Viola Spolin is the godmother of modern improv. Her landmark development — with her mentor, Neva Boyd — of ‘theater games’ during the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s laid the foundation for everything that has happened with improvisation in the 80+ years since, including the theories and practices of GameChangers.
It’s by a quirk of genetics that we have come to associate improv so strongly with comedy. Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, introduced her techniques to Second City, which he co-founded with Bernie Sahlins in 1957. At its roots, however, improvisation is still about what Spolin created — a technique for building environments that foster learning and communication, that hold the potential for what she called ‘spontaneous explosions’ of creativity.
Spolin’s great book, Improvisation for the Theater, originally published in 1963, includes a section called ‘Reminders and Pointers’. There are 96 items listed in the section. Here are four, abbreviated, with my notes in italics:
The energy released in solving the problem…forms the scene. It is important to note that improvisers do not enter a scene with a problem to be solved. They pose the problem and resolve it within the scene itself. A ‘sales scene’ in business provides a useful analogy. A skilled salesperson, like a skilled improviser, does not enter the scene looking to solve a particular problem for a customer. He or she lets the customer help define the problem, which they then set about solving collaboratively. If the experience is a good one — if ‘the energy released in the solving of the problem’ is positive and productive — the scene is much more likely to have a happy outcome for all the players involved.
Be flexible. Alter your plans on a moment’s notice if it is advisable to do so. The more rigid and dogmatic you are when you enter your scene, the more wedded you are to a particular narrative or outcome, the more likely you are to stumble when things change. And things do change. Always.
Remember that a lecture will never accomplish what an experience will. Like Spolin, all good teachers know and practice this one. This time-honored advice is especially relevant to organizations educating Gen-Why? employees, who have grown up learning how to play the game, navigate the site, phone the friend and hack the solution without reading the instructions.
Act, don’t react. To react is protective and constitutes withdrawal from the environment. Since we are seeking to reach out, a player must act upon environment, which in turns acts upon player, catalytic action thus creating interaction that makes process and change possible. Don’t even try to understand this unless you’ve had some improvisation training. Improvisation is an animal spirit within you. It must be tamed before it can be ridden, otherwise someone’s going to get hurt.
Tags: Act, Change, Communication, Experience, Flexibility, Improvisation for the Theater, Learning, Lecture, Pointers, Problem Solving, Reminders, Viola Spolin
[...] was thrilled last Wednesday to have lunch with Phillip Spolin, nephew of Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improvisation. Phillip had some kind of two-pronged plastic thing in the [...]