Selected Reminders and Pointers in
“Workshop Procedures” from Improvisation for the Theater

Viola Spolin

The dialogue of "Primitive Games" developed out of the improv group between Birgit Rathsmann and her collaborators: Becket Bowes, Mary Houlihan and Lorelei Ramirez. The group discuss their adaptation of improv techniques in their interview earlier in this issue (see right); below is a long quote from Viola Spolin, one of the early progenitors of improv technique.

The below selected "Reminders and Pointers" comes from Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1963). A collection of 220 games and exercises, the book guides teachers and actors to remain within moments and find choices through focusing on spontaneous interaction. Each of Spolin's exercises gives players a simple problem, like keeping your eye on an invisible ball. By playing a series of such games, practitioners learn complicated theatrical conventions and techniques. Players gain skill through keeping attention on the game instead of falling into self-consciousness or intellectualism. "Reminders and Pointers" are a collection of Spolin's notes for Improvisation for the Theater, kept in a shoebox and originally to be left out of the book. By the final edit, however, Spolin chose to insert them as a section under "Workshop Procedures" as tips to be borne in mind by teachers and actors.1

All video documentation of Spolin's Theatre Games are by Gary Schwartz and are available at Spolin Games Online, along with other exercises.

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The following list of reminders and pointers for both teacher (or group leader) and student rightfully should be weighed after the exercises have been used. However, a quick glance at them now will alert everyone, and the list should be reviewed while a group is working through the exercises.

1. Do not rush student-actors. Some students particularly need to feel unhurried. When necessary, quietly coach. “Take your time.” “We all have lots of time.” “We are with you.”

2. Interpretation and assumption keep the player from direct communication. This is why we say show, don’t tell. Telling is verbally or in some other indirect way indicating what one is doing. This then puts the work upon the audience or fellow actor, and the student learns nothing. Showing means direct contact and direct communication. It does not mean passively pointing to something. 

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4. Repeat problems at different points in the work, to see how student-actors handle early work differently. Also this is important when relationships with the environment become fuzzy and detail is lost.

5. How we do something is the process of doing (right now!). Pre-planning How makes process impossible and so becomes resistance to the Point of Concentration, and no “explosion” or spontaneity can take place, making any change or alterations in the student-actor impossible. True improvisation re-shapes and alters the student-actor through the act of improvising itself. Penetration into the POC, direct contact, and relationship with fellow players result in a change, alteration or new understanding for one or the other or both. In time, during the solving of the acting problem the student becomes aware that he is acted upon and is acting, thereby creating process and change within his stage life. This insight gained remains with him in his everyday life, for whenever a circuit is opened for anyone, so to speak, it is usable everywhere.

6. Without exception, all exercises are over the moment the problem is solved. This may happen in one minute or in twenty, depending on the growing skills of students in playing. The solving of the problem is the scene’s life force. Continuing a scene after the problem is solved becomes story instead of process.

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8. A group of individuals who act, agree and share together create strength and release knowledge surpassing the contribution of any single member. This includes the teacher and group leader.

9. It is the energy released in solving the problem which forms the scene.

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15. While a team is working on stage, the teacher-director must observe audience reaction as well as the players’ work. The audience (including herself) should be checked for interest levels and restlessness; the actors must interrelate, communicate physically, and be seen and heard as they solve the acting problem. When an audience is restless, uninterested, the actors are responsible for this.

16. The heart of improvisation is transformation.

17. Avoid giving examples. While they are sometimes helpful, the reverse is more often true, for the student is bound to give back what has already been experienced.

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20. No outside device is to be used during improvisations. All stage action must come out of what is actually happening on stage. If actors invent an outside device to create change this is avoidance of relationship and the problem itself.

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22. Act, don’t react. This includes the teacher and group leader as well. To react is protective and constitutes withdrawal from the environment. Since we are seeking to reach out, a player must act upon the environment, which in turns acts upon her, catalytic action thus creating interaction that makes process and change (building of a scene) possible. This is a most important point of view for members of the workshop to have.

23. If the student-actors are to develop their own material for scene improvisations, group selection and agreement on the simplest objects in the beginning work are essential to developing this group skill.

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26. Let all scenes develop out of the agreed stage environment. The players must help each other “make do” with what is at hand if they are to truly improvise. As in games, the student-actors can play only by giving complete attention to the environment.

27. Discipline imposed from the outside (emotional tug-of-war for position) and not growing out of involvement with the problem produces inhibited or rebellious action. On the other hand discipline freely chosen for the sake of the activity becomes responsible action, creative action; it takes imagination and dedication to be self-disciplined. When the dynamics are understood and not superimposed, rules are abided by, and it is more fun that way. 

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32. By helping to free the student-actor for the learning process and by inspiring her to communicate in the theater with dedication and passion, it will be found that the average person will not fail to respond to the art form.

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34. Stage life comes to the player by her giving life to the object. Giving life to the object prevents her from mirroring herself.

35. Invention is not the same thing as spontaneity. A person may be inventive without being spontaneous. The explosion does not take place when invention is merely cerebral and therefore only a part or abstraction of our total selves. 

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46. Ad-libbing and wordiness during the solving of a problem constitutes withdrawal from the problem, the environment, and each other. Verbalizing becomes an abstraction from total organic response and is used in place of contact to obscure the self, and when cleverly done, this is difficult to catch. Dialogue, on the other hand, is simply a further expression of total human communication onstage.

47. Train actors to handle theatrical reality, not illusion.

48. Do not teach. Expose students to the theatrical environment, and they will find their own way.

49. Nothing is separate. In the unity of things rests growth and knowledge. Technical facts about the theater are available to everyone through many books. We seek far more than information about the theater.

50. In the seed rests the flowering tree. So must acting problems hold within them the prefiguring of their results from which “the individual in the art and the art in the individual” can flourish.

51. To evolve problems to solve problems requires a person with rich knowledge of the field.

52. Creativity is not re-arranging; it is transformation.

53. Sentiment, tear-jerking etc. are cultural weapons. On our stages, let us cry and laugh not from old frames of reference but from the sheer joy of watching human beings explore a greater beyond.

54. Imagination belongs to the intellect. When we ask someone to imagine something, we are asking them to go into their own frame of reference, which might be limited. When we ask them to see, we are placing them in an objective situation where reaching out into the environment can take place, in which further awareness is possible.

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60. Caution: if students consistently fail to solve the problem and fall back on ad-libbing, story-telling, joke-making, and working separately, with body and body movement misshapened and distorted, their whole foundation is shaky. They have been rushed, or the function of group agreement and the POC has never been understood. They must go back to the earlier exercises and work on the simplest object involvements until they are sure enough of the beginning material to advance successfully.

61. No one can play a game unless he is intent on both the object and his fellow player.

62. Improvising in itself is not a system of training. It is one of the results of the training. Natural unrehearsed speech and response to a dramatic situation are only part of the total training. When “improvising” becomes an end in itself, it can kill spontaneity while fostering cleverness. Growth ceases as the performers take over. The more gifted and clever the players, the more difficult it is to discover this. Everyone ad-libs every waking hour of the day and responds to the world through her senses. It is the enriching, restructuring and integration of all these daily life responses for use in the art form that makes up the training of the actor for scene improvisation and formal theater.

63. A moment of grandeur comes to everyone when they act out of their humanness without need for acceptance, exhibitionism or applause. An audience knows this and responds accordingly.

64. It takes a penetrating eye to see the environment, one’s self within it and make contact with it.

65. All of us must constantly dig around, above and below, cutting away the jungle to find the path.

66. In scene improvisations, for better or for worse we all throw ourselves into the same pool.

67. An audience is neither refreshed nor entertained when not included as part of the game.

68. A fixed attitude is a closed door.

69. When urgency (anxiety) appears, find the POC and hang on. It is the tail of the comet.

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74. Acting is doing.

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77. Group agreement is not permissiveness; it simply keeps everyone playing the same game.

78. Let the object put us in motion. 

79. It is difficult to understand the need for a “blank” mind free of preconceptions when working on an acting problem. Yet everyone knows you cannot fill a basket unless it is empty.

80. Contact comes out of our sensory equipment. Self-protection (assumption, prejudices, etc.) keeps us from contact.

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83. When players are always alerted and willing to come to each other’s aid as needed, each member of the cast is given a sense of security. This mutual support brings a feeling of well-being to the audience.

84. Any player who “steals” a scene is a thief.

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89. Players must learn to use any and every break made during the solving of problems for the scene itself. Breaks, for the most part, are momentarily pulling away from the stage environment and relationships. If this happens through laughter, for instance, the teacher-director simply side-coaches, “use your laughter.” This is easily picked up by the player, and she utilizes the energy and “legalizes” it within the scene. A student-actor soon learns that there is no such thing as a break on stage, for anything that happens is energy that can be channeled into the mainstream of the scene.

90. On stage, one’s taking is the other’s giving.

91. Everyone, including the teacher-director, is strengthened and moves towards action and leadership when “reasons” for not doing something (or doing something) are not acceptable. The simple statement, “There is always a reason,” keeps the student from verbalizing “reasons” further. It is important to know that each and every reason is valid, whether it be socially acceptable or not, whether it be in truth “a sick grandmother” or just dilly-dallying, for in every case the “reason” created the present problem, whether it be lateness to rehearsal or a quarrel between players. When the youngest actor knows that the only thing that matters is to keep the game going and that a “reason” is but a past step that holds up the game, she is freed from the need to be servile. Reasons have value to us only when they are an integral part of and help us understand the present situation. Any other reason is imposed. It is a private matter and therefore useless except for possible subjective reasons.

92. An object can be put in motion only through its own nature and will not respond to manipulation. To transform or alter an object requires total absorption without meddling. Let it happen! Stay out of it!

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94. No one knows the outcome of a game unless she plays it.

95. Without the other player, there is no game. We cannot play tag if there is no one to tag.

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