Adam Blatner

This is a book review about a newly released book , Trusting the Moment:  Unlocking your creativity and imagination: a handbook for individual and group work. As you know, I’m all for promoting improvisation, and this book of warm-ups is rich in ideas about how to develop these skills. A number of such books have been published over the last many years—I can’t keep up with them. This one is very good; it has a fair number of principles laid out that can supplement the exercises. It’s not merely a listing of techniques or improv or theatre games. (I write about this topic also in my anthology, Interactive & Improvisational Drama, in a chapter on warm-ups. Further references are noted on a supplementary webpage.)

The idea of promoting the capacity to make up stuff, to improvise, is very close to my heart and my everyday life. Helping others to re-discover this innate element in their heritage—healthy kids do it all the time—is one of my goals. So I appreciate Ms. Lindheim’s pursuing this along several channels, as may be noted on her website, http://www.center4creativity.org/.  She also has written about hospital clowning, which again resonates with one of the chapters in the Interactive & Improvisational Drama book.