Theatrical Improvisation, Consciousness, and Cognition

C. Drinko

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137335296
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Improvisation teachers have long known that the human mind could be trained to be effortlessly spontaneous and intuitive. Drinko explores what these improvisation teachers knew about improvisation's effects on consciousness and cognition and compares these theories to current findings in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.

1

Viola Spolin: Games as a Means toward Flow, Empathy, and Finding One’s Truer Self

Abstract: Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s flow, mirror neurons and the mirror system, and Antonio Damasio and V.S. Ramachandran’s neuroscience held up against Viola Spolin’s theories on the effects her improv games have on the mind. Spolin’s concepts of a true self and outward focus or point of concentration lay the groundwork for a new theory on improv’s effects on consciousness and cognition.

Drinko, Clayton D. Theatrical Improvisation, Consciousness, and Cognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137335296.

Viola Spolin is often called the mother of improvisation, so a look at her improv games is a logical starting point for this project. From 1924 to 1927, she studied at Neva Boyd’s Recreational Training School at Chicago’s Hull House. Boyd’s work in recreational games is the inspiration for much of Spolin’s later work in improvisation. Spolin then experimented with her own improvisational games as the teacher and supervisor of creative dramatics on the Works Progress Administration’s Recreational Project in Chicago. She then continued her teaching in Hollywood in 1946 with her Young Actor’s Company, a school that taught children through games. Her best-known contributions to improvisation, and the platform which allowed her to publish her Improvisation for the Theater (1963), were her workshops with adult improvisers at her son Paul Sills’s two theaters, The Compass and then Second City.

What connects Spolin’s work to Boyd’s is that their games require outward focus from participants. Games, as opposed to play, rely on guidelines and a structure, and this structure makes changes in cognition and consciousness possible. Spolin also advocates for her improvisers to not need approval from their teacher or from the audience, and this results in a less self-conscious mode of playing. This same kind of fearless playing is innate in children and is integral to Boyd’s game theory.

Neva Boyd

Neva Boyd began her work in recreational games in 1911 when she organized the Chicago School for Playground Workers. She then directed the Department of Recreation in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy from 1914 to 1920 before starting her own Recreation Training School at Hull House.¹ It is here where she taught Spolin. One of Boyd’s main theories was that play was important in childhood development. Trying to figure out why has relevance to Spolin’s later work as well as to cognition.

Neva Boyd taught at Northwestern University in the Sociology department from 1927 until 1941, and it is likely in this period that her paper “Play—A Unique Discipline” wound up in Spolin’s hands.² Spolin’s notes from her time in Boyd’s classes in the 1920s also prove that Boyd was theorizing about games and play even before Gregory Bateson and certainly well before her Handbook of Recreational Games was published in 1945 or her article “Play as a Means of Social Adjustment” appeared in New Trends in Group Work in 1939. As far back as 1925, Spolin included questions in her class notes about the role of recreation on childhood development and play as a means to unconsciously improve participants.

In “Play—A Unique Discipline,” Boyd distinguishes work from play by stating, “that play is always an artificial situation and work is always a genuine one.”³ She goes on to clarify, “A game . . . is a situation set up imaginatively and defined by rules which together with the prescribed roles, is accepted by the players.”⁴ Boyd then poses the question, why would children take this artificial situation so seriously? She gives two reasons, “the nature of the situation” and “the child’s attitude toward it.”⁵ Games allow the child a more condensed experience than the learning that occurs in the genuine world, to use Boyd’s term. So the child enters the artificial situation willingly, because there is a problem that must be solved and rules that can be followed in solving it. Then, once absorbed in the game’s reality, time and space are “condensed” to promote more rapid and freer learning. When someone is involved in game play, she does not need to focus on herself. Successful game playing requires an outward focus that promotes a freer type of play. In “Play as a Means of Social Adjustment,” Boyd writes that much of the learning that actually occurs through game playing is “unverbalizable” and that the discipline needed for game playing helps stabilize the nervous system and make children socially better adjusted.⁶ All of these ideas, that games teach without being explicitly didactic and that they promote individual and social improvement, also appear in Spolin’s improvisation pedagogy, which will be explored after a brief discussion of game theory.

Game theory

Gregory Bateson famously theorized play, and his work is important in understanding how Boyd’s recreation affects children’s development and then how Spolin was able to transform Boyd’s recreational play into her improv games. In his 1956 essay “The Message ‘This is Play,’ ” Bateson defines play as having the following conditions: the ordinary function of play is not real (in play-fighting no one is killed), there is exaggeration and expansion, it is repetitive without a set sequence, all participants are willing, there is frequent role switching, it exists independent of external needs, and it is set apart from other activities through signs indicating a beginning and end of play.⁷

Sociologist Erving Goffman builds on Bateson’s study of play by developing his own theory of keying and framing. Since play is a scenario set apart from what Boyd would call the genuine, it is framed as such. All participants know they are within the frame of play. If one participant did not know she was playing and the other did they would be framing their experiences differently—one within the play frame and the other within the genuine frame. Either one participant must be clued in that it is play, or the other will interpret the events as a serious threat. Frames are cleared either way, so that the participants are working within the same frame. Goffman defines catharsis as simply the clearing of frames, and his definition of self is the sum total of social interactions. Goffman’s view that the self is comprised of an accumulation of social interactions makes sense where improv is concerned. Later in this chapter, a few different cognitive studies possibilities for what constitutes a self will be examined, but the important thing to remember when dealing with improvisation is that focusing more on others and less on oneself reduces self-consciousness. It could also be said that this external focus and reduction in self-consciousness brings one closer to her true self, at least the true self specific to that moment in time. Each social interaction, and the accumulation of interactions, changes the self. Game playing can bring out the self of the player, because the focus is on fellow players and the rules of the game. This allows the self to vary according to each situation.

Boyd’s work on games inspired in Spolin the idea that game playing was a special activity where people could safely leave their genuine world behind to become intensely invested in solving problems together. Games, unlike free play, add this problem-solving element. Participants focus on each other and collaborate in order to solve the problem of the game. If a player isolates herself or works within a different frame the problem of the game is not solved. Focusing on the problem keeps players in the present moment instead of worrying about the past or future, and this kind of moment-to-moment attention is one of the most important aspects of game playing and improvisation as far as cognition is concerned.

Viola Spolin

In her notes from Boyd’s Hull House classes, Spolin wrote on November 16, 1925, “What is the place of recreation in all this. [sic] How can recreation helps [sic] in building in qualities which cannot be talked about cannot be helped consciously. [sic]”⁸ This note proves that she had been thinking about the role of consciousness in Boyd’s recreational games as early as 1925. Initially, Spolin referred to her budding games as problems, and she began developing these problems during the Depression with her involvement in the WPA Recreational Project that aimed to help poor children in Chicago.⁹ These problems were to be a separate space for children to problem-solve together thereby unconsciously developing their own senses of self in the process.

After Spolin’s work with the WPA, she relocated to Hollywood, California in 1946 and started her own children’s school, the Young Actor’s Company. It is here that she began solidifying her own theories on her improv problems. In 1948, she wrote “A Slight Preface as to Why I Have Come to Think as I Do”:

Each individual becomes aware of, and moves into a movement in terms of his individual needs and his understanding of relationships in the world in which he lives. The creative release of individuals in terms of their everyday [sic].¹⁰

Spolin’s theories on her teaching at this time began to center more specifically around how focusing outside of oneself could change children’s self-perception.

Another part of Spolin’s thinking on how improvisation affected consciousness and cognition was that improvisation’s shift in focus also resulted in different parts of the brain being affected than would be during everyday life. In her book The Compass (1990), historian Janet Coleman claims that Spolin had been known to say, “I’ve always known this stuff about the right brain.”¹¹ Coleman goes on to clarify:

The left brain, the province of intellect, the mind, is literal, sedimentary, logical, premeditated, censoring. Metaphoric, metamorphic, mystical, spontaneous and unguarded, the province of intuition, genius, is the right brain.¹²

It is not quite that simple, but there is something to the left brain/right brain binary. The important take-away from this period in Spolin’s theorizing on improvisation and the mind is that she was now thinking of the brain as working in parts. Some parts could be slowed down and sped up, resulting in different outcomes of thought and behavior. The way Spolin saw to unlock these changes was through her games.

Spolin left Los Angeles to direct a production of Juno and the Paycock in spring 1955. The Playwrights Theatre Club, of which Spolin’s son Paul Sills was a founding member, produ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Viola Spolin: Games as a Means toward Flow, Empathy, and Finding Ones Truer Self
• 2  Del Close and the Harold: Improvisational Time and the Multiple Draft Modeled Mind
• 3  Keith Johnstone: Spontaneity, Storytelling, Status, and Masks, Trance, Altered States
• 4  The Improvising Mind: On Stage and in the Lab
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index