Through personal experience, reading and research an insight can be gleaned into how improvisation can play such an important role in aiding the Actor's development of theatrical character.

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Through personal experience, reading and research an insight can be gleaned into how improvisation can play such an important role in aiding the Actor’s development of theatrical character.  To fully comprehend how liberating improvisation can be as a doorway to one’s creative self, one has to experience and understand the process.  

The Actor’s tools begin with him or herself.  The key to accessing this inspired part of a self is through the process of playing games.  It is through games that a person of any age can act, evolve, developing new skills, creating and inventing new ideas, and, through the game’s unique process, without even being conscious of it.  

It is through play, in which children imitate more or less consciously all human activities and sentiments, which is for them a natural path towards artistic expression and for us a living repertoire of reaction of the most authentic kind – it is through play that we wish to construct not a system, but an educational experience.  We seek to develop the child, without deforming him or her, through the means which the child provides, towards which he or she senses the greatest inclination, through play, in playing, in games which are imperceptibly disciplined and exalted.

The skills necessary to create are basic.  They are each installed in every person from birth.  It is only the accessing of these skills that is sometimes seen as a difficulty, or more commonly the belief that only very talented people can create or perform.  In fact, it is the performing that is often seen as threatening, this is often up to the personal experiences and psychology of the individual.  This mind-set can be dissolved in the process of play.  ‘We observe the children at play.  They teach us.  Learn everything from children.  Impose nothing on them.  Take nothing away from them.  Help them in their development without their being aware of it.’    To play, and whilst playing free one’s mind, free one’s self.  To feel no threat, no judgment or contest, just to play once again as if a child.  To remember one’s soul and remind one’s body of it’s capability for creativity.  To learn and teach through one’s self.  To abandon any negative thoughts about one’s self or disapproving feelings implied by others or destructive teachings gleaned from an uninspired education.  The human body, mind, heart and soul have the capacity, once accessed to spark all inspiration.

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The human condition also has the aptitude for negative action and disbelief in itself.  This is truly destructive to the imagination.  Keith Johnstone believes that a negative experience with a teacher as a child can turn an imaginative person into an unimaginative person very quickly, leaving that person with little or no belief in them self.  

At school any spontaneous act was likely to get me into trouble.  I learned never to act on impulse, and that whatever came into my mind first should be rejected in favour of better ideas.  I learned that my imagination wasn’t “good” enough. ...

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