Writers Improv – finding deeper emotional connections to story

Christina Kallas writer, producer, educator and founder of the Writers Improv Studio. Christina and her team will be bringing a special collaborative storytelling experience to DIY DAYS where participants will be able to enter a process that strives to find deeper emotional connections within a stories.

5 Questions with Christina Kallas

What will you be doing at DIY DAYS?

I’ll be running the Writers Improv Experience – a group of actors and writers from the Writers Improv Studio work throughout the day taking in variables from attendees and improvising on stories and characters that will be part of the open storyworld that will fuel an end of the day performance. This collaboration will bring us a co-created storyworld that is lead by the imagination of the attendees and their wishes for the future.

What’s your background?

Storyteller and changelover. Being at home in many countries and many languages, I recently moved from Europe to New York, where I feel that change has its home at the present moment.

What excites you about the writing process?

I love the moment when you seem to have touched onto something which is true and simple and you are led more than leading. It is an almost feverish condition, you feel the energy, as if you touched a string which is responding by sympathetic resonance to a note from another source. This is the aim of the Writers Improv method – to get writers and actors to that state, where they are able to feel the flow and rhythm of the story.This demands that as a storyteller you have to let go of control. Actors and writers take on the story of the original storyteller and tell on as if it were their own. There are certain things which I have found to be of incredible importance to be able to go deeper in such collaborative story evolution, and they all have to do with I-motion (I am joking, it is emotion, of course.) But letting go of control is the first step. I like to use the metaphor of Eskimos when they make ice sculptures: they firmly believe that there is only one form in the ice. Many artists from antiquity felt the same. They freed the form imprisoned in the marble, a pre-existing form that was there long before they were. We cannot be held responsible for something that existed before us. The marble and the form we discover in it, the words and the meanings we discover when combining them, are not there to express our egos. We are the medium through which something that pre-exists becomes known. So we can all work at the same piece of marble or ice, the form will be the same, as it pre-exists.

What’s your wish for the future?

I wish that we can evolve in consciousness and become able to perceive with a bigger part of our brains. I cannot imagine a more exhilarating experience.

If you could share a book, film, album, and experience with the future what would each be?

If what you mean is which book, film, album I cherish most to bring into the future, then this is a difficult question. Perhaps Radiohead, perhaps Mulholland Drive, perhaps The Catcher in the Rye. And what about an experience? Looking into my son’s eyes for the first time, seeing the Berlin wall fall, group meditating in Apollo’s temple in Delphi, using the human microphone… There’s so much I’d like to share with the future!

WHAT CHRISTINA WILL BE DOING AT DIY DAYS

The Writers Improv be a collaboration with Writers Improv Studio, which focuses on the art of improvisation as a method for writing. Improvisation, as used here, incorporates scene work with actors through a concrete method to explore the emotional arcs and deeper truth of stories. Writers Improv is like walking backwards. You know who you are and what has happened, but you cannot see where you are going. You are walking into the future – but the future is included in the past. The focus is on emerging and collaborative storytelling. The goal is a co-created storyworld, lead by the imagination of the attendees and their wishes for the future.

Christina Kallas has written and/or produced a number of movies, TV series and TV movies. She has taught in film programs at university level for more than 15 years and currently teaches at Columbia and The New School. Christina earned an M.A. in music and film studies and a PhD in film and media studies at the FU Berlin, and has written five books, among them Creative Screenwriting: Understanding Emotional Structure. As a storyteller and scholar she loves alternative narrative structures (non-linear, multi-protagonist, multi-perspective, dissolution of time). In 2011 she founded the Writers Improv Studio in New York. She is currently working on a transmedia project, The Kairos Project.

twitter, skype: chriskal666
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site/blog: www.writersimprovstudio.com