You may read in the place of ‘meaningful deep work’ any of the following: time for studying further, time for writing, for painting or designing a new process, or just remembering what gives you courage and significance. Perhaps you are making a career change and you need time to strategise and execute new ideas.
Together we will embark on a journey, where Petro and Christian support you, to define your most important goal to design and evolve your individual and successful Story Spiral towards it.
You are invited to catch flying pigs with us
DATE: Thursdays: 9, 16, 23 & 30 Nov, 7, 14 & 21 Dec.
TIME: 20:00 – 20:45
PLACE: a ZOOM room (we will send link)
FACILITATORs: Petro Janse van Vuuren and Christian F. Freisleben
COST: $25 per session for 7 sessions or
$150 for the entire series of 7 sessions
RSVP by 2. Nov petro@playingmantis.net
More on the time structure
The online process will take 7 sessions over seven weeks to allow you to implement your Success Story from week to week, so it is a commitment.
We would like your permission to video record all the sessions. We would also like to use the material to populate the course and the book – keeping your identity confidential, of course.
Who should attend?
Coaches, facilitators, game changers, thought leaders like you who can accept the following:
This is not a showcase or sales event geared to impress or win you over. If you come, you already believe that metaphor, embodiment, improvisation and imagination are powerful, fun ways to bring about transformation and you want to know more about using them in coaching and facilitation.
Experimentation and mistakes are part of the process. You must be willing to play with ideas that may not work or may be a bit uncomfortable, but that could lead to new heights of freedom and insight.
We’re looking forward to being inspired by you. Oink!
My friend and collaborator Christian and I will be presenting a session at the Applied Improvisation Network’s annual conference next Sunday 27 August. To me it is a kind of dream come true. This will be the third time I attempt to attend the AIN conference in some way. The last two attempts failed because for various reasons I was unable to make the trip. This year, though, Christian and I solved half the problem.
We will be attending the conference from the comfort of our home offices.
He is in Austria, I am in South Africa and we will meet together online and on screen to present a conference session in California!
I say half the problem, because, while we get to present and interact for an hour, we still do not get to attend and connect with all the other wonderful contributors and players. Next time!
Our topic: How does one use embodiment in online rooms?
Over the past two years Christian and I have been offering online pig catching sessions and learned a number of important principles for doing embodied exercises online. I have colleagues who do not believe it can be done and when I challenge them, they say: “I am sure something essential gets lost.”
Well, we have found that there is a unique kind of intimacy that develops online when people play together – a kind distinctly different in quality than when you work with someone offline. Part of the reason is because you see yourself on the screen interacting and this creates a certain vulnerability that adds to the connection.
To engage the imagination through the body requires some innovation when working online. We found ways to use the unique feature of online rooms to access the imagination and people’s creativity in fresh and unexpected ways.
We have discovered how to contain the work when there is no physical room within which to contain activities and relationships.
We have found out how to bridge the divides between participants and build playfulness and connection in new ways.
All these insights will be shared at the conference on Sunday morning and I look forward to sharing some of the principles here in a blog or two soon.
For the curious, here is our conference abstract:
An important aspect of Applied Improvisation is using and perceiving the body: your own and those of others in the room. It therefore seems logical, that “room” is a physical construct, a place with enough space to move and also to rest.
In a connected world “rooms” in the World Wide Web are part of the reality of more and more people: 3,6 Billion people have direct access to the internet, which is about half of the world population. Especially in Europe (over 70 percent of the population) and North America (nearly 90 percent) using the Internet is a part of daily life. An important aspect in the still growing numbers of direct users is mobile access to the internet via smart devices.
Internet “rooms” are used more and more often to learn together, to plan projects and them into action step by step. Topics are not only “tech related” – they are also about facilitating, coaching, developing various kinds of people, individually and in groups. Live online tools are often used in these contexts. They enable participants to hear and see each other. Nonverbal communication is a key aspect of Applied Improvisation. It is also a key aspect of live online rooms.
In our contribution we will summarize studies on using embodiment in settings enabled by technology. We will present different improvisation methods that can be used in online settings highlighting its effects on collaboration and interaction on one hand and and on personal development on the other.
Facilitators
Dr. Petro Janse van Vuuren, petro@playingmantis.net, Playing Mantis and Drama for Life, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Applied drama researcher and practitioner, coach and consultant.
Christian F. Freisleben,christian.freisleben@improflair.at, Halftime: St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences (Didactics in Higher Education, E-Learning); teacher, trainer, journalist in the fields of education, health care and social affairs
“When pigs fly” is a figure of speech that says something is completely impossible, even unthinkable. For example: “Can people really change for good?” “Yes, when pigs fly.”
For us a flying pig is the moment of insight that brings shift and transformation in our clients, students, participants…
Join us in our quest.
We will not only look for flying pigs, we will also research ways to catch them, integrate them in our work and our lives with the help of methods and inspirations from the fields of Applied Improvisation and Strategic Narrative Embodiment.
In this online Pig Catching adventure you will be accompanied by Petro Janse van Vuuren from south Africa and Christian F. Freisleben from Austria. We will invite you to take a close look at your pig catchers’ wardrobe, i.e. your strengths as coach, facilitator, trainer and teacher. We will meet three times online, talking, sharing, working and also moving together. The sessions foster insights and inspiration, ideas and dreams, concepts for your work in, changing the world for good.
A taster session, where you can learn more about flying pigs and the methods we use
Monday 18th of July, 8pm
A longer journey of learning, laughing and transforming:
Thursday 22nd of August, 29th of August, 5th of September – on all days from 8 to 9:15pm, Johannesburg time.
Before and between these dates you will have time to take a closer look at flying pigs!
Cost?
In return for our preparation and facilitation of the journey we ask you to pay us whatever amount of money you think it is worth for you and your work.
