The Birth of Improv

Last week I missed the Fall Improv Show and although I was very disappointed, I learned about someone who transformed the history of theatre. Here is the essay I wrote:

  During the 1950s, Viola Spolin created a series of exercises that would eventually lead to the development of improvisation as a style of performance. The use of improvisational games was originally meant for merely training actors and helping them come up with skit ideas, but Spolin quickly developed them into an actual method of performing (Zeldes). Although she used these games for a variety of purposes outside of theatre, Spolin’s contribution to the dramatic arts in particular has extended the minds of performers to creative extremes.

            The events of Viola Spolin’s life allowed her to find the inspiration for the new world of theatre that she would eventually spur on. Growing up she was involved with various forms of entertainment and theatre, including “family theater amusements, operas, and charades” (The Spolin Center). However theatre was not at the center of Spolin’s career choice as she decided to work with underprivileged children in an inner city settlement home, educating and giving attention to them. It was during this time, though, that Spolin found the spark to begin what would become her life’s work. She learned how to use, “traditional game structures to affect social behavior in inner-city and immigrant children” (The Spolin Center). Soon afterwards, she became the “drama supervisor” and wanted to incorporate this game style of exercise into her teaching of children from all different backgrounds (The Spolin Center). Her creation was similar to the games she had seen before but instead of correcting manners, it used these characteristics as a source of creative inspiration and provocation. With these games in her written work Improvisation for the Theatre, Spolin embarked on a series of entrepreneurial adventures that explored making these games into a style of performance (The Spolin Center). She discovered that the uses for her games reached far beyond the boundaries she could have ever perceived.

            Throughout her lifetime and even today, Spolin’s advancement of the idea that games can inspire creativity has led to an important evolution of the theatre performance. Improv did not even exist as a form of entertainment until she created the games that led the way.There were several unique aspects to what Spolin discovered about working with these games. The first was how to use the space one is in to best communicate the presence of objects of the imagination. Learning about and understanding the various ways that one’s space can be manipulated is key to becoming an effective performer (The Spolin Center). Among the many contributions that Spolin made, one of the most important, though, is her understanding of how the performer interacts with his or her audience. She wanted to merge these two and develop an interactive relationship between them, “eliminating the conventional separation between improvisational actors and audiences who watched them” (The Spolin Center). In Spolin, theatre finds the inspiration to be spontaneous and do the unexpected just for the fun of it. It is because of these groundbreaking ideas “that improv has begun to be perceived as more than a theatrical exercise,” in the last several years (Zeldes).

            Viola Spolin’s role in the development of theatre practices was responsible for the birth of improvisation as an expressive performance. Because of this she is one of the most important names in the recent history of entertainment as she created a completely unheard of practice that has influenced both how actors learn and how they can chose to perform. Through her games, the substance of acting has become a living, breathing, and changing work in progress that each actor can influence.

~Julie