Applied Improvisation for Coaches and Leaders

A Practical Guide for Creative Collaboration

Susanne Schinko-Fischli

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429851834
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychologie
• Categoria: Industrie- & Organisationspsychologie

Leadership, teamwork, creativity and storytelling are hot topics in contemporary training and management. They are also an integral part of applied improvisation, which as a result gives us a valuable stock of exercises and methods to impart these skills. In Applied Improvisation for Coaches and Leaders: A Practical Guide for Creative Collaboration, Schinko-Fischli provides a complete introduction to applying the principles and techniques of improvisational theatre to working life.

Schinko-Fischli uses her wealth of experience to illuminate how trainers and managers can add new stimuli to their work through applied improvisation. The book begins with a general introduction to the development of improvisational theatre and to applied improvisation, defining the foundations of improvisation and how we can usefully apply these methods to teamwork. It then focuses on how we can use creativity, with a particular focus on co-creativity, to pave the way for new visions of the future and innovative solutions, and explores how storytelling can be applied to teamwork and presentations. Finally, Schinko-Fischli examines status, examining how we present ourselves and appear to others, and how we can influence and control this. This unique book takes a fresh and nuanced look at many soft skills and presents a complete overview of the areas in which applied improvisation may be used by coaches and managers. It contains practical exercises throughout and clearly explains relevant theory and terminology.

Applied Improvisation for Coaches and Leaders: A Practical Guide for Creative Collaboration will be essential reading for coaches in practice and in training, particularly executive coaches, and those who work with leaders in teams and organisations. It will also be a key text for leaders, trainers and managers seeking to enhance and expand their soft skills and make learning gainful and enjoyable.

Chapter 1
Improvisational theatre

Introduction to improvisational theatre

“Homo improvicus”

Although unforeseen events are part of daily life, we have an ambivalent attitude towards them, as they remind us that we cannot plan anything in our lives perfectly, that we never know just what the future will bring, and that in the end we will never have control over our existence. This unsettles us.

At the same time, this unpredictability offers us many opportunities. The Latin word “improvus” means both “unforeseen” and “surprise.” It is not for nothing that neuropsychologists have discovered that little stimulates the reward centres in our brain more than a pleasant surprise. Marketers and media strategists will often exploit this. Our ability to react spontaneously to unforeseen events is part of our make-up as humans, which we have inherited from our stone-age ancestors. If they happened to come across a bison, they had to be capable of killing it on the spot and taking it to a safe place before others were able to take the valuable food away. It would have been unproductive for stone-age people to have been too bound up with their root-gathering habits to make the most of such surprising discoveries.

Figure 1.1 © Evi Fill

Still, the double-edged character of the unexpected remains a “problem” for us humans. In our globalized world, with our strict timetables and our days that seem full to the brim without a second to spare, surprises are a nuisance to us – even those that should be positive. On the way to the kindergarten, where we have to drop our child before work, the bus or tram has to be right there at the stop at the exact moment shown in our public transport app. To gaze at the unexpectedly beautiful morning sky, or to bump into an acquaintance and chat with them a while, is out of the question.

This is why sectors have arisen dealing with the predictability of events, with hosts of professions attempting to master this art. This works relatively well in some domains (e.g. weather forecasting), and less well in others (such as predicting elections in recent times). The fact is that, despite all the effort we invest in trying, the future remains unplannable.

Improvisation is one solution to this “problem,” as in a certain way it hands us back the reins. If we can catch the ball that fate has suddenly thrown at us, we can focus on a new goal, and this goal may be beneficial to us. If we allow it, something new may emerge.

We have to improvise whenever something happens that throws our plans into disarray, and when we have to re-plan the future, such as when we are developing new and innovative products or services. Here, improvisation methods are increasingly being put to use, as new horizons can only be opened up through the openness that improvisation makes possible. But how should we improvise “correctly”? To answer this, we need to look to art, as art might be said to have improvisation in its DNA. Theatre, music, dance, and literature would be unthinkable without the artists’ ability to improvise. For a long time, improvisational theatre has concerned itself, both practically and theoretically, with the basic principles of improvising, how to communicate and improvise effectively within teams, and thus how to nurture creativity together!

Origins of improvisational theatre

Improvisation in theatre has a rather chequered past. It was present from the very earliest days of theatre, precisely because it was not yet possible to plan everything. It was not until late antiquity that scripts and movements became formalized and fixed, and from that time onwards improvisation was gradually forced out of the theatre. Only with the birth of the commedia dell’arte in Italy was it able to blossom once more. Here, improvisation was used to criticize the political realm, and to poke fun at society. The growth in censorship in the 18th century saw unscripted theatre, and improvisation with it, sidelined again. In the 20th century Jacob Levy Moreno breathed fresh life into it, allowing it finally to return for good. From this time, new forms of improvisational theatre emerged, and Keith Johnstone’s Theatresports spread quickly from Canada to the United States, and later to Europe. Since the start of the 21st century, Theatresports and other styles of improvisational theatre have become very popular in many countries around the world.

It all began with mimetic performances:

Mime

The origins of theatre lie in occult rituals and ceremonies, whereby performers usually depicted a hoped-for situation; for example, hunters may have imitated the animals they caught. In antiquity, mime was developed from these rituals, and gradually lost its religious significance. The term “mime” comes from the Latin for “imitator.” Mimesis involves embodying and imitating real-life people, and given that in early theatre much was still unplanned and had to be improvised, these performances were closely bound up with improvisation right from the start. This form of theatre dominated Greek and Roman stages until late antiquity, until scripts and movements started to become more rigidly fixed.

It was not until the 16th century that improvisation in theatre started to regain significance, in the form of the commedia dell’arte.

Commedia dell’arte

In the 16th century the commedia dell’arte was a milestone in theatre, and particularly in improvisational theatre. This style emerged in northern Italy, and harked back to the buffoonery of ancient Rome and the carnival performances of Venice. Each actor had a fixed character (mask), who he portrayed his whole life. The roles and the dramatic context were established, but the plot was improvised. As there were no written dialogues, the actors were free to represent the views of the lower classes, and thus criticize society without immediately having to deal with censorship.

The commedia dell’arte was also known as “commedia improvvisa,” and helped improvisation become an established art form. It strongly influenced authors such as Brecht, Giorgio Strehler, and Dario Fo, and the old Viennese Volkstheater (People’s Theatre) of the 19th century. The commedia dell’arte also gave rise to the Stegreiftheater (improvised theatre), which wandering players took with great success all over Europe.

Stegreiftheater

Stegreiftheater is an early form of modern improvisational theatre. The word Stegreif comes from Middle High German, and means stirrup. As in the com-media dell’arte, in Stegreiftheater the characters and scenes are fixed, but the dialogues are improvised by the players, a technique also known as extemporization. Extempore phrases, or even songs, are created “on the spur of the moment,” and often driven by the audience. When the actors could extemporize well – that is, improvise – audiences very much appreciated it. However, authors and above all censors feared it and fought against it.

From the middle of the 18th century, censorship required scripts to be fixed, and the popularity of commedia dell’arte and Stegreiftheater gradually waned. In 1752 in Vienna, an adviser to Maria Theresa implemented a ban on extemporization, thus sounding the death knell of the Stegreiftheater in Austria. From then on, theatre was to depict bourgeois life, with great importance given to training and instruction. The year 1836 saw Johann Nepomuk Nestroy banned from the stage for extemporization, and he even spent a short time in prison. Only in the 20th century did Stegreiftheater once again gain a foothold.

Jacob Levy Moreno’s psychodrama

In 1921, Jacob Levy Moreno founded a Stegreiftheater in Vienna, and experimented with improvisation there. He was particularly fascinated by the vitality and immediacy of Stegreiftheater. In Vienna, and later in the USA, he developed it into method of psychotherapy. He aimed to get people to act spontaneously and creatively to help free them from their rigid roles and behaviour patterns. Thus, he developed the “psychodrama” form of psychotherapy, which had originally been conceived as an action-oriented alternative to psychoanalysis.

Jakob Levy Moreno also created the book “Das Stegreiftheater” (1924), which was the first to deal with theoretical concepts of improvisation. Today, psycho-drama is principally used as a form of group therapy, whereby conflicts, for example, are resolved by an improvised exchange of roles.

Viola Spolin

The acting coach and author Viola Spolin first studied under the sociologist Neva Boyd in her Group Work School in Chicago, receiving training in the leadership of groups, the use of leisure time, and social work. She was particularly inspired to see how traditional structures of acting could be used to adapt the social behaviour of children from immigrant and socially disadvantaged families.

In 1946, Spolin founded the Young Actors Company in Hollywood, giving acting training to children, and experimenting with a variety of improvisational theatre techniques. With her methods, she wanted to help her pupils remain focused in the moment and to make improvised decisions on stage that echoed real life. To achieve this, Spolin developed playful exercises to facilitate the creative process.

These theatre games transformed complicated theatrical conventions into simple forms of acting, whereby each piece had a specific focus. Of these, Spolin laid particular emphasis on concentration. To nurture this, she would focus on an acting assignment such as working with a prop (and later also working on a character or on a feeling). This focus on one detail aimed to prevent the pupils becoming overwhelmed or fearful. By giving their entire attention to the task, the pupils could set free the intuitive side of their personality. The aim was to generate something spontaneous in the moment, without judging it. Spolin was convinced that every type of acting could be learned and could be expressed creatively.

Among others, Spolin worked with actors from the improvisational theatre group The Compass Players, founded by her son Paul Sill, and from the improvisational theatre and comedy troupe The Second City, which was also co-founded by her son. There, she also furthered her acting theories and wrote her famous book “Improvisation for the Theater” (1963). Viola Spolin had a strong influence on the improv theatre movement in the USA, and is often referred to as the mother of today’s improvisational theatre.

Paul Sills

Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, developed these methods further, and in 1955 founded the student theatre group The Compass Players in Chicago, the first professional improvisational theatre group as it is understood today.

In 1953 in Chicago, Paul Sills, Bernard Sahlins, and Howard Alk had founded the famous comedy and improvisational theatre group The Second City. The initial idea was to use Viola Spolin’s techniques to develop forms of improvisational theatre for the stage. Today, comedy shows at The Second City are partially created through improvisation, and sometimes live before an audience. When the official part of the show ends, the audience is invited to stay to see the actors improvise and work on scenes for the next show. The audience’s reaction decides which scenes are taken forward, and which are dropped.

The Second City is one of the most successful comedy and improvisational theatre stages. Famous actors and comedians such as Dan Ackroyd, Tina Fey, Mike Meyers, and Bill Murray first trod the boards there and started on their road to success.

Theatre of the Oppressed

Between 1950 and 1960, at the Núcleo do Teatro de Arena in São Paulo in Brazil, Augusto Boal developed the Theatre of the Oppressed. He aimed to create a theatre of the people and for the people, whose methods could help audiences stand up against oppression.

To this end, Boal invented a variety of forms, for example Statue Theatre, which involves representing conflicts of interest or situations of oppression by constructing statues out of people. The first representation is one’s own image of reality (the real picture); one then moves on to representing one’s ideal image, that is, what one hopes for (the ideal picture). Through this process, specific steps are identified to get from the real picture to the ideal picture.

Boal’s best-known form of theatre is Forum Theatre, whereby the audience is usually also drawn into the performance. A difficult situation is introduced by the audience, and with the help of a joker the scene is played out, then discussed and modified by the audience. Then the characters – often weak, disadvantaged or oppressed people – are played on stage by the actors. The audience can replace actors and have them change the scene on stage. This allows solutions for difficult situations to be tried out and tested. Boal saw his methods as anti-authoritarian; it was not about finding the “right” solution, but to try out different ways and possibilities.

Keith Johnstone’s Theatresports

Keith Johnstone taught at the Royal Court Theatre in London between 1956 and 1966, and called into question all the rules he himself had learned in school. His main criticism was that there was no room...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Portraits
• 1 Improvisational theatre
• 2 Applied improvisation
• 3 Foundations of improvisation
• 4 Teamwork
• 5 Creativity
• 6 Status
• 7 Storytelling
• 8 Presentation skills
• Bibliography
• Index