Improv – The Long and the Short of It
Short Form and Long Form are the same The distinction between short form and long form is a development that stems from the going awry or misunderstanding the focus of a game. These terms get bandied about as if they are two separate disciplines. They are not. Spolin used these games as exercises to help.. read more →
Show! Don’t Tell!
When you don’t see where you are, all you can do is talk about it. You get a suggestion for a scene: Who — A husband and wife. Where — at Disneyland. What — waiting to get on a ride. Most players will begin the scene with dialogue something like this. Husband: Well, well, dear.. read more →
The Seduction of the Teacher
The Trap “Students who regard an instructor highly will tend to adopt that instructor’s attitudes, orientations, and values. This is a seductive phenomenon because it can lead to the ego-enhancement of instructors who have not reached full psychological maturity. This ‘ego-stroking’ can then motivate instructor behaviors which do not have the personal development of participants.. read more →
The Power of Play and the Need for Playing
Play creates happy emotional condition of the organism-as-a-whole. Play involves social values, as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control, and imagination. These are the more complex adjustments a child learns through play. In play, there are adjustments to new situations constantly. Play experience can prepare.. read more →
A Question of Evaluating Students
I recently got a letter from a teacher who uses Spolin Games in the classroom. She asked an interesting question: …Here’s my question: what theatre game would you recommend I use in evaluating the ability level or strength of a 4-6 grader performing improvisation? In other words, which game might let me know which student.. read more →
NO FAIL NO FEAR
“I don’t believe in success and failure.” – Viola Spolin. We all approach new things with some trepidation. I’ve been told by new students that they are there in the workshop because Improv terrifies them and they want to face that fear. Bravo to them for their courage, but ‘sheesh!” I tell them that they.. read more →
Direct Experience and Peak Experiences
“What we are after is a direct experience!” — Viola Spolin I used to think that a direct experience is the same as what Abraham Maslow called the ‘peak experience’. Maslow coined the term to describe what other people have referred to as a ‘religious experience’ as in a born again feeling where the subject.. read more →
What Does it Mean to Improvise?
“Creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known.” – Viola Spolin Creativity is a state that allows us to touch the unknown and to bring it into the phenomenal world: To make the invisible visible. The unknown is a territory that holds all possibilities, until it is revealed. The act of revealing – that is.. read more →
The Art of Sidecoaching
The most subtle and essential element in Spolin Games is sidecoaching. The sidecoach is at once a fellow player, a grounded teacher and a canny director. Sidecoaching is as much a skill as it is an art. It therefore requires the same intuitive ability evoked by playing. In addition, the sidecoach has to also be.. read more →
The Genius of Preoccupation
Spolin’s pathway to the Unknown The [Spolin’s Theater Games] exercises are artifices against artificiality, structures designed to almost fool spontaneity into being–or perhaps a frame carefully built to keep out interferences in which the player waits. Important in the game is the ‘ball’ — the FOCUS, a technical problem, sometimes a double technical problem which.. read more →