Improvisational theatre

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Swedish actors performing in theatresports, a competitive form of improv

Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of
theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or
unscripted created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the
dialogue, action, story, and characters are created collaboratively by the players
as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared,
written script.

Improvisational theatre exists in performance as a range of styles of

improvisational comedy as well as some non-comedic theatrical performances. It is
sometimes used in film and television, both to develop characters and scripts and
occasionally as part of the final product.

Improvisational techniques are often used extensively in drama programs to train

actors for stage, film, and television and can be an important part of the
rehearsal process. However, the skills and processes of improvisation are also used
outside the context of performing arts. This practice, known as applied
improvisation, is used in classrooms as an educational tool and in businesses as a
way to develop communication skills, creative problem solving, and supportive team-
work abilities that are used by improvisational, ensemble players.[1] It is
sometimes used in psychotherapy as a tool to gain insight into a person's thoughts,
feelings, and relationships.

Contents
1 History
1.1 Modern
2 Improvisational comedy
3 Non-comedic, experimental, and dramatic, narrative-based improvisational
theater
4 Applying improv principles in life
5 In film and television
6 Psychology
7 Structure and process
8 Community
9 Notable contributors to the field
10 See also
11 Notes
12 References
13 Further reading
14 External links
History
The earliest well-documented use of improvisational theatre in Western history is
found in the Atellan Farce of 391 BC. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, commedia
dell'arte performers improvised based on a broad outline in the streets of Italy.
In the 1890s, theatrical theorists and directors such as the Russian Konstantin
Stanislavski and the French Jacques Copeau, founders of two major streams of acting
theory, both heavily utilized improvisation in acting training and rehearsal.[2]

Modern

Italian Nobel-winner Dario Fo received international acclaim for his highly

improvisational style
Modern theatrical improvisation games began as drama exercises for children, which
were a staple of drama education in the early 20th century thanks in part to the
progressive education movement initiated by John Dewey in 1916.[3] Some people
credit American Dudley Riggs as the first vaudevillian to use audience suggestions
to create improvised sketches on stage. Improvisation exercises were developed
further by Viola Spolin in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and codified in her book
Improvisation For The Theater,[4] the first book that gave specific techniques for
learning to do and teach improvisational theater. In the 1977, Clive Barker's book
Theatre Games (several translations and editions) had an international effect.
British playwright and director Keith Johnstone wrote Impro Improvisation and the
Theatre, a book outlining his ideas on improvisation, and invented Theatresports,
which has become a staple of modern improvisational comedy and is the inspiration
for the popular television show Whose Line Is It Anyway

Spolin influenced the first generation of modern American improvisers at The

Compass Players in Chicago, which led to The Second City. Her son, Paul Sills,
along with David Shepherd, started The Compass Players. Following the demise of the
Compass Players, Paul Sills began The Second City. They were the first organized
troupes in Chicago, and the modern Chicago improvisational comedy movement grew
from their success.[5][6]

Many of the current rules of comedic improv were first formalized in Chicago in the
late 1950s and early 1960s, initially among The Compass Players troupe, which was
directed by Paul Sills. From most accounts, David Shepherd provided the
philosophical vision of the Compass Players, while Elaine May was central to the
development of the premises for its improvisations. Mike Nichols, Ted Flicker, and
Del Close were her most frequent collaborators in this regard. When The Second City
opened its doors on December 16, 1959, directed by Paul Sills, his mother Viola
Spolin began training new improvisers through a series of classes and exercises
which became the cornerstone of modern improv training. By the mid-1960s, Viola
Spolin's classes were handed over to her protégé, Jo Forsberg, who further
developed Spolin's methods into a one-year course, which eventually became The
Players Workshop, the first official school of improvisation in the United States.
During this time, Forsberg trained many of the performers who went on to star on
The Second City stage.[5][6]

Many of the original cast of Saturday Night Live came from The Second City, and the
franchise has produced such comedy stars as Mike Myers, Tina Fey, Bob Odenkirk, Amy
Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Eugene Levy, Jack McBrayer, Steve Carell, Chris Farley,
Dan Aykroyd, and John Belushi.

Members of the Montreal Improvisation League

Simultaneously, Keith Johnstone's group The Theatre Machine, which originated in
London, was touring Europe. This work gave birth to Theatresports, at first
secretly in Johnstone's workshops, and eventually in public when he moved to
Canada. Toronto has been home to a rich improv tradition.

In 1984, Dick Chudnow (Kentucky Fried Theater) founded ComedySportz in Milwaukee,

WI. Expansion began with the addition of ComedySportz-Madison (WI), in 1985. The
first Comedy League of America National Tournament was held in 1988, with 10 teams
participating. The league is now known as CSz Worldwide and boasts a roster of 29
international cities.

In San Francisco, The Committee theater was active in North Beach during the 1960s.
It was founded by alumni of Chicago's Second City, Alan Myerson and his wife
Jessica. When The Committee disbanded in 1972, three major companies were formed
The Pitchell Players, The Wing, and Improvisation Inc. The only company that
continued to perform Close's Harold was the latter one. Its two former members,
Michael Bossier and John Elk, formed Spaghetti Jam in San Francisco's Old Spaghetti
Factory in 1976, where shortform improv and Harolds were performed through 1983.
Stand-up comedians performing down the street at the Intersection for the Arts
would drop by and sit in. 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, above a Soho strip club.

Modern political improvisation's roots include Jerzy Grotowski's work in Poland

during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Peter Brook's happenings in England during
the late 1960s, Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre in South America in the early 1970s,
and San Francisco's The Diggers' work in the 1960s. Some of this work led to pure
improvisational performance styles, while others simply added to the theatrical
vocabulary and were, on the whole, avant-garde experiments.

Joan Littlewood, an English actress and director who was active from the 1950s to
1960s, made extensive use of improv in developing plays for performance. However,
she was successfully prosecuted twice for allowing her actors to improvise in
performance. Until 1968, British law required scripts to be approved by the Lord
Chamberlain's Office. The department also sent inspectors to some performances to
check that the approved script was performed exactly as approved.

In 1987, Annoyance Theatre began as a club in Chicago that emphasizes longform

improvisation. The Annoyance Theatre has grown into multiple locations in Chicago
and New York City. It is the home of the longest running musical improv show in
history at 11 years.[7]

In 2012, Lebanese writer and director Lucien Bourjeily used improvisational theater
techniques to create a multi-sensory play entitled 66 Minutes in Damascus. This
play premiered at the London International Festival of Theater, and is considered
one of the most extreme kinds of interactive improvised theater put on stage. The
audience play the part of kidnapped tourists in today's Syria in a hyperreal
sensory environment.[8]

Rob Wittig and Mark C. Marino have developed a form of improv for online theatrical
improvisation called netprov.[9] The form relies on social media to engage
audiences in the creation of dynamic fictional scenarios that evolve in real-time.

Improvisational comedy

Three improvisers performing longform improv comedy at the Gorilla Tango Theatre in
Chicago.
Modern improvisational comedy, as it is practiced in the West, falls generally into
two categories shortform and longform.

Shortform improv consists of short scenes usually constructed from a predetermined

game, structure, or idea and driven by an audience suggestion. Many short form
exercises were first created by Viola Spolin, who called them theatre games,
influenced by her training from recreational games expert Neva Boyd.[4] The short-
form improv comedy television series Whose Line Is It Anyway has familiarized
American and British viewers with short-form.

Longform improv performers create shows in which short scenes are often
interrelated by story, characters, or themes. Longform shows may take the form of
an existing type of theatre, for example a full-length play or Broadway-style
musical such as Spontaneous Broadway. One of the better-known longform structures
is the Harold, developed by ImprovOlympic co-founder Del Close. Many such longform
structures now exist.

Longform improvisation is especially performed in Chicago, New York City, Los

Angeles; has a strong presence in Austin, Boston, Minneapolis, Phoenix,
Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington,
D.C.; and is building a growing following in Baltimore,[10] Denver, Kansas City,
Montreal, Columbus, New Orleans, Omaha, Rochester, NY,[11] and Hawaii. Outside the
United States, longform improv has a growing presence in the United Kingdom,
especially in cities such as London,[12] Bristol, and at the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe.

Non-comedic, experimental, and dramatic, narrative-based improvisational theater

Other forms of improvisational theatre training and performance techniques are
experimental and avant-garde[13] in nature and not necessarily intended to be
comedic. These include Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed, the Poor
Theatre, the Open Theatre, to name only a few.

The Open Theatre was founded in New York City by a group of former students of
acting teacher Nola Chilton, and joined shortly thereafter by director Joseph
Chaikin, formerly of The Living Theatre, and Peter Feldman. This avante-garde
theatre group explored political, artistic, and social issues. The company,
developing work through an improvisational process drawn from Chilton and Viola
Spolin, created well-known exercises, such as sound and movement and
transformations, and originated radical forms and techniques that anticipated or
were contemporaneous with Jerzy Grotowski's poor theater in Poland.[citation
needed] During the sixties Chaikin and the Open Theatre developed full theatrical
productions with nothing but the actors, a few chairs and a bare stage, creating
character, time and place through a series of transformations the actors
physicalized and discovered through improvisations.

On the west coast, Ruth Zaporah developed Action Theater™, a physically-based

improvisation form that treats language, movement and voice equally. Action
Theater™ performances have no scripts, no preplanned ideas and create full-length
shows or shorter performances. Longform, dramatic, and narrative-based
improvisation is well-established on the west coast with companies such as San
Francisco's BATS Improv. This format allows for full-length plays and musicals to
be created improvisationally.

Applying improv principles in life

Many people who have studied improv have noted that the guiding principles of
improv are useful, not just on stage, but in everyday life.[14] For example,
Stephen Colbert in a commencement address said,[15]

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.[16] There has been much interest in bringing lessons from improv into
the corporate world. In a New York Times article titled Can Executives Learn to
Ignore the Script, Stanford professor and author, Patricia Ryan Madson notes,
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 film and television

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Many directors have made use of improvisation in the creation of both mainstream
and experimental films. Many silent filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster
Keaton used improvisation in the making of their films, developing their gags while
filming and altering the plot to fit. The Marx Brothers were notorious for
deviating from the script they were given, their ad libs often becoming part of the
standard routine and making their way into their films. Many people, however, make
a distinction between ad-libbing and improvising.[17]

The British director Mike Leigh makes extensive use of improvisation in the
creation of his films, including improvising important moments in the characters'
lives that will not even appear in the film. This Is Spinal Tap and other
mockumentary films of director Christopher Guest were created with a mix of
scripted and unscripted material. Blue in the Face is a 1995 comedy directed by
Wayne Wang and Paul Auster created in part by the improvisations during the filming
of Smoke.

Some of the best known American film directors who used improvisation in their work
with actors are John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, Christopher Guest, and Rob Reiner.

Improv comedy techniques have also been used in hit television shows such as HBO's
Curb Your Enthusiasm created by Larry David, the UK Channel 4 and ABC television
series Whose Line Is It Anyway (and its spinoffs Drew Carey's Green Screen Show and
Drew Carey's Improv-A-Ganza), Nick Cannon's improv comedy show Wild 'N Out, and
Thank God You're Here. A very early American improv television program was the
weekly half-hour What Happens Now[18] which premiered on New York's WOR-TV on
October 15, 1949 and ran for 22 episodes. The Improvisers were six actors
(including Larry Blyden, Ross Martin, and Jean Alexander – Jean Pugsley at the
time) who improvised skits based on situations suggested by viewers. In Canada, the
series Train 48 was improvised from scripts which contained a minimal outline of
each scene, and the comedy series This Sitcom Is...Not to Be Repeated incorporated
dialogue drawn from a hat during the course of an episode. The American show Reno
911! also contained improvised dialogue based on a plot outline. Fast and Loose is
an improvisational game show, much like Whose Line Is It Anyway. The BBC sitcoms
Outnumbered[19] and The Thick of It[20] also had some improvised elements in them.

Psychology
In the field of the psychology of consciousness, Eberhard Scheiffele explored the
altered state of consciousness experienced by actors and improvisers in his
scholarly paper Acting an altered state of consciousness.[21] According to G.
William Farthing in The Psychology of Consciousness comparative study, actors
routinely enter into an altered state of consciousness (ASC).[22] Acting is seen as
altering most of the 14 dimensions of changed subjective experience which
characterize ASCs according to Farthing, namely attention, perception, imagery and
fantasy, inner speech, memory, higher-level thought processes, meaning or
significance of experiences, time experience, emotional feeling and expression,
level of arousal, self-control, suggestibility, body image, and sense of personal
identity.

In the growing field of Drama Therapy, psychodramatic improvisation, along with

other techniques developed for Drama Therapy, are used extensively. The Yes, and
rule has been compared to Milton Erickson's utilization process and to a variety of
acceptance-based psychotherapies. Improv training has been recommended for couples
therapy and therapist training, and it has been speculated that improv training may
be helpful in some cases of social anxiety disorder.[23][24]

Structure and process

Improvisational theatre often allows an interactive relationship with the audience.
Improv groups frequently solicit suggestions from the audience as a source of
inspiration, a way of getting the audience involved, and as a means of proving that
the performance is not scripted. That charge is sometimes aimed at the masters of
the art, whose performances can seem so detailed that viewers may suspect the
scenes are planned.

In order for an improvised scene to be successful, the improvisers involved must

work together responsively to define the parameters and action of the scene, in a
process of co-creation. With each spoken word or action in the scene, an improviser
makes an offer, meaning that he or she defines some element of the reality of the
scene. This might include giving another character a name, identifying a
relationship, location, or using mime to define the physical environment. These
activities are also known as endowment. It is the responsibility of the other
improvisers to accept the offers that their fellow performers make; to not do so is
known as blocking, negation, or denial, which usually prevents the scene from
developing. Some performers may deliberately block (or otherwise break out of
character) for comedic effect—this is known as gagging—but this generally prevents
the scene from advancing and is frowned upon by many improvisers. Accepting an
offer is usually accompanied by adding a new offer, often building on the earlier
one; this is a process improvisers refer to as Yes, and... and is considered the
cornerstone of improvisational technique. Every new piece of information added
helps the improvisers to refine their characters and progress the action of the
scene. The Yes, and... rule, however, applies to a scene's early stage since it is
in this stage that a base (or shared) reality is established in order to be later
redefined by applying the if (this is true), then (what else can also be true)
practice progressing the scene into comedy, as explained in the 2013 manual by the
Upright Citizens Brigade members.[25]

The unscripted nature of improv also implies no predetermined knowledge about the
props that might be useful in a scene. Improv companies may have at their disposal
some number of readily accessible props that can be called upon at a moment's
notice, but many improvisers eschew props in favor of the infinite possibilities
available through mime. In improv, this is more commonly known as 'space object
work' or 'space work', rather than 'mime', and the props and locations created by
this technique, as 'space objects' created out of 'space substance', developed as a
technique by Viola Spolin.[4] As with all improv 'offers', improvisers are
encouraged to respect the validity and continuity of the imaginary environment
defined by themselves and their fellow performers; this means, for example, taking
care not to walk through the table or miraculously survive multiple bullet wounds
from another improviser's gun.

Because improvisers may be required to play a variety of roles without preparation,

they need to be able to construct characters quickly with physicality, gestures,
accents, voice changes, or other techniques as demanded by the situation. The
improviser may be called upon to play a character of a different age or sex.
Character motivations are an important part of successful improv scenes, and
improvisers must therefore attempt to act according to the objectives that they
believe their character seeks.

In improv formats with multiple scenes, an agreed-upon signal is used to denote

scene changes. Most often, this takes the form of a performer running in front of
the scene, known as a wipe. Tapping a character in or out can also be employed. The
performers not currently part of the scene often stand at the side or back of the
stage, and can enter or exit the scene by stepping into or out of the stage center.

Community
Many theatre troupes are devoted to staging improvisational performances and
growing the improv community through their training centers.

In addition to for-profit theatre troupes, there are many college-based improv

groups in the United States and around the world.
In Europe the special contribution to the theatre of the abstract, the surreal, the
irrational and the subconscious have been part of the stage tradition for
centuries. From the 1990s onwards a growing number of European Improv groups have
been set up specifically to explore the possibilities offered by the use of the
abstract in improvised performance, including dance, movement, sound, music, mask
work, lighting, and so on. These groups are not especially interested in comedy,
either as a technique or as an effect, but rather in expanding the improv genre so
as to incorporate techniques and approaches that have long been a legitimate part
of European theatre.

Notable contributors to the field

Two theater members in front of the former building on Hennepin Avenue in

Minneapolis.
The Brave New Workshop Comedy Theater (BNW), is a sketch and improvisational comedy
theater based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Started by Dudley Riggs in 1958, the
artists of the BNW have been writing, performing and producing live sketch comedy
and improvisation performances for 62 years – longer than any other theater in the
nation.[26] Notable alumni of the BNW include Louie Anderson, Mo Collins, Tom
Davis, Al Franken, Penn Jillette, Carl Lumbly, Paul Menzel, Pat Proft, Annie
Reirson, Taylor Nikolai, Nancy Steen, Peter Tolan, Linda Wallem, Lizz Winstead,
Peter MacNicol, Melissa Peterman, and Cedric Yarbrough.

Some key figures in the development of improvisational theatre are Viola Spolin and
her son Paul Sills, founder of Chicago's famed Second City troupe and originator of
Theater Games, and Del Close, founder of ImprovOlympic (along with Charna Halpern)
and creator of a popular longform improv format known as The Harold. Others include
Keith Johnstone, the British teacher and writer–author of Impro, who founded the
Theatre Machine and whose teachings form the foundation of the popular shortform
Theatresports format, Dick Chudnow, founder of ComedySportz which evolved its
family-friendly show format from Johnstone's Theatersports, and Bill Johnson,
creatordirector of The Magic Meathands,[27] who pioneered the concept of Commun-edy
Outreach by tailoring performances to non-traditional audiences, such as the
homeless and foster children.

David Shepherd, with Paul Sills, founded The Compass Players in Chicago. Shepherd
was intent on de