team building lessons from a school of fish

When I was courting my wife, she lived in Edmonton and was a keen Fringe fanatic. The Edmonton Fringe Festival happens for a few weeks every summer and draws all sorts of "unusual" performers and an equally "unusual" audience.

Tania had been attending the festival for many years and got to watch many different kinds of experimental theatre and performance art. She thought it wise to introduce me into this world slowly and picked what she thought was a relatively conservative stand-up comic for my first experience. No point in scaring off the new boyfriend.

As it turned out, dude was flat out weird.

As it turns out, dude was flat out weird, in a really magnificent way.

He started his show with the lights off, as he gave a diatribe about the tenuous boundary that exists between a performer and the audience. The boundary is the stage.

He brought one guy up on stage and predictably had some mildly embarrassing fun with him. Then he brought a second person up and started playing with both. Then a third, then a fourth and then, eventually, he had all of us on stage and he went into the "audience." This process reversed what I think we all considered to be the stage. Audience members were now performers. Kinda.

While we were up on stage–maybe 150 of us–our host taught us how to act like a fish. We all crouched as we walked, with a hand flipping behind us simulating our tails, and our cheeks sucked into our teeth with our lips making the familiar fish mouth.

We practiced this a fews times and then he led us outside. We walked down Whyte Avenue as a normal looking, albeit large group and every once in a while he'd yell fish! and we'd all assume the fish position. We packed into several bars and he yelled fish! We surrounded a few innocent pedestrians and did "fish." Then we went into the middle of the intersection of Whyte and Calgary Trail–one of the busiest intersections in the city–and did "fish", blocking the road for several lights both ways.

We closed by singing the theme to the Flinstones, which of course by that time seemed like the normal thing to do. Then he disbanded the group and we all went our separate ways.

In 60 minutes, our "stand-up comedian" led us through one of the most interesting group bonding processes I've ever been through. I felt truly sad when it ended.