Improvisation in the Theater

Any history of alternative theater in the last half of the Twentieth Century must make mention of the multitude of experiments with improvisation. Theater makers pursued Artaud-inspired goals of developing a metalanguage of theater, one that is more like the language of ritual than the speech of everyday life (or of the traditional theater). From this and other Twentieth Century inspirations (e.g. Brecht, Cage), Joseph Chaiken detailed the "presence of the actor," calling attention to the human being on stage distinct from character. Aronson explains that "by presence [Chaiken] meant that quality that emphasizes the liveness of the actor and the sense of shared experience between audience and performer" (88). In rehearsal, the actor's impulses were subject to exploration though improvisation of sounds, movements, and words developed in the moment. These spontaneous inventions made "presence" manifest. Theodore Shank reports that "improvisation...was the chief means used by the [Chaiken's Open Theatre] to develop their plays (49).

Improvisation was central to the development of alternative scripts like those mounted by the Living Theater, George Coates Performance Works, as well as by the Open Theatre. Frost and Yarrow (1990), Shank (2002), Smith and Dean (1997) each relate extensive histories of the experiments in the use of improvisational work in the development of Western performance pieces. In many instances, rehearsal improvisations were used as a means to develop scenes for performance. In contrast to performance pieces that are improvised in front of the audience, these works were ultimately set and scripted in order to counteract the (perceived) unreliability of improvisation, the complexities of showing a work with lighting, props, and in the case of George Coates Performance Works, polymedia.

Improvisation was also consistently a part of participatory or interactive theater in which the audience was given a more active role to play. Since audience contributions could never be known in advance, improvisation was a necessary part of such performances. However, audience improvisations could be entropic, disrupting the structure that a writer or company intends. In one case, the audience literally stopped the show: spectators actually kidnapped the actor playing the lead at a performance of The Performance Group's Dionysus in 69 (Aronson 100). In spite of such perils, a good number of theater groups reject the relegation of improvisation to the rehearsal space alone, instead undertaking it as a performance practice.

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