human struggles, creative engagement and social-emotional connection. What produces good acting can be applied to self-development to advance our social and emotional intelligence. 

"A key to good improvising is to be emotionally connected. Improvisers have great freedom to explore limitless options. Yet they must work tgether to create scenes and songs, and to do so, they need to be on the same page with the other actors. For this, they must rely…

After some recent performances of (mostly) TRUE THINGS - a show in which 3 out of the 4 storytellers in the line-up change a few details in their narrative of a personal experience and 1 person tells it straight - some friends were discussing how difficult it was to pick out the little white lies. In social worker and actress Rosemary Flanagan's story about the impact of Nikita Kruschev's visit to the White House on an elementary-school girl's imagination, she brought us thoroughly into her thinking as a child dealing with civil defense drills, threats of nuclear annihilation and other realities of the Cold War. The story was so engaging that her one (purposely) misstated historical fact went by unnoticed. And when former NYC police officer Regina Pasqualino described what she learned by being the only female from law enforcement at a rape scene, we were so caught up in the world she drew us into that we completely believed one not-so-subtle inconsistency. The details …