Frameworks Guiding Expression

FRAMEWORK FOR EXPRESSION
1.1 A long time ago I took improv lessons as part of my design to become an actor. It was one of the things I enjoyed the most while acting. Like living life but knowing that it was all a game at the same time.
1.2 We were given some guidelines for our skits as the do in the show “Whose Line is it Anyway.” In one scenario three of us would do a scene together, and we would come in one at a time. The first person was given a basic setting, the kitchen. He started of tidying up or making breakfast. Then the second person enters with a given agenda, then the third person, me.
1.3 As first one actor and then the other set the scene I wondered what I was going to do. The minute I stepped on stage I knew what to do by seeing what was around me.
1.4 Luigi’s character sarcastically mentioned me and my whole grain bread. I sidestepped and mentioned the girl I’d met last night who given me her phone number. But Doug had thrown it out, and the garbage truck had already been by and picked up the garbage and we carried on from there.
1.5 “Why did you throw it out?”
1.6 “Because I felt like it...”
1.7 Once we were in the scene it carried us. And we expressed it, simply from being given a few simple instructions, frameworks within which to express ourselves. In this case the framework was quite open. A kitchen. It didn’t say what kind of kitchen. And oh, we were housemates, that was the assumption. And I was looking for something, a girl’s phone number. It was enough to give us room to express ourselves.
1.8 Because we were given a setting and a set of relationships we had a framework within which to express ourselves. We were all relating or creating relationships with each other. Each of us an idea connecting to other ideas in different ways, three housemates arguing over a lost phone number and a loaf of whole grain bread. When each of us understood the ideas that we were portraying and the relationships between them, when we understood the limits within which we were working, then we were free to express ourselves within them.
1.9 Frameworks, guiding expression.