Animal Brain, Human Brian

We had an exciting exercise today - we took our first step towards our transition into human characters. Starting with an animal character improvisation, we, step-by-step, began to exchange our animal parts with human parts. The first to go were the feet - suddenly I had a heron's body with human feet! Then ankles, knees, thighs, hips, etc., moving up into the upper body and finally the head. But never, of course, the brain - the brain was still an animal brain. Then we explored the room, trying out our new human limbs for the first time, seeing how we would treat and react to the various things in the room. Then we began interacting with people with the word "Hi," although the way we used the word "Hi" was completely up to our interpretation and did not have to have anything to do with a greeting. Finally, we were allowed to use names, and to play with the sounds of different names, and perhaps even introduce ourselves.

Reflections on the Exercise

I found a lot of cool new things in my animal today as I transitioned into a human being. Having human limbs, as a start, was absolutely revolutionary - especially having hands. When I obtained hands, I just wanted to touch everything in the room, to see how it felt to grasp it in my fingers. What an experience! It was like I had discovered a new color. I touched not only things in the room, but my own body. I felt what it was like to have human skin, human teeth, human fingernails, and with my animal brain it was like I was exploring my own body for the first time.

Not having wings or a beak was another huge transformation. Moving my arms was a surprise for me, and I even was acting like I had a phantom beak - trying to poke at things with my mouth and my tongue without fully realizing that they functioned completely differently from my beak.

I also experimented with what it was like to lie on the floor, to roll around, to make movements that the heron could not have accomplished. While I don't know if I'll be able to bring these movements into my human character for the bird, I still liked to experiment with them to challenge my animal brain into exploring the world around me. That's what I really liked about today - it was about exploring our environment in a completely new way, much like I explored Studio A during Watering Hole. Except this time, I was exploring it as a newly transformed human being. So I tried out lots of different things and made discoveries of Studio A that I had begun to take for granted as both Brian P-S and the blue heron.

And, of course, interacting with the other characters was just as fun, because it was so completely new. I was meeting people for the first time, except they weren't really fully formed people because we were trying out so many different ways of interacting with each other. I used "Hi" in about 10,000 different ways, trying to elicit different responses from different people. I used it to attack Jordan, for example, but I also used to seduce Andrea. We were all playing, in a state of anything-goes, and that was really engaging to be a part of.

After today, I'm really excited to see where our characters go from here. Honestly, I think my character could go in several different directions; I'm going to need lots of exercises like the one today to decide on what works for the blue heron, and what doesn't work. But getting to play without limits today created a state of fun that really opened me up to what is possible.