Improvisation in Drama, Theatre and Performance

History, Practice, Theory

Anthony Frost, Ralph Yarrow

• Éditeur: Methuen Drama
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350316249
• Édition: 3
• Sujet: Médias et arts de la scène
• Sous-sujet: Arts de la scène

Improvisation is a tool for many things: performance training, rehearsal practice, playwriting, therapeutic interaction and somatic discovery. This book opens up the significance of improvisation across cultures, histories and ways of performing our life, offering key insights into the what, the how and the why of performance. It traces the origins of improvisation and its influences, both as a social and political phenomenon and its position in performance training. Including history, theory and practice, this new edition encompasses Theatre and performance studies as well as drama, acknowledging the rapid reconfiguration of these fields in recent years. Its coverage also now extends to improvisation in the USA, cinema, LARPing, street events and the improvising audience, while also looking at improv's relationship to stand-up comedy, jazz, poetry and free movement practices. With an index of exercises and an extensive bibliography, this book is indispensable to students of improvisation.

PART 1

Who? Major Practitioners of Improvisation

Introduction

Part 1 offers a survey of major practitioners across time and space, suggesting key areas in the history and range of performance which have been significantly influenced by the principles and processes of improvisation. The book is organised in several ways. The first two chapters look at the work of ‘early’ (i.e., late nineteenth and early twentieth-century) practitioners in the European and American context in order to establish routes into Academy and Drama School Training; ‘traditional’ and ‘alternative’ imply different kinds of performance outcomes and hence different working methods – roughly, those in the tradition of Stanislavsky, and those derived from Johnstone or Lecoq, tending towards different models of identity and role in performance. Geographical and cultural factors (of the UK, USA, Europe, Africa and the Middle East) produce distinct uses and forms of the improvisatory in different contexts and spaces; and applications ‘beyond theatre’ extend the use of the ‘games’ model towards psychological, psychokinetic and political encounter. All of these lines of investigation work, on the one hand, towards the definition of the theatrical frame as representational matrix and, on the other, to its exploitation as generic productivity for performers and ‘participants’. In not a few cases, these roles and functions overlap. They may also represent or engender different models of the self and its place in society.

1 Improvisation in Training, Rehearsal Practice and Writing (Europe and the UK)

The principle of improvisation

Improvisation is not just a style or an acting technique; it is a dynamic principle operating in many different spheres, an independent and transformative way of being, knowing and doing. The twentieth century witnessed an explosion of experiments which have embraced the principle of ‘improvisation’. Music, for example, was transformed by the various forms of jazz: technical proficiency allied to improvisation to create a practically inexhaustible synthesis. In modern dance, Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, in different ways, opened up a wealth of new plastic possibilities for the expressive body. The former immediately and spontaneously danced the truth of what she felt. The latter broke down the rigid formulae of classical ballet and replaced them with a language that responded to the world around as well as within the dancer. The 1960s political philosophy of situationism in Europe and happenings in the United States celebrated the spontaneous and site-specific, most importantly perhaps the conjunction of site, moment, performer and spectator, that is, the place, time and bodies of new event-structures. Many of these forms have been reconfigured in the performance work of the early twenty-first century, so it is worth dwelling on this a little. The examples given above (jazz and twentieth-century modern dance) involve the negotiation of form and freedom, and writing about this often tends to polarise them. In fact, as noted in the discussion of commedia in the Introduction, both are involved throughout, in preparation/rehearsal and, sometimes, in performance – arguably more often in site-specific or immersive work of recent times. It has been suggested that most of what passes for ‘improvisation’ in jazz is anything but that: ‘breaks’ tend to be repetitive and/or predictable, and they remain strictly within the frame of rhythm and key-signature or depart from it only in ‘agreed’ ways. So quite a lot of jazz falls back on habit – the habit of the player and the expectation of the listener. But this immersion in pattern is not solely restrictive: as with much Asian performance – and a key criterion adopted by Barba for his own company’s work – knowing the ‘score’ (which may have been developed from a long sequence of experiment, trial and error) is a basis for liberation. Using the term ‘improvisation’ is a bit sloppy here, because it refers equally to the development process and to potentially -unexpected ‘leaps’ in performance, moments when ‘the flower blooms’, as Noh theatre would have it. But what both time-dimensions trace is a point of change, a happening of something new.

As Martha Graham writes, ‘There is a necessity for movement when words are not adequate. The basis of all dancing is something deep within you’ (in Roose-Evans 1970: 112). Is improvisation here the honing of a technique or acuity for identifying the moment when things ‘change’, when something really does ‘happen’ to the relationship between ‘self’ (located in the machine of the body-as-agent) and the ‘environment’ (space, place, time, other performers, audience, score, text, context and so on)?

However, it is true that all theatrical performance ideally strives for a rigorous authenticity: what Stanislavsky called ‘artistic truth’, perhaps? The lines of development we discuss in this section lead in three principal directions, but each ultimately demands the same degree of commitment and is concerned – though from different angles – with an exploration of ‘self’ and ‘reality’ for performers and/or audience.

Improvisation is used in three major contexts. It feeds first into what we might call traditional theatre training, as a preparation for performance and a way of tuning up the performers. We can place this in the (Stanislavskian) tradition of ‘character’ preparation, or, to put it another way, as a method of schooling the actor to project the ‘reality’ of the character. It is a process which involves the development of imaginative skills so that the body can experience and express appropriate emotional states: discovering in oneself the self or being of ‘another’ and presenting it.

We discuss the use of improvisation in actor training below; this line of work initially tends – though not exclusively or rigidly – towards the naturalistic, the documentary and the sociopolitical, with a relatively clearly defined concept of ‘character’ as the focus of deterministic forces: what D. H. Lawrence called the ‘old stable ego of personality’ clings to this and inhabits the structure and content of the ‘well-made play’. Perhaps the most extreme development occurs in the improvisation-for-performance work of Mike Leigh, where a scripted text arises from improvisation fleshed out by ‘sociological’ research.

The second tradition (or perhaps anti-tradition) rests on a more radical acknowledgement of the fragmentation of nineteenth-century notions of a consistent personality. The comic and satiric vein, often allied to improvisation, challenges assumptions about stable social personality and ‘bourgeois’ respectability; taken to extremes, it undercuts political, religious and philosophical myths about the coherence of individual identity and its consonance within a system of stratified order and significance. The work of Jarry, Artaud and Beckett, for instance, extends and foregrounds this destabilisation; it also requires a more radically physical and improvisatory approach to acting, and it is not surprising that alongside this eventually scripted and accepted form of theatre, work on and with improvisation should have continued to -develop almost as a form in and for itself. Improvisation of this kind both serves as an exploratory form of theatre and – here we move into the third tradition, ‘para-theatrical’ context – also locates the issue of self and reality in spheres other than the narrowly theatrical.

The more radical modes of improvisation both accept the consequences of the disintegration of the existential self and attempt to use them positively. Grotowski’s actors learn to ‘disarm’, that is, to arrive at a condition without the protective masks of the familiar or the comfortable escapes of dramatic cliché. The work focuses not on the reality of the character but on that of the performer; where it emerges as public theatre, it is the inventiveness and authenticity of the performers in their relationship with the spectators which is foregrounded, as opposed to the presentation of a narrative. Here improvisation and performance are seen as part of a developmental process which can thus extend beyond theatre into, for example, psychotherapy, education and politics.

It is only a step from here, and indeed a step which had already been taken by work like that of Grotowski’s para-theatrical period, to the spectrum of concern with location and audience in which they become participants in the event. Yet in another way it is also a step back, towards the communitas Victor Turner identified as the dynamic of ritual. In the ongoing exploration of new forms of being, the shaman bites back.

John Martin (2004) notes that improvisation is used in pre-rehearsal, rehearsal and performance, and offers four ways of working with it: solo, in pairs, variations and for groups. He indicates that in addition to Western actor training, improvisation is found in Boalian Forum Theatre (responding to spectator interventions), Japanese Noh (gauging the state of the audience), South Indian Kathakali (play with audience by popular characters) and West African performance, where dances are ‘never the same’ (Martin 2004: 102–3). Exercises are organised according to the kinds of energy level they seek to generate and the ways in which they change the nature of the performer’s relationship to space. Martin trained at the Lecoq school and has worked extensively with performers from many traditions.¹

Martin’s proposed divisions can be seen to relate both to what we discuss in Part 1 about training and trainers and to the way Part 2 (the ‘how’ section) is organised. The use of improvisation as a strategy of training is a way of developing the performer’s resources, which as it is formalised or repeated develops into a methodology; improvisation as a way of creating or amending performance alters its nature and effect, inflecting its status and meaning. Pre-rehearsal involves the preparation of bodies and groups for disponibilité and play, and the exploration of the relationship between the body of the performer and the space of performance. Improvisation in and as rehearsal continues these moves with reference to the performance-text (the ensemble of signs and codes which constitute the performance); it develops the contexts and ‘back-stories’ of characters and situations through exercises like ‘hot-seating’ or affective memory work; and it works on strategies to energise relationships and intentions, by attempting to find ways to ‘raise the stakes’ and intensify the degree of attention to what is happening between performers and in the space. Improvisation in and as performance can be the most risky venture possible – for a clown courting failure, for a participant in a scenario whose parameters are known but whose detail, order and meaning is liable to be changed by any performer; or a subtle variation registering the receptive condition of the audience or the specific dynamics of the moment by a highly skilled performer; or -uncensored or deliberately invoked interventions from spectator--participants to which performers respond supportively. In what follows we discuss both forms of training (process) and uses in performance (application or product), which often feature in parallel in the work of trainers and theatre-makers, or follow directly on from each other.

Precursors: Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Chekhov

Improvisatory methods slowly began to percolate through mainstream Russian theatre. In St Petersburg in 1908, the idealising theorist Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) proposed a renovation of the theatre in which the actors would descend among the audience, distribute masks and costumes ‘to everyone who wanted them … involving those present in a communal creative improvisation’ (Rudnitsky 1988: 10). He sought to replace theatre’s classical reliance on mimesis with a dionysian group praxis. His Symbolist poetic contemporaries were cautious, and they regarded Ivanov’s proposals for a renewed liturgical theatre that would take the place of traditional religious ritual as utopian and unworkable.

Following Meyerhold’s use of commedia techniques in Columbine’s Scarf (1910), Alexander Taïrov’s production of The Seamy Side of Life by Jacinto Benavente opened in 1912 at the Reineke Theatre. This too sought to -explore the improvisatory essence of masked commedia and mime, though the young, inexperienced actors struggled to realise Taïrov’s vision.

After the October Revolution of 1917, perhaps the first person to think of improvisations as more than idealist experiments, historical reconstructions or as training and rehearsal exercises was Meyerhold’s protégé Sergei Radlov (1892–1958). Radlov founded the ‘Popular Comedy’ (Teatr Narodnoy Komedii, or People’s Comedy Theatre, St Petersburg) in 1920. He argued that ‘a genuine contemporary art form could be achieved only in one way – by means of “the actor’s verbal improvisation”’ (Rudnitsky 1988: 57). Where Meyerhold had stressed physical improvisation and mime, Radlov placed emphasis on the spontaneous creation of verbal text. Feeling that melodrama and tragedy depended for their power on a fixed, stable text, Radlov chose to work exclusively in comedy, often with circus performers and clowns such as Georges Delvari, creating half-plays/half-scenarios in which every one of the players

was allowed, and in fact obliged, to say everything that came to mind. The main criterion for success lay in the audience response: the more often and the more loudly they burst out laughing, the better. Topical jokes about current events, remarks unexpectedly directed at the audience and informal, familiar banter with spectators were encouraged. (1988: 57)

For Radlov, indeed, the playwright was seen as ‘pernicious’, and his aim was to free the actor from the writer’s tyranny. He felt that the actor’s -enslavement to the words of others ‘completely atrophies the actor’s initiative, transforming an independent artist into an obedient and passive performer, practically a marionette, controlled by the writer’s will’ (57). He did, however, collaborate with Maxim Gorki, who found the idea of -improvisation attractive, on a piece called The Hardworking Slovotekov, a satire on bureaucracy. The piece was considered a failure: the theatre’s designer Valentina Khodasevich described Delvari’s improvisations as ‘crude and vulgar’ (Rudnitsky 1988: 59) and recorded Gorki’s displeasure at the way the actors turned sharp satire into broad farce and slapstick. Discouraged, Radlov began to direct more classical, less improvised comic pieces, and the circus performers decamped back to St Petersburg’s Cisinelli big top. In 1922, the Popular Comedy closed.

Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s last production, Carlo Gozzi’s Princess Turandot, which opened at the Moscow Art Theatre’s Third Studio (later renamed the State Vakhtangov Studio) in February 1922, saw his actors given freedom to improvise in performance. They were asked to imagine that they were playing Italian actors playing the Chinese roles of the play: they were encouraged to get into role, and to get out of role, and to show the transitions. They were instructed ‘to conduct complex, capricious and merry play with the character, simultaneously demonstrating the technique of transformation, the joy of metamorphosis and the ability to look at one’s hero with irony “from the side”’ (Rudnitsky 1988: 54). Vakhtangov’s ‘fantastical realism’ style of performance anticipated Brecht, quoted from commedia as well as from Chinese theatre and remained in the theatre’s repertory for a thousand performances. Revived in 1971, it remains popular to the present day.

We might assume that Constantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) was the originator of the modern use of improvisation, at least as a rehearsal and training device. Many of the scenes described in his books, An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and Creating a Role, in which the director ‘Tortsov’ guides his young protégés through the processes of self-discovery, are -improvisatory in nature. But these books are the product of Stanislavsky’s later years, after a heart attack had forced him to give up acting. They do not necessarily relate to his own theatrical practice, particularly in the early days of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT).

Stanislavsky did use a form of ‘proto-improvisation’, a kind of imaginative projection of oneself into a role, and began to sugg...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction and Preface to the Third Edition
• Part 1: Who? Major Practitioners of Improvisation
• Part 2: What? The Practice of Improvisation: Improvisation Exercises
• Part 3: Why? The Meaning(s) of Improvisation:Towards a Poetics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Selected Games and Exercises
• General Index