So, you may remember me mentioning Destination Imagination ?
If you don’t remember me mentioning Destination Imagination, you can go check out my previous blog post about it or even my post recounting my first time doing DI.
On the off chance that you now still have no idea what Destination Imagination is, let me recap:
Destination Imagination is essentially a series of tournaments in which teams, representing schools from elementary to university levels, have to compete in various challenges. Each team has a main challenge, which they get to select from a list of options, and an “instant challenge”, which is given to them on the day of the tournament. The main challenge is generally something that takes a lot of preparation and development of ideas over time, while the instant challenge is generally something that requires quick thinking, teamwork and logic.
The main challenge that my team (Kate, Angela, Robbie, Claire and myself) did actually required both. Our challenge was this: present three skits, with three minutes to prepare and present each one, all based on the same prompt but with a different genre and stock character each time. To assist us in our skits, we were allowed to bring a 13″ x 13″ x 13″ box of props. We had some restrictions with the props, such as not being allowed to bring anything that would ruin the stage if it got knocked over, but for the most part we could bring whatever we thought would be helpful.
We also had to include two “team choice elements”: things that represented our collective interests as a group. These elements had to be well-incorporated into our presentations, while still clearly accentuated.
When I wrote my last blog post about DI, we had just finished the regional tournament, and gotten first place due to being the only team in our category and age group. We were feeling pretty good about the performance we had given, but there were some things we wanted to improve on.
The first thing we wanted to improve upon was one of our team choice elements. The idea for this team choice element was to handcraft one of our props out of (homemade play dough). However, the prop we made for regionals didn’t hold together very well.
So, we decided to try again. This time, however, instead of making a specific prop, we would just make some play dough and keep it mold-able for the tournament so that we could make whatever prop we needed on the spot. Besides the interests that we had initially wanted to represent– spacial-visual skills, science and art –we now also had to utilize the same creativity and quick thinking that we were already using to improvise our skits.
The second thing we wanted to improve upon was our understanding of the stock characters and genres that we could potentially be given for our skits. For the provincial tournament, we had a different set of potential stock characters than the ones we had for regionals. We used the preparation time we had between tournaments to practice improv skits with these characters, and changing our box of props to suit the characters we were now using.
Eventually, the day of provincials arrived, and we performed our three skits. They all went fairly well, but I think the first one (prompt: the stock character is working in a car dealership, stock character: royal person, genre: parody) went best. I had some technical issues trying to download the videos of our skits, so I can’t include them here until further notice, but watching them back I felt that this was the skit where we had the most energy and confidence. This probably stemmed partly from the fact that we chose to parody Keeping Up With the Kardashians, seeing as we had been including Kim Kardashian in our skits from pretty much the very beginning of this project.
If I have to do DI again next year, I think I’ll probably do improv again, as I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed DI last year. I also feel like I’ve learned a lot about how to improvise skits during this project, so it would be interesting to do again with some preexisting improv ability.
Toodles!