 Thank you. Thank you so much. Improvisation is great for young people. Yes, and improvisation is wonderful for older people. Let's bridge the gap! That is what our conversation is about today. We are so thrilled about the Applied Improvisation Network because through this organization we collaborate with one another and that's how we found each other. I've been passionate about using the arts as a bridge between generations for years. I directed my first intergenerational art space project when I was in my 20s, an intergenerational community mural project in LA, which you can still see. And then this project was born two years ago in Irvine at the AIN conference who was there. Yay! I was sitting at dinner and I was showing a picture of the improv class that I teach at a wonderful music and dance camp every summer, and it's for teens and adults. And that particular year my class age range was from 10 to 75. I showed it to a fellow AIN person and they looked at me and said, wow, maybe intergenerational improv is your calling. And I went, why didn't I think of that? And so as soon as I got home I called Joel. I gave him a little time to rest because he was in charge of that conference. And then I called him and said, I have to talk to you. I have a wild and crazy idea. And he said, yes, and let's do it. Y'all had some great ideas in terms of how to bridge cultural gaps. And one of those bridges that we need to cover is the gap between older generation folks and younger generation folks. And if we're lucky, we're all going to eventually be the older generational folks, right? That's kind of where we're all going. So we want to be mindful of that and how do we treat one another within that framework. So we came up with this approach, one which was to recruit the younger generation through my student body. So I offered a class. I teach two improvisational classes a year. One is on kind of the core concepts and then one is on a special topic. And so we taught one on applied improvisation. And I told them that we'd have an opportunity to work with people from different generations. The second element is that we recruited older generations as there was a number of folks in the community. So we reached out to a wide variety of different folks to invite them to come and participate in our eight-week exploration. And then we kind of nested those in each other with a specific emphasis in thinking about how do we work with people from a different cultural framework than us, but also kind of just thinking about the core concepts of improvisation, which I developed from my partner, L. Veenstra's dissertation on improvisation, thinking about acceptance, presence, and trust. And on the very first day, the first thing we did after welcoming them and giving them each a journal that they wrote in throughout the process to record their thoughts. For the students, it was maybe new to actually write with a pen. And we divided them then into two groups and two rooms. And Joel went with the students because he's young and handsome. And I went with the older adults because I am one and proud of it. And we talked about surfacing biases and assumptions about that other group. So with them out of the room, they could be more open and honest. And then we brought them together to play together. And in doing so, we wanted to really accept the reality in which we were existing. So we want to be both mindful of our physical capacities in terms of what we can and can't do, both for the older generation and the younger generation. And trying to really set a tone of equality and the way that we are unique and how we can all be treated within the same framework within that. And also, with that intention, we tried to intentionally put people together of the different cultural frameworks within exercises and explorations and making them work together intentionally. One example that we saw of this being very successful is in past the clap. And sometimes we had silos where the older generation would be on one side of the room and the younger generation would be on the other. And we intentionally tried that exercise where we passed the clap around the circle. And we found that there's a lot of tension and nervousness around the older generation when this clap got around to them. And we said, what's going on here? And they're like, oh, we think we're going to mess this up. We're not going to do this right. We feel like it's awkward. And the young people just get it so quickly. And so we shifted the framework. And rather than being these silos, we interlaced them so that every spot we had an older person and a younger person. And when we did that, the exercise worked perfectly. And we think when we intentionally put ourselves in situations where we are combined with one another, we have this opportunity to make the systems work better. And the exercises that we did with them, we intentionally had them work with somebody of the other age group, sometimes switching roles and scenes. And it created a great amount of trust between them and developed a deeper relationship. And so we're going to show you a quick video of some of the feedback and experiences that they shared together. My name is Jesse Tromburg. And I am part of this amazing improv group, an intergenerational improv group. Improv by itself is great. And you don't have to have a background like that. You just have to be quick on your feet and support the group that you're working with. It's a great experience. It's used as a tool, a teaching tool from any different disciplines. It engages you to listen more, to respond better. And it's fun. Just fun. It's going to be taking an improv class. I didn't know there would be an older generation in the class. I mean, to be honest, it was kind of funny because I came from a community college and so there would be older people in our classes but it was like, if I was taking a swim class they'd be like doing aerobics, you know? And so I thought it was kind of funny. I was like, oh no, what's going to happen? This is like a silly class and we're not much going to have a lot of work. I don't know. Yeah, I just thought that it was going to be a lot less serious and I didn't think that I would like do anything important with my improvising. I think I trust myself a lot more with improv and I keep hearing people talking class about working with the different generation but it didn't feel any different than doing improv with my own generation. It was just another group of people. And so I think it's funny that it was a whole topic for a class that doesn't happen more often than intergenerational improv because, I mean, I don't know why I wouldn't. It doesn't make any sense because we were just doing improv together like any other group of people. As many times as I've seen that, I still get checked up. It's pretty remarkable. And you see Irvine, University of California Irvine, being a research institution. We really wanted to make sure that we had data and we feel like that's so important to our field. And so as part of this, we did a pre and post-rease survey that outlined essentially what kind of aspects, seeing at the beginning, what did you feel about other people about yourselves in terms of these kind of key frameworks and had them take this survey and then reflected that on a post-survey. And we saw statistically significant results in over half of the feedback in terms of what was going on, so that this impact really seemed to have some very distinctive quantitative analysis differently. And the questions were not only about how it impacted them in terms of confidence, all those things we know improv does, but how they felt about the other group. Then a year later, we brought them back together for a reunion and did a follow-up survey because we all wonder, does this have a lasting effect? And we found that on a couple of the items, on two of the questions, they went even higher than they had at the end of the class. And on the other eight, it went down a little bit because they hadn't seen each other for a year. We didn't have funding to do the class the next year, but it was still way ahead of where it was before they took the class. So we take from that this works and it would work even better if you can continue it and make it ongoing. We got some great feedback, and for sake of time, we'll let you read this and pause the video when you see the video. But we had great feedback both qualitatively as well in terms of the feedback, in terms of people really having good impact. And probably the additional impact which we think is most exciting is that this group of people became friends. And they really started missing each other and communicating each other beyond the classroom, which we think has a lot of potential in other platforms of different cultural shifts. So we urge you to go out there and do work with mixed generations. Enough of the age silos. Yes. And do it. Thank you. Thank you.