E1 - a first experience with Energy Theater

Four super groups were assembled (it takes eight folks to make a good energy theater): (1&3), (2,5,6), (7,8).

I will first describe a few interesting things I saw groups(1&4) doing.  They worked very well together, listening carefully, responding thoughtfully.  Different leaders emerged at different times pretty much spontaneously.  They decided on gestures for the different forms of energy.  It fascinated me that one person did a hand motion and almost immediately everyone was doing the same hand motion, spontaneously, without any verbal instruction.  They just saw and imitated.  Since they were all in a row, it was like a wave passing from one end of the group to the next.  Sight is faster than speech.

They spontaneously organized their bodies this way as well, when starting to act out what the energy was doing.  Again, not verbal instruction, but just paying attention to the nearest neighbor and instinctively moving to get in line.

Initially they had the ropes representing the different objects (stick, puck, floor, air) overlapping, like the objects were overlapping.  As they went on and got more comfortable with representing what they thought was going on, Sue noticed this overlapping and mentioned it didn't make sense to her.  After more discussion refining their representation, she came back to the overlapping, and then they had a conversation to discuss it and eventually decided to separate them out from one another.

They practiced a lot.  Desi wanted them to get quite accomplished.  The women in colored striped top spontaneously started being the counter.  They all spontaneously organized their bodies around the ropes and started doing the Kinetic Energy motion (jogging in place).  Then she said "1" and folks moved to their first "state", then she said "2" and they moved to the second state, etc.  Later, the rest of class commented on how impressed they were with the choreography of this group.

Just as they were about to perform for the rest of the class, the guy from group 3 brought up a realization that he and another person had, that the group had forgotten about the stick vibrating back and forth and having potential alternating with kinetic (I think).  So they talked about it and had to figure out what to do without any practice.  It was hard to follow what they ended up doing to account for that - the rest of the class asked a clarifying question to make sense of that portion.