Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

The Full Circle fundraiser for Material Management Relief Corp (MMRC) at ComedySportz on Saturday, October 23 was a HUGE success!  We raised more than $545 through ticket and raffle sales, which will go directly towards MMRC and the tremendous work they are doing to help the people of Haiti.  The evening was filled with laughter and fun as the Full Circle performers, ChiArts High School students, and the Actors Training Center students performed some short and long form improvisation.  Thanks to Full Circle member Annie Calhoun (Director of ChiArts High School improv team) and Philip Markel (Associate Director of ATC), the student performers were prepared to take the stage and play hard!

We recently heard from MMRC regarding the donation we were able to provide.  MMRC explained they are “in the middle of an emergency cholera effort to deliver desperately needed supplies to a hospital in North Haiti.” The funds will go directly to cover the costs for the aircraft required to deliver the supplies needed, which means our donation will be used to save hundreds of children under the age of 5 in the next 48 hours.  Full Circle is humbled to be able to take part in this effort and wants to thank those of you who were able to come out and support our fundraiser by attending our show, participating in the raffle, or both!  We are reminded that a little bit of energy around one idea can lead towards making a significant impact on lives around us.

We’d like to recognize the following organizations that so generously donated items for our raffle:

• Dog & Pony Theatre Co
• Northlight Theatre
• Barrel of Monkeys
• Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
• ComedySportz
• Lambs Farm
• Half Acre Beer Co
• The Steppenwolf Theatre
• Improv Olympic Theater
• The Remy Bumpo Theatre Co.

Thanks to these organizations and their generosity, Full Circle was able to raffle some outstanding items such as tickets to shows and free classes!

And finally, we’d like to extend our biggest thanks to David Montgomery and everyone at ComedySportz for graciously sharing the CSz stage with our young performers (as well as a portion of the ticket sales to their mainstage show!) This night would not have been possible without this support.

Upon reflection of this experience, we feel strongly about the need to seek out more opportunities to give back to the community surrounding us – whether that is teaching improvisation workshops at schools in Chicago, performing at community shelters, interacting with residents at assisted living facilities, or sponsoring fundraising events for those in need overseas.  We are committed to spreading the joy of improvisation to those around us and we have found that as we seek opportunities to spread our passion, it comes right back to us with a positive energy that is impossible to deny!  This cyclical passing of joy is contagious and invigorating!

Missed the event but still want to donate? You’re not too late! You can make a donation to MMRC by clicking here.

Post by Laura Calhoun.

Full Circle hosts event to fund aid workers in Haiti

This Saturday, Oct 23^rd, Full Circle Performance Outreach will be hosting an event at ComedySportz Chicago to help raise money for Materials Management Relief Corp (MMRC), a non-profit organization dedicated serving people whose lives have been affected by natural disaster or conflicts. ComedySportz has generously offered to give a portion of tickets sales from their 6pm show to MMRC – we are so excited to help out this incredible organization.

I wanted to tell you about a really inspirational guy, Paul Sebring, an American fashion photographer who felt a strong urge to help with the relief efforts after the earthquake ravaged Haiti back in January of this year. A few weeks into his time there, ‘Big Paul’ (as he is known) started an organization with a friend called MMRC. And he’s been there since.

At the present moment, MMRC operates as the only system in the whole country that resembles a 911 service. Unfortunately, there are very few working hospitals or clinics at the moment and all of the country’s second year nursing students were killed in the earthquake when their school (the only nursing institution in the whole country) collapsed.

With the help of friends (nurses, doctors, ex-militaries, locals), Big Paul has been working often 14-16 hour days to support local organizations in Port au Prince. They are currently running the only “ambulance” system in the country, doing all patient transfers between tent communities and hospitals. They know which hospitals have burn units, incubators, oxygen, specialized surgeons and they have saved countless lives by getting local Haitians the help they need in time.

For example, on a Sunday night back in May, my friend Anne, a nurse from Canada, explained how she was working the night shift at a local hospital, and had 4 patients in critical condition requiring oxygen (3 were on ventilators, another was completely oxygen dependent). Throughout the day the hospital staff attempted to find additional oxygen, with no luck. When Anne started her shift, there was less than 4 hours of oxygen left in the tanks. It was rainy season and the power was out. The phone lines were down and everything was closed. The roads were a complete mess. Anne and the other medical volunteers realized they would soon have the task of deciding which of these patients would get that last reservoir of oxygen and which ones would have to die. Anne then remembered that she had done an ambulance transport with Big Paul a few days earlier and immediately contacted him on Facebook. Within 2 hours, he showed up with 4 tanks transported from another hospital, as well as a family he had recovered whose home had fallen on them during the storm. Paul and his crew had spent those two hours driving around to all of the local hospitals in the area searching for extra tanks. Thanks to MMRC, everyone survived the night.

Aside from patient transfers, they are also focused on distributing supplies and allocating resources where they find the needs to be the greatest. Whether it be IV solutions, medications, pedialyte, or anything else they find a surplus of at different sites, MMRC is consistently there to diminish the waiting time between arrival and distribution of goods. There have also been instances where they have gone to bring extra supplies to orphanages, as well as medical attention to children requiring it.

Big Paul and his team ‘save the day’ every day; they help get people the help and care the need. Paul and MMRC rely solely on individual donations to continue their work. Unfortunately, they are running out of funds and we are going to help them out in any way we can.

We’d love for you to come enjoy this night of comedy with us and support MMRC. For only $22 you can see Full Circle Performance Outreach perform alongside two teen groups we have worked with this summer at 4:30pm and then stick around for the 6pm ComedySportz show! So come early and stay late! Ticket and additional event information is available by clicking here.

If  you would like to make a private donation to MMRC, you can make it via PayPal by clicking here.

Post by Connor Tillman.

How to start a movement

Full Circle had the opportunity to meet this week for a meaty discussion on our core values and how they would effect how we presented lessons and managed our class. After some consideration, we came face to face with the guiding principal we work from:

Our teachers are participating.

If you go to any improv class in Chicago, you’ll see all the students on-stage and the teacher sitting off to the side, separate from the action. When we play “Space Dance,” “What Am I Watching?” or “Kitty Wants a Corner,” the Full Circle teachers are playing right alongside our students. This “immersion” within the circle was never a conscious choice (or some educational ideal) but from the very plain fact that we are all the type of people who can’t be in a room with fun going on and not be participating. The result of this enthusiasm and sense of playfulness is that we have stumbled into a unique approach to classroom leadership.

I recently watched an amazing video from Ted.com that illustrates exactly what Full Circle has started doing. It’s a 3-minute presentation by Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, in which he discusses how a leader can start a movement. You can check out the video here.

In the beginning of the video, you will see a lone man, dancing wildly on a hill. There’s really no nice way to say this, but the guy looks like a complete idiot. Yet, for whatever reason, someone joins him, flailing eagerly alongside him. And what does the first dancer do? According to Sivers, “The leader embraces him as an equal. So now, it’s not about the leader anymore, it’s about them.” Soon enough, you’ll see more people come, and more and more until the hillside is blanketed with dancers. And they’re not following the leader anymore, they’re following the other followers – and there is, of course, safety in numbers.

When Full Circle teaches, we greet our students as equals when we participate with them. We are not the authority held at a distance. We are in the thick of the mayhem, guiding and prodding when necessary, so that the machine is self-sustaining and not dependent on an outside source (powered by affirmations from the teacher).

This is not to suggest, in any way, that we have succeed where other improv teaching institutions have failed. iO, The Annoyance, and The Second City are world-class teaching institutions – these are the places that gave us the skills which we now pass along. But fundamentally, we have different goals for our students. We could care less if our students end up putting on funny shows. We just want them to be better at:

• Learning to articulate their thoughts
• Taking on and exploring new points of view
• Being a team player
• Taking risks, following impulses
• Listening
• And allowing themselves to be as silly as they want to be.

In sum, the teacher immersion helps us to create a safe and supportive environment for all of this to happen. Don’t believe us that it’s working? Here’s a great example:

At last week’s class, we posted a number of principles on the wall, like “Take risks!” “Yes AND” and “Have fun!” We asked the students to define each principle for us. When I posed the question “What does it mean to ‘have fun?’” one of the boys raised his hand and said, “Can I do something instead?” I said, “Sure, why not?” and he proceeded to run around the classroom screaming. He executed every single principle we posted on the wall in one single response.

Post by Susie Gutowski

YES And…The story of the Feisty Ferret

Prescott, Paul, Mike, and I have been teaching a weekly improv class for teens at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club. We’re only two weeks in, but the students are quickly catching on. And today we had our first great example of “YES AND,” one of the most important principles of improv.

“YES AND” is the idea that we don’t just accept gifts from others, but we add to them. So, for example:

Person A: Doctor, eyeglasses are for geeks. I can’t wear these.

Person B: But Stephen Hawking wears these glasses!

Not only does Person B accept that he’s an optometrist, but he’s also given more details we can use in this scene. He could have just said, “Well, you need glasses” – that would just be saying yes, but then what? But because Person B said YES AND (giving those great details about Stephen Hawking’s glasses) we have a new world to play in. We now know things about this scene, like that this doctor thinks nerdy glasses are cool. For the rest of this scene, the doctor knows to keep offering Person A nerdy things, like free pocket protectors, T-89 calculator bags, and wedgie-proof underwear. Because we said YES AND, this scene has legs on which to run!

So in today’s class, we were playing a game called “Red Ball, Blue Ball, Feisty Ferret”. You pass an imaginary ball using eye contact, saying “red ball” when you pass the red ball to someone, and “blue ball” when you pass the blue ball to someone. But the real fun comes in when you must pass the Feisty Ferret. The Feisty Ferret is exactly what you think it is: an imaginary ferret that doesn’t want to be held and is clawing and scratching at you, causing you to wrestle and wrangle it before you pass it along. So at the end of the game, one of our boys had had enough of the that ferret so he threw it on the floor and stomped on it.

Soon, we were all standing over the imaginary ferret, saying a few kind words at the ferrets funeral. One of the boys began to officiate over the proceedings, saying, “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today…” and the rest of us took turns reminiscing on all the good times we had with the Feisty Ferret, like that time we went bowling, that time we got lunch together and remember how he wasn’t always feisty? While we’re doing this, one of the boys left the circle and started messing with something at one of the tables at the side. I’m sitting there wondering why he’s not participating, when he returns and places at Post-It note in the middle of the circle. On it, he had written, “We’ve all hated you feisty ferret.”

If creating an insulting tombstone for Feisty Ferret wasn’t a great example of YES AND, then I don’t know what is!

Best of all, we were having fun. We we wrestled a ferret, we sang a made-up hymn, and we ate mashed potatoes at the reception, all without ever leaving our classroom. We used our imaginations and laughed a lot. I can’t wait for next week!

Post by Susie Gutowski

A Family That Eats Together

 

Prescott, Rebecca, Jo, Annie D., Annie C., and Susie answering the world's age old questions, like "Who took the last of the milk?"

 

Recently, Full Circle made a trip to the Lincoln Park Community Shelter (LPCS) to perform a pre-dinner show for the shelter residents.  LPCS, located in the basement level of a church, exists to “bring our community together to empower homeless men and women to make life changes.” The show marked the first day that Full Circle reached out to an adult homeless shelter.

At the very least, I expected the residents to be an audience to whom none of us were accustomed.  I assumed they would be a difficult, perhaps inattentive crowd. With volunteers coming in every day of the week to cook a unique, fresh meal, dinner time is probably the most favored hour at the shelter.  I knew that the moment the smell of garlic wafted through the air, Prescott’s hilarious, excuse-filled student character would go unnoticed.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

 

Susie milking a dry cow while Jo says goodbye to Grandma Annie, who is (unfortunately) dying.

 

 

Jo Scott said it best when she commented that “there was no point where they jumped on board with us.  They were on board from the very start.”  It shocked us all how the simplicity of our short form games brought smiles and heart felt laughter to their evening. Our play immediately absorbed everyone – all through human connections and hilarious discoveries that come from improvisational comedy.

Although the residents were slightly hesitant to give us suggestions during the show, (with the exception of the lovely lady who gave us “who took the last of the milk?” and “Pepsi”) they truly enjoyed the performance of discovery.  That euphoria (that both the players and the audience experience) that comes with witnessing the creation of theater on the spot is a huge part of why I do this.  I feel honored to share that with the folks at LPCS.

So what made this show different from others I have done?

To me it was the feedback from the residents after the show.  They wanted more.  They shook our hands.  They asked us to come back and to be more vulgar next time.  They told us that they related to characters in our set.  THEY WANTED MORE!

Connor and Annie D. caught in a "Weekend at Bernie's" moment

 

The LPCS show was a success and my hope is that the guests’ hunger that night was not only satisfied through garlic pasta and milk, but through laughter as well.

Post by Annie Donley

Why Are We Called “Full Circle”?

All the teachers and performers in Full Circle Performance Outreach have spent a significant amount of time on stage. It’s become more comfortable with time and repetition, but the memory of that first moment is a scary one: most of us were in class, standing alone in front of a room of seated strangers.

For the first Full Circle improv class we taught, we made that same mistake. Our students were having fun during the warm-up games we would play in a circle, but as soon as they were singled out on stage, they were no longer having fun. They spoke softly and slowly backed away from the audience (our first class was taught on a school field so you can imagine how far they got!) They were biding their time until they could escape back to their peers.

So the next class, we played fun warm-up games in a circle like always, but when it came time to perform, we had two students simply move in to the middle of the circle and begin a scene. Now everyone was standing together. The stage and audience had blended. There was no place to run because a smiling friend blocked any exit. Students seamlessly transitioned from attentive audience to performer and back again. The stage became their home and that protective shape, that Full Circle, became our name.

Post by Prescott Gadd