If Viola Spolin is the godmother of modern improvisation, that makes her son, Paul Sills, its Michael Corleone — the heir to the family business. Sills, who assisted his mom with her children’s theater workshops in the 1940s, enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1948. There, he directed many student productions and in the process met David Shepherd, with whom, in 1955, he organized the Compass Players, the first improvisational theater company in the U.S. In 1959, Sills and Bernie Sahlins formed Chicago’s Second City Theater, where he was director until 1965. All of Sills’ work in comedy theater, and in fact his life itself, was influenced by the theory and practice of improvisation. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Viola Spolin’
What Viola Said
Friday, May 16th, 2008
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. (more…)
Deepness
Friday, April 18th, 2008
One of the things that enthralls me about the art of improvisation is how deeply spiritual it is. I know, right? — the same form that yields the antics of Whose Line Is It, Anyway and Kenneth the NBC Page on 30 Rock is somehow connected to, like, your ch’i, your soul, your dharma?
The threads of my contention lead back to Viola Spolin’s work in the 1930s and ’40s, before her son Paul Sills and his cronies at the U. of Chicago focused her techniques on their forays into comedic improv with Compass Players and Second City. (more…)
Workshop Clips
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008Video clips from GameChangers workshops at Twelve Horses Interactive and an Executive MBA Class at Notre Dame. The Twelve Horses engagements typically have from 8 to 10 people participating. The MBA class had 65 people in it.
Choose Your Game Wisely
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008Ask yourself this question: Would you rather work or play? The answer is easy. If we could afford to, just about all of us would choose play over work because play, by definition, is much more fun. Playing (unless your idea of play is competitive eating, hydroplane racing, bounty hunting or something along those lines) relieves stress, improves your mental and physical health, and fills you with good energy.
Let’s pose the possibility that, through improvisation, work can take on the qualities of play. Imagine that you’re not going to work any more. You’re going to play! We are not glossing over the fundamental facts of business life here. Serious work must get done. Products pick-pack-shipped on time. Papers filed. Satellites launched. Deals closed. Stalls mucked. Connections made. Fires put out. Incomes earned. But how much more exciting would all of that could happen in the context of a game, with you as one of the its primo players? (more…)
One Laptop Per Child — Competition vs. Collaboration
Friday, November 9th, 2007As many of the entries here will attest, improvisation is a fresh way of looking at familiar business scenarios like the Writers Guild Strike, at Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal taking the package, or at how Southwest Airlines employees are good ambassadors for their brand.
It is also a way of understanding scenarios that might not otherwise make traditional business sense, a way of resolving what seems to be a paradox. (Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, has said that the ability to resolve paradox is a major factor in the organization’s success.) Here is an example of a paradox that’s easily resolved when seen through the lens of improvisation.
My partner in GameChangers, LLC, Dr. Virginia Kuhn, the Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, pointed me to a recent post on eSchoolNews that contained this information: former MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization, which builds and sells a low-cost ($200) computer called the OX that runs on a proprietary system, competes for customers in developing countries with Intel and Microsoft and their their bare-bones Classmate PC, which can run on Windows or Linux. At the same time, all three companies are collaborating. Intel has a seat on OLPC’s board and has invested money and given technical help to the organization. Microsoft is working to make a version of Windows that can run on the OX box.
What gives? (more…)
The Joe Ranft GameChangers Fund
Monday, October 29th, 2007One of the most important things I’ve learned from improvisation is to act instantly and instinctively on opportunity.
In improv theater, when you’re observing your teammates in a scene and you sense an opportunity to add to the scene — you don’t even have to know what you’re going to add, you just get a sense that the time is right and the scene will gain energy from your addition — you jump in. This did not come easily to me. I am by nature, an observer, a describer of the narrative, and I have to work hard to stay out of my head, trust my gut, move on instinct. (more…)