Don’t give up your day job Windows
My first week of intensive social software – Twitter, delicious (‘can’t remember where the full stops go), Second Life, Edublogs, Moodle, new websites, Connectivism course complete with bogged emails. All new. For someone who has an arts background, and is a self-confessed digital dyslexic (literally) that’s not bad. I’m telling all you geeks out there – That’s PRETTY GOOD in fact! It’s nothing to you – is it! Anyway, my head gets full of thought pressure by 4.00pm, and so today I am using this blog as an overflow outlet:
The thing about social software is that it, like fire, is a good servant and a bad master. When it does what I want, I like to have it around. Twitter worked for me straight away, and it was fun to make contact with work colleagues in this novel (for me) way. Of course, the first thing that any Drama major graduate wants to do is play with it and push the boundaries. I can hear voices from my distant past urging – “Well, don’t just use it in the predictable way – turn it into something else – where’s the humour in it? Be imaginative…” But that’s not allowed now. It’s not proper. I’m in an office now, not on the stage. It’s unprofessional.(If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not good for you.) Hm.
I walked past the campus drama studio yesterday. Inside, a girl was lying on a rostrum, just being. When I would walk up to a rostrum, in days of Drama long gone, and lie down on it, I would think – just let that world go now so that in here you can be anyone or anything you want. We did a lot of movement and dance back then, and I became conditioned so that as soon as I lay down on the floor, or the stage, I would relax both mentally and physically. It was the starting state of the artist – the epoche.
That was my personal learning space – the drama studio. In the drama studio, noone was surprised or nervous about anyone’s unexpected behaviour. The unexpected was the norm. It was our job to create the unexpected and to challenge the patterns of behaviour that the outside world would consider customary. The whole learning phenomenon was about challenging the expected, using the usual in an unusual way, playing “against the lines” for impact and all of the physical and mental gymnastics that went along too. Interactions were supported, never blocked. We were taught that. Never block another actor’s initiative – go with it or take it somewhere else.
So when this unfunny computer blocks my inspiraton and sense of play with negative instructions and irritating pingging (I’ll spell it how I like) noises, I think, how will I ever coach this thing to relax, just be and then perform with grace and authenticity the script that I will soon prepare for it to deliver in Second Life? Don’t give up your day job Windows.
