Improvisational theatre

• 1. Introduction

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  Improvisational theatre rests on a single act of trust: nothing is written down. The dialogue, the action, the story, even the characters are built by the performers as the scene unfolds in present time. There is no prepared script waiting in the wings. The earliest well-documented use of this form in Western history reaches back to the Atellan Farce of 391 BC. So how did a tradition of unplanned performance travel from the streets of ancient Rome to a television show like Whose Line Is It Anyway? Who decided that audience suggestions could shape a scene, and who wrote down the rules of an art form defined by having none? And why are executives, engineers, and therapists now studying techniques first invented to teach children?

• 2. The Streets To The Studio

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  Commedia dell'arte performers worked from a broad outline in the streets of Italy from the 16th to the 18th centuries, building scenes around it rather than reciting lines. In the 1890s, the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski and the French Jacques Copeau, founders of two major streams of acting theory, both made heavy use of improvisation in training and rehearsal. Modern theatrical improvisation games started as drama exercises for children. They became a staple of drama education in the early 20th century, helped along by the progressive education movement that John Dewey initiated in 1916. Some credit the American Dudley Riggs as the first vaudevillian to use audience suggestions to create improvised sketches on stage. Viola Spolin developed improvisation exercises further across the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and set them down in her book Improvisation For The Theater. It was the first book to give specific techniques for learning to do and teach the form. In 1977, Clive Barker's book Theatre Games carried the ideas internationally across several translations and editions, while the British playwright Keith Johnstone wrote Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre and invented Theatresports.

• 3. The Chicago Crucible

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  Viola Spolin influenced the first generation of modern American improvisers at The Compass Players in Chicago. Her son, Paul Sills, started that troupe alongside David Shepherd, who provided its philosophical vision and hoped to bring political drama to the stockyards in pursuit of a true people's theatre. Elaine May was central to developing the premises for the troupe's improvisations, with Mike Nichols, Ted Flicker, and Del Close as her most frequent collaborators. When The Second City opened its doors on the 16th of December 1959, directed by Paul Sills, Spolin began training new improvisers through classes and exercises that became the cornerstone of modern improv training. By the mid-1960s she handed her classes to her protege, Jo Forsberg, who built Spolin's methods into a one-year course. That course eventually became The Players Workshop, the first official school of improvisation in the United States. Many of the original cast of Saturday Night Live came from The Second City, and the franchise produced stars including Mike Myers, Tina Fey, Bob Odenkirk, Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Eugene Levy, Jack McBrayer, Steve Carell, Chris Farley, Dan Aykroyd, and John Belushi.

• 4. Spreading Across Cities

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  Dick Chudnow of Kentucky Fried Theater founded ComedySportz in Milwaukee in 1984, and expansion began the next year with the addition of ComedySportz-Madison in 1985. The first Comedy League of America National Tournament was held in 1988 with 10 teams; the league is now known as CSz Worldwide and lists a roster of 29 international cities. In San Francisco, The Committee theater was active in North Beach during the 1960s, founded by Second City alumni Alan Myerson and his wife Jessica. When it disbanded in 1972, three companies formed from it, and only Improvisation Inc continued to perform Del Close's Harold. Two of its former members, Michael Bossier and John Elk, started Spaghetti Jam in San Francisco's Old Spaghetti Factory Cafe in 1976, where shortform and Harolds ran through 1983. In 1979, Elk brought shortform to England, teaching workshops at Jacksons Lane Theatre, and he was the first American to perform at The Comedy Store, London. Meanwhile Keith Johnstone's group The Theatre Machine, which started in London, toured Europe, and Theatresports surfaced publicly after Johnstone moved to Calgary. The Annoyance Theatre began as a Chicago club emphasizing longform in 1987 and is home to the longest running musical improv show in history at 11 years.

• 5. Two Schools Of Comedy

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  Shortform improv consists of short scenes usually built from a predetermined game, structure, or idea and driven by an audience suggestion. Viola Spolin first created many shortform exercises, which she called theatre games, drawing on her training from recreational games expert Neva Boyd. In one example, performers play a scene while a director performer points to one of them after a line, prompting that performer to rewind and say something new each time. Longform improv performers create shows in which short scenes are often interrelated by story, characters, or themes. A longform show may take the shape of a full-length play or a Broadway-style musical such as Spontaneous Broadway. One of the better-known longform structures is the Harold, developed by ImprovOlympic co-founder Del Close, and actors such as Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell found their start in longform. The form is especially performed in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and many other cities, with a growing presence in the United Kingdom, including London, Bristol, Glasgow, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

• 6. Beyond Comedy

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  Playback Theatre, founded by Jonathan Fox in 1975, is a form of improvised community theatre that is often not comedic and replays stories shared by members of the audience. Other experimental and avant-garde forms include Theatre of the Oppressed, the Poor Theatre, and The Open Theater. The Open Theater was founded in New York City by former students of acting teacher Nola Chilton, soon joined by director Joseph Chaikin, formerly of The Living Theatre, and Peter Feldman. This group explored political, artistic, and social issues, creating exercises such as "sound and movement" and "transformations" that anticipated or ran alongside Jerzy Grotowski's "poor theatre" in Poland. During the sixties, Chaikin and the Open Theatre built full productions with nothing but actors, a few chairs, and a bare stage. On the west coast, Ruth Zaporah developed Action Theatre, a physically based form that treats language, movement, and voice equally, with no scripts and no preplanned ideas. Companies such as San Francisco's BATS Improv keep longform, dramatic, and narrative-based improvisation well-established, allowing full-length plays and musicals to be created improvisationally. In 2012, the Lebanese writer and director Lucien Bourjeily used these techniques to create 66 Minutes in Damascus, a multi-sensory play in which the audience play kidnapped tourists, premiered at the London International Festival of Theatre.

• 7. The Rules Of Yes And

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  An offer is the basic unit of an improvised scene: with each spoken word or action, an improviser defines some element of the scene's reality. That might mean giving another character a name, identifying a relationship or location, or using mime to define the physical environment, activities also known as endowment. The other performers are responsible for accepting those offers; refusing one is known as blocking, negation, or denial, and it usually stops a scene from developing. Accepting an offer is usually paired with adding a new one that builds on the earlier offer, a process improvisers call Yes, and..., considered the cornerstone of the technique. The 2013 manual by the Upright Citizens Brigade members explains that Yes, and... applies mainly to a scene's early stage, where a base or shared reality is set before being redefined through the "if this is true, then what else can also be true" practice. Many improvisers eschew props in favor of mime, which in improv is called space object work, with the imagined items known as space objects made of space substance, a technique developed by Viola Spolin. Performers are encouraged to respect that imaginary environment, taking care not to walk through a table or survive multiple bullet wounds from another improviser's gun. In formats with multiple scenes, an agreed signal marks scene changes, most often a performer running across the front of the stage in a move known as a "wipe".

• 8. Improv Off The Stage

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  Beginning in the late 90s, the field of applied improvisation was born as a way to use improv as a tool outside the performative space. In a commencement address, Stephen Colbert told graduates, "Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what's going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say "yes." And if you're lucky, you'll find people who will say "yes" back." Tina Fey, in her book Bossypants, lists several rules of improv that apply in the workplace. Stanford professor Patricia Ryan Madson observed that "executives and engineers and people in transition are looking for support in saying yes to their own voice. Often, the systems we put in place to keep us secure are keeping us from our more creative selves." In the psychology of consciousness, Eberhard Scheiffele explored the altered state experienced by actors in his paper Acting: an altered state of consciousness, and G. William Farthing's comparative study found acting alters most of the 14 dimensions of changed subjective experience that characterize such states. Improv has been studied for its effect on creativity, anxiety, and narrative skills, and the "Yes, and..." rule has been compared to Milton H. Erickson's utilization process. Alan Alda's book If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? investigates how improvisation improves communication in the sciences, based on his work at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University.