Grocery Store Musical

Defenders of the Playful award-winning Improv Everywhere take their "musical mission" to the dangerously intimate and mundane environment of the local supermarket, producing the world's first Grocery Store Musical.

Be sure to see their webpage. Get a little closer to the experience in this interview with a few of the innocent bystanders.

The real magic here is in how open and responsive most of the shoppers were, how willing they were to abandon their shopping lists and embrace the extraordinary. There was real shared delight here, as if they were all in on the joke, even though they had nothing to do with it and couldn't really understand it. "When we did Food Court Musical," the blog reports, "we had a pretty good idea of where our audience would be– sitting at the tables. This was more unpredictable. We had all of this choreography planned, but we had no idea if people would make way for us. The area got increasingly crowded as the day went on, which made it all the more fun. Often people found themselves right in the middle of the show."

May we each find ourselves there, at least once in our life times, suddenly, and without reason, right in the middle of such a silly, joyful show. And when we do, as the song so poignantly recommends, "let's squish our fruit together."

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Junkyard Sports Found Object Tabletop Olympics

Ask me what game - of all the wacky and sometimes profound works of play art that I've created in my 40-plus years of wacky and profound play art creation - I played with the top creative people at LEGO.

No. It was Found Object Tabletop Olympics.

Earlier this year, at the LEGO Design Conference, it and I reached some kind of apotheosis. It had a lot to do with our reaching the right audience at the right time. One of the participants, Lucius Margulis, took copious photos of the event. Here is his post, and below, a compilation of his photos and clips.

Found Object Tabletop Olympics event is based on the approach to play and creativity I described in Junkyard Sports. But it is the first Junkyard Sport I designed where the materials (junk) are truly "found objects" - totally random, collected from whatever the participants happen to have with them at the time, or can find in the room.

It was a big step for me, letting go of deciding exactly what junk people will get to play with. I had built the book and the concept around the art of assembling just the right collection of materials that would help get people to play and think together. And then discovering that without any special junk it was just as much fun and just as profound - and much, much easier to produce. I'm not saying that it's better - assembling a collection of the "right" materials is an art in itself - just that it works, that it's still fun, still meaningful. A different kind of meaning, though, because the "junk" comes from what people have, and what they are willing to share, and what the people who provide the room leave around.

So the whole thing takes on an extra meaning - letting people find their own junk helps them discover the wealth of what's around them, at their fingertips and in their very pockets. Helps them discover the wealth of resources they have to play with, and the people, too.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Crab walks, and beyond

I am fortunate to hear from people like Phil Smith - artists, thinkers, players who are busily creating new invitations to deep fun. I last wrote about him and his book here.

Some of what Phil has been sharing with me since follows:

This link and this herald, very minimally, something that I hope will be along either before the end of this year or at the beginning of next.

A book with my Crab Walks scripts and an extended essay on walking and performance has just been published: it's called Walking, Writing and Performance (Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith) and is edited by Roberta Mock.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith