Dreaming spires

Last night I ran a workshop for the Oxford Imps, the university's improv troupe. The session was held at beautiful Magdalen College and the guided tour of the grounds beforehand was an unquantifiable bonus.

A theatrical 'workshop' is a strange beast; not quite a rehearsal and not a part of a progression of classes. It should not be positioned as remedial and neither should it seek to alter the artistic DNA of the group in question. I find that such sessions work best by piquing the interest of the individual performer rather than speaking to the wider group. Anything more usually falls prey to overreach.

The session turned out to be a strange confluence of my two worlds. Whilst the content was obviously 'comedy', as the Artistic Director invited me seemingly with no more than partial consultation with the wider group, the context was decidedly 'corporate'.

I've wandered into enough corporate training rooms in enough places to know the unspoken question forming in the collective mind: -

Why exactly am I here?

Neither the 'arty' nature of the subject or the youth and relative inexperience of the participants absolved me of the need to answer this. Throughout the session I found we lost impetus unless I kept restating that our aim was personal development and not a wholesale, group-wide step change.

So no different in attitude from how I would approach any sales or marketing team training.