Still working on the Great Data Restoration of 2017.

I wish I knew what our desktop PC had done with its backup files, because Jiminy Cricket, this is ridonculous.

From now on, I’m going to upload backups of our backups to The Great Cloud In The Æthers so this will NEVER HAPPEN EVER AGAIN.

Anyway, I’m still working on this. I expect to finish it by … I’m not sure. Tomorrow morning at the latest. It would be tonight, but rehearsal. THE SHOW MUST GO ON, amiright?

In the process of doing this relentless desk-bound and detail-oriented job, I have discovered that I will do almost anything to avoid sitting at a desk and futzing about with financial datas, including cleaning the house. “Oop, can’t enter the datas right now, our friend who’s in massage therapy school is coming over to work on us!” (Speaking of which: OMG. You guys. Evidently I have needed a legit massage for like 17 years or something.)

Anyway, one of my Avoidance Strategies this morning was to come up with a set of cards for an improv game that I’m going to try with our Dance Team, which is divided into Kids Who Grok Improve and Kids Who Are Like, “Wait, What Steps Am I Supposed To Improv?”

There are three sets of cards, as such:

Animal

• cheetah
• elephant
• falcon
• lion
• snail
• trout

Movement

• crawl
• glide
• run
• skip
• stand (yes: in dance, standing is a movement)
• walk

Feeling

• angry
• bored
• confused
• joyful
• sad
• thoughtful

The idea is to give the kids something a little more concrete around which to improvise movements.

Here’s how it works:

1. Choose an Animal card (these are orange in my set). Think about how that animal is shaped and how it moves. Think about how it might feel to be that animal. Are you heavy or light? Are you relaxed or focused? Do you live on the land or in the water, and can you fly? If you live in the water, do you live in lakes, rivers, or oceans? If you live on land, do you live on the plains, the mountains, or the forest? Is it hot there? Cold? It’s okay to start out moving in ways that look like the animal in question, but ultimately you should try to move your body in ways that feel like the animal in question. Explore this for at least one minute; at most, five minutes.
2. Choose a Movement card (these are green in my set). If you draw “Elephant” and “Glide,” think about how a glide would look and feel if an elephant were doing it. Try to capture that movement with your body. Is there more than one way an Elephant can Glide? How would a Falcon Skip if it were by itself? What about five Falcons together? Explore this for at least one minute; at most, five minutes.
3. Choose a Feeling card (these are blue in my set). We tend to associate certain movements with certain feelings, but we can mix them up. What would an Elephant Angrily Gliding look and feel like? What would a Snail Joyfully Standing look and feel like? Is there a difference between one Cheetah Thoughtfully Walking and three Cheetahs Thoughtfully Walking? Explore this for five minutes, to give yourself time to connect all the parts.

I plan to couple this with the classic North, South, East, West flocking exercise. I’ll run them through the flocking exercise first, though, so they get a sense of how flocking works before adding weird stuff.

Next time, I might add in “vegetable” and “mineral” categories. How might sad seaweed skip? How might a confused granite cliff-face crawl?

And now, back to our regularly scheduled strugglecast day.