On Saturday, we took 2 of our cardboard ‘gods’ – Death & Growth to London for a session with writer and Improv performer Susan Harrison on ways we might create more animated dialogue with the gods we have made.

The Improv training session was inspiring, fun and useful. Once we’d got over the hurdle of relinquishing control, we surprised ourselves by generating a series of wild and whimsical conversations triggered by varying god combinations in different ‘real world’ scenarios proposed by Susan.

For a start, Growth & Death were involved in a couples counselling session where the therapist was encouraging the pair to talk out the tensions and incompatibilities in their clearly fraught relationship. Next came Lady Justice and Lady Luck (two of the gods we’d left behind) as guests being interviewed on a TV Chat Show. The Chat Show host and Lady Luck were both challenging a somewhat defensive Lady Justice on how she could be so absolutely certain on right versus wrong. She had to admit she wasn’t but needed, for the sake of society, to portray that the difference matters. On the other hand, the two Ladies discovered a shared scepticism of the fairness of a society based on meritocracy. Finally, Death and Lady Justice found themselves on holiday idly chatting whilst lying on adjacent sunloungers. While Justice was suffering from guilt at not being in post on top of the court buildings ensuring justice was administered, Death was alarmingly cheerful about the fact that no-one could die whilst he was on holiday! But they both agreed they needed a break from their extremely stressful lines of work.

The big learning for us from the day was that we didn’t have to ‘act’. Given a simple structure of 2 or 3 characters and a recognisable scenario, then compelling and enlightening conversations readily flowed without us consciously thinking about what to say. Each conversation created intriguing narrative threads revealing the character of each ‘god’ as well as surprising insights into the abstract concepts they stand for which can otherwise remain elusive.