I met the spirit of Viola Spolin, the vivacious Mother of Improv, on a Friday night in downtown Austin.
I often marvel at that fortuitous evening because I didn’t know that saying “Yes” to catching a dinner and a show with a charismatic friend would lead to stepping into a new life chapter.
It’s like retracing the steps of how you met that special someone, how you didn’t know they’d be at that party, or take that seat opposite of you at the coffee shop! You were just showing up – you were improvising with the daily mechanics of life and the Fates, on a laughing whim, decided to come out, swirl up some magic and play.
I had just quit my job, my only anchor of financial security in my new-home-of-a-city, and a buzzing concoction of self-righteous triumph and sputtering panic splashed about in my insides as I attempted to be posh with my new friend, my first Austin friend, at a slick sushi bar.
But here’s the thing – I don’t know how to use chopsticks and I had to crack and ask for a spoon, and the embarrassment of that confession still clung to my cheeks as I entered the beer-scented theatre for the late-night improv show.
In Austin, even with very gracious and inclusive friends, I felt what my teenager-self had somehow (gratefully) missed out on – a desperate desire to belong. I felt that so acutely as I settled into the seats, as I listened so attentively to my friend, a former musical theatre performer with a spectacular flair for astrology and living-out-loud her spirituality, tell me about the cast, how an improv show typically goes …(as in “It’s all made up on the spot, kind’a like life.”).
I was also experiencing an escalation of creative energy, a physical enlivening, an excitement that utterly perplexed me and left me exceptionally restless. And that creative electricity was humming in the back of my mind, in the corners of my heart, in the crevices of my spine as the theatre lights dimmed and the troupe enthusiastically rushed to the stage.
Now, looking back, seeing the young woman, the one in a polka dot blouse who is without a job and highly insecure by the lack of her cutlery couture, I know that what she is intuitively picking up on is a shift, a dramatic change in her life’s scenery. She doesn’t know that, but all the signs lead up to what will be a homecoming.
This homecoming just happened to star a troupe of three experienced improvisers. They cordially asked the audience for a suggestion of a movie title. I don’t recall the exact title thrown out and chosen by a random, boisterous stranger sitting a few rows in front of me, but I do remember that it had something to do with eagles and a nest, so let’s just say the title was “Eagles Who Find Their Nest.” Impromptu inspiration led the improvisers to then pitch three separate plot lines, and by the audience’s approving applause and cheering shouts the troupe improvised a dramatically charged, coming-of-age story about an adopted bird who finds peace and happiness with a lonely couple out in the suburbs … or something like that. It’s not about details, it’s about feeling, and the feeling for me was one of awe and also … recognition.
I could do that.
I know it’s rather a cocky thing to admit, but it’s true. I watched in sheer enjoyment and fun-loving appreciation, and secretly thought as that bird-daughter pecked away at her dinner, I can do that.
I can play with the moment and collaborate with others to create a story out of thin air.
And I can. And I did.
And so can you.
Viola Spolin would want you to know that you can improvise, you can cultivate the Now-focus to free yourself to play.
This Mother of Improv, this lively social-worker turned theatre revolutionary blended and forged the necessary games, practices and tools to help us free ourselves from ourselves.
Improv is about liberation.
Improv is the people’s theatre, an innovative American art form built to strengthen and support our democratic values. Every voice matters. Everyone is worthy of a dignified spot on that stage. Everyone is invited to connect, collaborate, create.
This was the initial vision of Viola Spolin, and play theorist, Neva Boyd. Viola and Neva are the remarkable women behind the foundational roots of improvisational theatre. Their passionate advocacy for the transformational power of play was the magnetic presence that I sensed and gravitated toward during my first improv show.
Improv’s roots stem from the early progressive education movement that happened in Hull House, a settlement house for immigrants and first-generation families in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. Neva Boyd was a pioneering sociologist who believed and advocated for the transformational power of play.
As the leading recreational leader at Hull House, she introduced a wide variety of folk dancing, storytelling, music and art and games to the families living there and in the neighborhood. Neva understood that play was a natural human instinct.
When channeled into games, play teaches collaboration, social values, and strengthens democratic and equalitarian principles, so people could become model citizens. She knew the reward of play was self-realization; that play was a healing activity where children could be self-motivated to address and accommodate the needs of their fellow players to keep the joy of the game going, and that play is a vehicle for transformation.
Neva Boyd emphasized play and shared her expansive collection of games with the social workers (then referred to as group-workers) who trained at Hull House, and one of those social workers was Viola Spolin.
Viola was the daughter of immigrants; she was a modern woman of the 1920s with bobbed hair and red lipstick, lively, passionate, spunky (her friends called her Spark!). She naturally took to the games and would merge her love and training in the theatre with Neva Boyd’s teachings to empower people to overcome their inner blocks and express themselves on stage.
At Hull House, Viola established the foundation of improvisational theatre, and it would become the site for the first improvisational production performed by children, first and second-generation children from with different cultures, different languages, all coming together to collaborate and create a freshly inspired show.
And one of those kids in those early improv productions would be Paul Sills, Viola Spolin’s son, who would later go on to form Second City.
Paul Sills knew the richness and value in his mother’s work, had witnessed and experienced the transformation of her theatre games, and made her teaching the backbone of training for Second City improvisers. And here the ripple begins, a ripple that sent waves out into our creative culture – altering theatre, film, comedy. We could follow that wave of ignited inspiration to the making of “The Graduate,” to Bill Murray, to “Schitt’s Creek,” to the “mockumentary,” to Gilda Radner, and “The Colbert Report.” To just name a few.
And though improv has drastically changed – being funny, for a blaring example, was never the set-goal, that just happened along the way – there’s the essence of Viola and Neva that weaves through the theatrical space. It’s an inexplicable suspension from the constrictions of ego that can organically happen between players only when we choose to be real, not funny (because funny is a defense, an armor of cleverness we wear to shield ourselves from visibility, from intimacy), but really human and connect in that shared space of vulnerability. This is the realm of uncertainty, and in the realm of uncertainty possibilities exist.
Viola intuited that reaching for funny and striving to be clever, inventive, the competitive urge of the ego to be the best was the spirit-crushing product of a culture, a society governed by the steely, punitive eyes of approval and disapproval.
To establish an environment where students could reclaim their own inner sight, and not be swayed into trying to appease the teacher, and therefore, loose their own creative expression, she instructed her workshops and sessions in a non-authoritarian manner. There was no right or wrong. The teacher became a player in the games as well, dissolving any sense of hierarchy between them, and steered the games with cues completely intended to keep the participants focused on the game. After the game, only a few questions that kept the focus on how they had or had not achieved the focus of the game. No critique. No calling out. No notes.
“We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything,” Viola writes in Improvisation For The Theater, a book that performers and teachers cling to like the bible.
Simple, and revolutionary.
In order to directly experience life, or the improvised scene, we must be without our filters, without our walls and without our chameleon-like charades, so we can receive and respond from a place of embodied authenticity.
Viola knew that when the spotlight of the stage, or life! is upon us that our nervous system rushes into a heightened sense of fear. In the unblinking light we become suddenly self-consciously aware of the audience, of the invisible curious and perhaps critical crowd watching us. We can shrink, freeze, or puff up our defenses and over dominate the scene. We can hand over our power to the audience – striving for a laugh that signals a perception of approval or make ourselves so small in the attempt to not be rejected, to not do anything that would result in a plummeting sensation of failure, of disapproval.
But Viola knew that there was another way.
She believed that performance could be the expression of ultimate freedom. To dance like everyone is watching and let those movements flow from calmed embodiment, openhearted enough to hear and follow the mischievous cues of spontaneity, completely authentic in our instinctually guided choices.
The focus has to be on the NOW, on daring to be courageous enough to the space you’re in, to the space you’re sharing with the other person in the scene. This is true intimacy, this is reality, and the invitation to be a real human on stage, to be a real human in this life scares me.
But this is the critical call of our lives, and I heard it when I watched that eagle-feathered saga unfold: to unshackle from the approval and disapproval of others and of ourselves, and be free to shine, to play, to experience the many different textures of a moment, of a scene, of this human life.
To feel the momentary sensations of perceived failure and perceived success without letting it define us, wound us, distort our incarnate worth.
I recently read that the number one regret of the dying was that they were not truly themselves. They died regretting at a lifetime spent not showing the magnitude, the fullest expression of their unique souls. They had already died, silently suffocated by the fear of rejection and the clutching desire of needing to get applause, and the approaching kiss of death made them wake up to see that this life is meant to be experienced, expressed fully.
The improviser knows how to die.
Stephen Colbert, during his improv days, had the running mantra: “Love the bomb.”
Because you’ll find that even when you bomb, you’ll live. What can die is your ego, your ego’s restrictive, frantic obsession with getting approved, being liked, and letting the responses of others be what dictates your life.
Improv is about being real – real in our capacity to connect, communicate, collaborate and create. Improv is about being human, and as we let ourselves be human the funny and the fun naturally shows up, because … well, how could it not? Humans are humorous creatures organically. In my utterly kindhearted opinion, at least. And it’s our messy imperfection that makes us so lovable.
Improv teaches me off-the-stage to affectionately include the very human me who does not know how to use chopsticks and yearns to belong, and by embracing that sticky and insecure part of me I let myself be human and let that human part of me shine through when I do improvise scenes about belonging, about the very human desire to fit in. And I also am aware as I share this in writing and on stage, that I already do belong, to myself, with and without the applause.
And so do you.
We are improvising through this life.
When we feel like we are performing or scurrying away from the blaze of the light, may we remember what Viola taught her students: to let the focus work for us.
And the focus is reentering this moment, this now, and letting the space that surrounds us hold us and realize that we don’t have to be clever, we don’t have to stretch to invent, it’s all here within us, it’s all present within the now, and all we need to do is free ourselves to play with what is here and create our very humorous human lives from there.