Chapter 1

Introduction:

Improvisation in Theater and Everyday Conversation

True improvisation is a dialogue between people.

Paul Sills, director (in Sweet, 1978, p. 19)

This book is a study of the improvised dialogues performed on stage by Chicago

improvisational theater groups. This is the first book to study these improvised dialogues using

analytic techniques originally developed to study everyday conversation. One of my themes is

that the study of these dialogues has much to teach us about conversation more generally.

I first became interested in improvised dialogues because of my years of experience as a

jazz pianist. Beginning in 1991, I spent three years studying the Chicago improv scene. I began

my study by signing up for an improv theater class; while there, I met some members of an

ensemble that needed a pianist to accompany their improvisations. I auditioned and got the job—

probably because I was already comfortable with improvisation as a result of my jazz experience.

In an improv group, the pianist sits in front of or at the side of the stage, facing the action.

During performances, I set up my video camera and tripod just behind me. This gave me the ideal

position for participant observation—my physical position was symbolic of the fact that I was

both in the group, and at the same time, observing the group.

I began performing with the University of Chicago improv group Off-Off-Campus, which

had taken up the local tradition started by The Compass, the legendary 1950s group of Chicago

undergrads that invented modern improv theater. I performed with four different casts of this
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group over two years. A little over a year after I joined Off-Off-Campus, I began to approach

other improv groups around Chicago—and there were many of them, between 10 and 20 improv

shows to choose from each weekend. Every group that I approached agreed to be videotaped

during live performance, and many of the directors and actors agreed to be interviewed about the

creative processes of improvisation. After three years of research, I had collected videotapes of

almost 50 hours of improvised performance from 15 different theater groups.

Improvisation has been one of the most influential developments in twentieth-century

theater. Directors of conventional scripted plays frequently use improvisational exercises as a

rehearsal technique; for example, the influential Stanislavsky method is an improvisational

technique. Theater and movie directors have used improvisation in rehearsal as a way of

developing script ideas; although the ideas originate in an improvisation, the director then acts as

a playwright, arranging the best lines from the improvisation into a script that is then used for the

final performance. Movie director Mike Leigh has used this method for several widely acclaimed

films (Sawyer, 2001b).

These are all off-stage uses of improvisation. But beginning in the 1950s, a group of

Chicago actors began to perform improvisations on stage, in front of paying audiences. They

were influenced by Stanislavksy, but even more by the improvisations of the medieval Italian

commedia dell’arte and by the free flow of children’s dramatic play. In Chapter 2, I provide a

history and an overview of Chicago improv theater, drawing on my own interviews and

observations in Chicago, and also on a wide range of excellent books documenting the history of

Second City and other Chicago improvisational groups. In Chicago improv, the audience is

exposed to the collaborative creative process of an ensemble of actors; neither the actors nor the

audience knows how the performance will emerge. Many theater experts believe that this

Chicago style of improvisation has been America’s single most important contribution to the

theater. A surprising number of actors and directors got their start in Chicago improv; a short list
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includes Dan Ackroyd, Alan Alda, Ed Asner, Chris Farley, Elaine May, Paul Mazursky, Mike

Nichols, Harold Ramis, Joan Rivers, and Jerry Stiller. The most famous Chicago improv theater,

the Second City, is the model for Saturday Night Live, and many of SNL’s cast members have

been recruited from Second City’s stage.

Improv groups can be found today in every major American city, and the tradition still runs

strong in Chicago, where at least 10 or 20 groups are listed in the paper every weekend. In the

late 1990s, improv finally made it to American television, although it took a British show, Whose

Line is it Anyway, to convince American TV producers that improv could work on television. The

American version starring Drew Carey premiered on ABC on August 5, 1998. Following on the

success of this show, other improv-based shows appeared including The Groundlings, Random

Acts of Comedy, and LifeGame.

In response to the increasing influence of improv, scores of books have been published

about improv history and technique. But surprisingly, there has not been a single book that has

videotaped, transcribed, and carefully analyzed these dialogues to see how they really work and

what is really going on.1 As a result, what we know about improv is largely what actors talk

about. But when one looks closely at improvised dialogues, one realizes that a lot is going on

that actors are not aware of. These unintentional, unnoticed patterns are the focus of Chapters 6

through 8.

The brief transcript in Example 1.1 demonstrates how two improv actors create a scene

through improvisation.

Example 1.1. The beginning of a two-minute scene at the Improv Institute. 2

1 (Andrew steps to stage center, pulls up a chair and sits down, miming the action of

driving by holding an imaginary steering wheel)

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2 (Ben steps to stage center, stands next to Andrew, fishes in pocket for something)

3 Andrew On or off?

4 Ben I’m getting on, sir (continues fishing in his pocket)

5 Andrew In or out?

6 Ben I’m getting in!

I’m getting in!

7 Andrew Did I see you tryin’ to get in the back door

a couple of stops back?

8 Ben Uh...

The first actor to jump to stage front and start the scene can do almost anything. Nothing

has been decided—no plot, no characters, no events. But only a few seconds into the scene, the

actors quickly establish a basic dramatic frame. Once this happens, the actors have to work

within that frame.

By the end of this exchange, Andrew and Ben have developed a reasonably complex

drama. They know that Andrew is a bus driver, and that Ben is a potential passenger. Andrew is

getting a little impatient, and Ben may be a little shifty, perhaps trying to sneak on. A transcript of

the dialogue can be misleading, because it makes it all seem straightforward. But it’s important to

emphasize how unpredictable these 8 turns were, how this tiny bit of dialogue could have gone in

a hundred other directions. For example, at turn 2, Ben had a range of creative options available.

Ben could have pulled up a second chair and sat down next to the “driver,” and he would have

become a passenger in a car. At turn 3, Andrew had an equal range of options. He could have

addressed Ben as his friend, and Ben’s hand in his pocket could be searching for theater tickets:

“Don’t tell me you forgot the tickets again!” For a more crazy example, at turn 2, Ben could

have addressed Andrew as Captain Kirk of Star Trek, creating a TV-show parody. Each turn

presents a range of creative options for Andrew or Ben. Because each turn provides its own
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numerous possibilities, a combinatorial explosion quickly results in hundreds of other

performances that could have emerged.

Yet this creativity is not unlimited; although they start the scene with no idea what will

happen, a few seconds into the scene they are constrained by the scenario that has collaboratively

emerged. From then on, their creativity must be consistent with what has come before. In

improvisational encounters, participants must balance the need to creatively contribute with the

need to maintain coherence with the current state of the emergent frame.

Jazz musicians often describe their interaction on stage as a “musical conversation,” and

studies of conversation, by both conversation analysts and linguistic anthropologists, have

occasionally commented on its creative and improvisational characteristics (see Chapter 3).

Improv actors also comment on these similarities; actress Valerie Harper, who began her career in

Chicago improv, said “I’ve always found improvisation…to be close to jazz musicians jamming”

(Harper, in Sweet, 1978, p. 319). Both jazz and improv theater are collaborations in which

individuals have some creative freedom, but at the same time are influenced by the situation and

by each others’ actions.

In addition to the connections with jazz, many directors and actors make an explicit

connection between improvisation and children’s play. In an interview about her improvisations at

the Second City Theater in Chicago, actress Gilda Radner said “My dad used to say he loved

watching children play because they created worlds out of nothing….That’s what we did at

Second City” (Radner, in Sweet, 1978, p. 368). Many improvisational directors prefer to call

their performers “players” rather than “actors.” I drew on these connections in my first book,

Pretend Play as Improvisation (Sawyer, 1997b), a study of children’s fantasy dialogues. My

motivation was to explore how adult conversational and social skills develop. How do children

develop the improvisational skills required to participate in creative conversation? From my play

study, I learned that improvisational play is most common between the ages of three and five, the
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same years that many other cognitive and social skills are developing. Several decades of

developmental research show a remarkable consensus on the importance of this age range for

social development. For example, in parallel with a recent trend towards narratological studies in

a wide range of social science disciplines, developmental psychologists have identified these years

as the period when the child learns to represent and construct narratives. Since children improvise

frequently during these years, I argued that improvisation contributes to the development of

pragmatic and social skills by giving children an opportunity to practice how to collectively

manage an ongoing interaction.

The theoretical framework that I develop in this book is an elaboration of the one I used in

this play study. This theory emphasizes that the study of improvised dialogues can contribute to

our understanding of two processes that are present in all linguistic interaction. The first is the

process whereby participants in a conversation collaborate to create their interactional context, or

frame; I refer to this process as collaborative emergence. In Chapter 3, I argue that the frame

should be treated as a higher level of analysis that emerges from dialogue, and I argue that we

must consider the frame to be analytically distinct from any participating individual and distinct

from any single turn of dialogue. The second interactional process is that whereby participants

are constrained and enabled by the interactional frame that emerges from their dialogue. I refer to

this process as downward causation, because it is a causal relation between the frame, a higher

level of analysis, and individual discursive action. In Chapter 4, I provide a theory of how

individual participants are causally affected by the emergent frame, and I propose a new

methodology to study improvised dialogues.

The twin processes of collaborative emergence and downward causation have been central

focuses of several disciplines that study conversation, including conversation analysis, pragmatics,

and the ethnography of speaking. My approach is different from the dominant paradigms in

conversation research; whereas I argue that the frame is analytically independent of individuals
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and their dialogue, most conversation researchers analyze the frame in terms of individual

intentions, mental representations, subjective orientations, or turns of dialogue, as I show in

Chapter 3. My theory of collaborative emergence is based on sociological and philosophical

treatments of emergence, reductionism, and holism—bodies of literature that conversation

research rarely draws on. The theory makes clear the broad relevance of these studies to research

in conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology, and the psychology and sociology of creativity.

In Chapters 5 through 8 I use this theory to reveal hidden patterns in improvised

dialogues. These close transcript analyses will be of interest to anyone that has attended an

improv performance and wondered “How can the actors do that?” Actors, directors, and theater

educators will find much of interest in these studies, because actors themselves are not aware of

these patterns. Yet although the book will be of interest to theater people, the primary audience

will be those scholars who study conversation and verbal art. I show why these dialogues can

provide uniquely valuable insights into our general understanding of conversation, verbal art,

ritual, and theater performance, and I make several connections with the fields of conversation

analysis, linguistic anthropology, folkloristics, and discourse analysis. I have tried to present the

analyses in chapters 5 through 8 so that they could be read by theater people, but they necessarily

include frequent references to academic theories and concepts.

IMPROVISED DIALOGUES AND EVERYDAY CONVERSATION

The techniques of the theater are the techniques of communicating.

Viola Spolin, 1963, p. 14

Researchers have demonstrated that in everyday conversation, participants collaborate to

negotiate the properties of the frame (see Chapter 3). Improvised dialogues provide a window

onto this collaborative negotiation; because there is no frame at the beginning of an improvised

scene, we can observe the emergence of the entire frame. Using improvised dialogue, actors
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create a temporary social reality in minutes or even seconds. They collaborate to create roles,

characters, relationships, emotions, events, and a dramatic trajectory for the scene.

Conversation is more like improvised dialogue when it is negotiated, flexible,

collaborative, and in play, in unstructured encounters such as everyday conversation, small-group

collaborations, brainstorming sessions, and discussion seminars (Sawyer, 2001b). Conversation is

less like improvised dialogue when more features of the interaction are pre-specified and

intersubjectively shared. Unlike theater improvisations, in most conversations we know where we

are—a bar or restaurant, an office, the supermarket; we know who we are talking to, and what

sort of relationship we have with that person—good friend, acquaintance, co-worker; and we

know what sorts of utterances and topics will be appropriate. But in recent decades, conversation

researchers have demonstrated that even these basic features of the context are open to

negotiation (see the studies collected in Tannen, 1993; Duranti & Goodwin, 1992). Even in

familiar situations among intimates, there are still many things that need to be negotiated: What

they will talk about, when turn-taking will occur, and who has speaking rights. Participants

negotiate the definition of the frame, and attempt to influence others’ interpretations of what is

going on. This negotiation is usually implicit, and we are often not consciously aware of it. My

study of improvised dialogue continues this tradition in conversation research.

The study of everyday talk often requires an understanding of the personalities and past

histories of participants, and this can be difficult to capture without lengthy interviews or

longitudinal analysis. These methodological difficulties partly explain why almost no conversation

analytic studies have incorporated studies of the participating individuals. Yet, without

considering such factors, it is hard to know to what degree an observed conversational regularity

can be explained in terms of traits or preferences of participating individuals. This is why Erving

Goffman, who was keenly interested in the creative strategic moves made by speakers, focused his

career on encounters between strangers in public places: These are exactly those situations where
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a minimum of the frame is known in advance, and speakers have to be creatively strategic in

negotiating and defining the basic properties of the frame. Improvised dialogues have these same

features; each performance begins with new characters, and those characters’ histories and

personalities are completely constructed during the performance itself.

In contrast to this focus on creativity, some theories of conversation focus on situational

constraints that help speakers disambiguate others’ messages and maintain coherence. Pragmatic

theories such as Grice’s conversational implicature (1975) emphasize the shared cultural

knowledge that allows speakers to determine the pragmatic presuppositions of an utterance.

Discourse analytic studies of coherence focus on the background knowledge shared by speakers,

including scripts, frames, event schemata, and adjacency pairs (Brown & Yule, 1983, Chapter 7).

Many sociological theories of situated practice argue that individuals use ritualized or routinized

interaction patterns as a way of reducing anxiety and stress (Giddens, 1984; Collins, 1981). Such

theories focus on the structured aspects of conversation and neglect its improvisational aspects

(see Sawyer, 2001b). As a result, these theories have difficulty accounting for the most

improvisational conversations, when individuals co-create their context.

So although this book is a study of improvisational theater dialogues, at a deeper level it is

a study of how conversation works. The empirical analyses in Chapters 5 through 8 explore

foundational questions in the study of conversation: How do people use language to

collaboratively create a conversational frame? What are the interactional mechanisms that

participants use to do this? How do these mechanisms change in different contexts?

INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY AND COLLABORATION

Psychologists that study creativity have largely focused on the individual creator and the

psychological processes of creativity. But many creative activities occur in groups. Modern

examples include large teams in scientific research laboratories, where a single journal article may

have over 100 authors, and movie filming and production, where a film’s credits list over 100
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professionals. Theater and musical performance are perhaps the most group-oriented of all

creative forms. Many musical traditions are ensemble forms, including the chamber groups and

orchestras of the European tradition, and almost all theater is ensemble-based.

An improvisational group performance is a collaborative creation. As I argue in Chapter

3, the performance is collaboratively emergent, and like many emergent phenomena, it is difficult

and perhaps impossible to analyze using reductionist methods. For example, we can’t study the

collaborative creation of the dramatic frame by focusing on the psychology of individual

performers, or the creativity that they display in isolated turns of dialogue. Instead, we need a

theoretical framework and a methodology that allows us to study group interaction and

collaborative creativity. Although some psychologists have acknowledged the role played by

collaboration (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; John-Steiner, 2000), their empirical studies have been

largely qualitative and descriptive, due to the lack of a methodology with which to study

sociocultural practice in specific instances of collaboration. In this book, I demonstrate that we

can study collaborative verbal creativity by using methodologies developed for the analysis of

verbal performance, thus providing a new set of tools to creativity researchers.

In most European performance genres, the performers follow an outline that has been

created by someone else—musicians perform from a score that was written by a composer, or

actors memorize lines from a script that was written by a playwright. As a result, we often think

that the creativity in these domains originates with the solitary creator of the score or the script.

Also in European performance, each performance is managed by a single autocratic individual—

the theater director or the musical conductor. Thus it is relatively easy to analyze those genres of

performance by focusing on the creative individual, and when psychologists study performance

creativity, they usually focus on these European genres.

However, apart from European performance traditions, most of the world’s performance

genres are improvisational. Most of them do not have a tradition of notation—that is, they are
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oral cultures; and most of them do not have individuals equivalent to a “composer” or

“playwright”—the creativity rests with the performers (Sawyer, 1997a). In this situation, the

creativity of the performance itself plays as large a role as the creativity that led to the structures

that pre-exist the performance—the tradition or genre, or the song that is being performed. And

in oral cultures, genres and songs themselves are collectively created, emerging over historical

time (Sawyer, 1999, 2001b).

The psychology of creativity, if limited to the study of individual cognitive processes,

cannot explain collaborative emergence. In Chapter 3, I argue that the dramatic frame must be

treated as a distinct level of analysis, irreducible to participant’s mental representations or

orientations towards it. Perhaps psychologists have not attempted to study improvisational

performance because the emergent processes of improvised, unscripted, undirected performance

are hard to explain using the reductionist individualist methods of psychology.

If the emergent frame is an independent, irreducible level of analysis, there are several

implications for how we study the creativity of individual participants. Where does the actor’s

creativity come into the picture? What role does individual creativity play, and what are the

constraints on individual creativity? What is the balance between individual creativity and group

collaborative processes? Because this book’s focus is on emergent social processes, my unit of

analysis is not the individual, but is the emergent dramatic frame and the dialogue among the

actors. I do not analyze individual actor’s mental processes or personalities. Such psychological

study would be a valuable complement to this one; however, this study, by demonstrating that

collaborative creativity cannot be reduced to the psychological study of individual participants,

demonstrates that psychology can provide only a partial explanation of group improvisation.

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

In Chapter 2, I describe Chicago improv theater. There are many excellent source books

written for practicing actors and directors; I draw on these and other sources to show that improv
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is a historically- and culturally-located phenomenon, and I take an ethnographic approach in

describing the many sub-genres of improvisation. I identify some historical influences that have

not been noted by past scholars of Chicago improv, and I describe similarities across sub-genres

that have not been elaborated.

Chapters 3 and 4 are the most theoretical portions of the book. In Chapter 3, I critically

review two traditions of conversation research: conversation analysis and the ethnography of

speaking. I argue that both of these fields have inadequately theorized the frame. Consequently,

although these researchers sometimes speak of conversational emergence, their theory of

emergence is incomplete. To resolve these problems, I draw on sociological theories of

emergence. In Chapter 4, I present my theory of collaborative emergence, drawing heavily on

Silverstein’s theory of metapragmatics.

In Chapter 5, I describe the ethnotheory of the Chicago improvisational theater

community: their explicit norms and beliefs about how improvisational dialogue works. This

chapter draws on my ethnographic observations of performances, rehearsals, and classes; I also

draw on a large number of “how to” books written for actors and directors. Throughout this

chapter, I interpret the ethnotheory using the theory of collaborative emergence of Chapter 4.

Collaborative emergence provides insight into the regularities and internal logic of these explicit

norms.

Chapters 6 through 8 are close empirical studies of improvised dialogues, moving roughly

from the shortest to the longest genres of performance. Each of the chapters contains empirical

validations of the theoretical framework of Chapter 4.

Chapter 6 is an analysis of the shortest theater performances, the freeze games, which

contain an average of less than five turns of dialogue. These analyses flesh out the definition of

the dramatic frame: What information is in the frame? What information do actors propose first

and most often? I analyze the metapragmatic strategies that actors use to create the frame so
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quickly. Many of these differ from everyday conversation in subtle ways predicted by the theory.

I also show downward causal effects of the emergent dramatic frame.

Chapter 7 is a comparative study of different games. There are almost 100 different

games—sets of explicit rules and constraints—that improv ensembles use to structure an

improvisation. These have many implications for the study of framing and context in

conversation, because each game fixes a different set of frame properties while forcing others to

be collaboratively improvised; for example, by asking the audience to suggest a location for the

action, or a relationship for the two primary characters. Some of the games tease apart functional

interactional roles that are typically coincident in everyday conversation; for example, in the

Dubbing Game, the two actors on stage do not speak, but instead their lines of dialogue are

spoken by two “voicing” actors that stand out of sight at the side of the stage, while the on-stage

actors silently move their lips and physically interact. I consider a broad range of such games, and

discuss the implications of these unusual dialogues for studies of conversation more generally.

Chapter 8 is an extended study of two long form improvisations: fully-improvised plays

that are typically one hour in length. As I show in Chapter 2, there are a wide range of explicit

formats that ensembles use to help construct such extended performances; I have chosen to focus

on two that contrast in a particularly interesting way, given the theory of Chapter 4. This chapter

contains a broad range of data that support each of the predictions of the theoretical model.

In the conclusion, Chapter 9, I argue that the findings in chapters 5 through 8 support the

theory proposed in Chapter 4. I then draw out the implications for studies of conversation and

verbal performance more generally. These findings demonstrate the benefit of methodologically

collectivist analyses of the interactional frame, and of an analytically dualist stance that considers

the dialectic processes of collaborative emergence: how the interactional frame emerges from the

discursive actions of actors in individual turns, and how the interactional frame, once emerged,

constrains and enables discursive actions in specific turns. In sum, I clarify several undertheorized
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elements of contemporary conversation research, and at the same time, I propose and demonstrate

a methodology that can be used for their study. Along the way, I think we’ll have a lot of fun with

these improvised dialogues.

 1
I make this claim based on searches of the ISI database “Web of Science” (1988-2000, SSCI,

SCI expanded, and A&HCI) and the Library of Congress OCLC database, in September, 2001.

Perhaps the most important aspect of theater is dialogue; yet surprisingly, conversation research

and theater scholarship have only occasionally intersected. A few scholars have used methods from the

scientific study of conversation to analyze scripted theater dialogues (Burton, 1980; Herman, 1995;

Issacharoff, 1985/1989), but scripts are not improvised and scripted dialogue provides only “the illusion

of real-life conversation” (Herman, 1995, p. 6). Realizing this problem, in the 1980s and 1990s some

drama educators began to use the methods of conversation analysis as a form of actor training (Hopper,

1993; Stucky, 1988, 1993). In this genre of “natural performance,” actors transcribe the overlaps and

pauses of naturally occurring speech, rehearse the exact reproduction of the dialogue while using the

transcript and the original audiotape, and then perform the dialogues on stage.
2
Throughout the book, all actor names have been changed to protect the privacy of the actors.