Improvisation is the spontaneous invention of performance. It has a long theatre history, for example in commedia dell’ arte, which has been practised in Italy from about the mid-sixteenth century. In commedia, performers improvise unique performances within set rules regarding stock characters, plots and jokes, with few resources and in response to local contexts and current issues, to produce topical satire. Improvisation achieved popularity elsewhere in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, when its defining principles of spontaneity, creative play, openness to chance and group participation captured the imagination of artists and teachers. These practitioners included composer John Cage, dance-makers whose contact improvisation produced choreography out of performers’ unplanned movements, and theatre-makers and performance artists including Richard Schechner, Laurie Anderson and creators of happenings. Such practitioners were inspired partly by theatre’s own history of improvisation, but also by such things as improvisational jazz and contemporary educational theories about stimulating children’s learning through play. Improvisation in this context and beyond is a tool of creative stimulation facilitating more effective collaboration by requiring practitioners not to block a partner’s proposition, but to go with it and build on it. It is also a vital training and rehearsal tool and has links with stand-up comedy – which has to respond spontaneously to audience interjections. Improvisation’s capacity to be topical, to evade censorship and to facilitate democratic participation gives it enormous political potential that has been harnessed by performance artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and theatre artists including Augusto Boal. Improvisation’s capacity to challenge the received wisdom of ‘grand narratives’ has also made it a favoured tool of many postmodern performance-makers. While it specifies a particular form of performance, elements of improvisation are intrinsic to all performance and the quality of liveness it produces, as all events must constantly to their live, unpredictable conditions. From the RCTP
Image: John Rowley, Dave Levett and colleagues training, 1996. Courtesy of the Brith Gof archive