Longform Improvisation: an adapting secular ritual

Introduction

            In this article, I will be analyzing Long Form Improvised Theater performances through a lens of ritual.  Improvisational Theater is a theatric performance whose textual, subtextual, and contextual material is generated spontaneously by an actor or actors. This performance setting is fertile ground for the application and exploration of theories focused on performance, ritual, and humor.  Long Form Improvisational Theater takes a single or several suggestions at the beginning of a show and uses these to begin, influence, and shape a series of interrelated improvised scenes, characters and narratives.  The concerns of this research focus on what this spectacle does for its audience, how the actors present and shape the spectacle spontaneously, and what linkage or exchange occurs between these two collectives through the process of improvising the show.  Within these concerns are questions on what sort of themes, contexts, and symbols are dealt with in shows, What sorts of things are the audience connecting/reacting to, how does the audience’s connection, reaction and contribution influence the actors and the action, and what do the actors use, do, or say to entertain or otherwise ‘get’ and/or ‘keep’ their audience? 

In the field of anthropology, performance has been utilized as a framing device for analysis since Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).  Victor Turner continued down the road of culture as performance with his introduction of the phases of ‘Social Drama’ in The Anthropology of Performance(1986), along with his discussion of “liminoid” events such as concerts and theater performances.  Liminoid is a softening of the term “liminal”, which is often defined by Turner’s phrase “betwixt and between”.  The liminal is the time and space in between segments of regular existence wherein social norms are often breeched, discarded, or inverted (Turner 1986).  Liminal states are most often associated with rituals.  Turner introduced ‘liminoid’ in order to widen its explanatory power to events that were not obligatory or necessarily sacred to the participants (Turner 1986).  In improvised theater, the liminoid space is bordered by the offering and acceptance of a suggestion at the beginning and the lights going off or the performers calling an end to the piece in some other manner.

          Turner (1982) offers another important theoretical component to this type of spectacle, and that is his notion of ‘communitas’.  Communitas is a state of conceptual, emotional and social unity that arises from a collaboratively constructed event like a ritual or performance (Turner 1982).  It is clear from much of the prior research on improvisational theater that this state is experienced by performers in an improvisation, or a state very similar (Coleman 1990, Halpern et al. 1994, Sweet 1996).  One of the questions this brings up is how this state reads out to and/or affects the audience?  If the actors engage in an improvisation that excites their collective focus to a state of communitas, does this translate to a similar ‘uplifting’ experience for the audience wherein they forget the real context they are in and “fuse” with the context of the show (Alexander 2004)?  Of course, it could also just simply lead to a higher degree of meaningful comedy for the audience.  Nevertheless, communitas is an important component in regards to the fulfillment and satisfaction of the performers; it is their “high” (Coleman 1990, Halpern et al. 1994, Sweet 1996).

            This is similar in tone to the Kaluli séances discussed by Schieffelin (1985).  In his article “Performance and the cultural construction of reality”, Schieffelin analyzes ritual séances as performances (1985).  Through his analyses, some similarities between an improvised theater performance and a séance can be seen.  The first similarity comes in the form of the ad hoc construction of narratives with a blend of familiar, archetypical and unfamiliar characters which are based in the experiential world of the participants.  The second similarity lies in the dialogical participation of the kegel, or chorus, in interacting with the “spirits” channeled through the medium (Schieffelin 1985).  This interaction is corollary to how an ensemble of improv actors collaborates during an improvisation in a sort of call and response manner with another performer.   A third similarity lies in the fact that they both “articulate everyday and cosmological realities”. 

          However, these can only be interpreted as structural or semantic similarities and not one for one analogs because of the difference in illocutionary force between the two along with the drastically different social-cultural contexts of the improvised show and the Kaluli séance.  The differences between the two situations are vast in regards to the affective purpose of each.  For instance, the Kaluli call séances, which are attended by the community, for healing the sick and finding pigs (Schieffelin 1985), and improvised theater performances promise nothing more than entertainment for those who choose to attend.  Also, improvised theater performances are not led by a single shaman leader in the sense that a séance is.

          There are more comparisons to be made in the analysis of improvised theater.  Schieffelin’s account of the cultural construction of reality is one of the more fitting ethnographic situations for the comparison.  These comparisons will be made to an improvised performance in Portland, Oregon by a group called “The Liberators”.  The cast is comprised of three men and two women with varying degrees of experience and a variety of personal backgrounds.  They proclaim on their website that they “have come together to liberate all beings from suffering with many, many hilarious comedy words and gestures (Liberators website 2007).”  Of course this proclamation can be taken as either a comic commentary on Buddhist thought or a sincere undertaking by artists.  It can be compared to the assertions of the Wana shamans of Indonesia in maintaining their reputations (Atkinson 1987).  The shamans that Atkinson describes in her article spend a lot of time and energy in the maintenance of their reputations as heroes/patrons with powerful magic in order for the community to feel somehow indebted to them for being who they are (1987).

The Improvised Performance

            On the night I observed The Liberators’ show, the audience was comprised of students of improv theater, other performers, friends/colleagues of the performers, and a few newcomers.  It took place in what is normally a venue for music, Mississippi Studios, in a section of Portland that is in the midst of being gentrified.  Upon entering, one is situated at the rear of the performance space with a box office window on the left and a raised bar to the right that serves beverages, snacks, and alcohol.  The walls of this entry area are adorned with numerous band photos signed by the artists.  Then one passes under an archway to enter the seating area.  The seating is divided into an upper area with three rows of seats that overlook the lower floor level area, which is accessed by a stairwell to the right of the upper seats.  The stage space itself is nothing more than several wooden risers pushed together and covered with area rugs.  It is approximately eight feet deep, fifteen feet wide, and six inches high.

          It was a Sunday evening, and I arrived early to make contact with the performers and set up to roam the audience in order to perform informal interviews.  I was greeted by two volunteers who were prepping for the show.  They allowed me in, and the house was empty save for the two volunteers and the five performers who were doing improvised scenes to get themselves warmed up.  The lead actor spotted me as their warm-up closed, and he announced to the cast that I’ll be there to interview them after the show.  I briefly greeted and talked with all of the actors and fielded questions as to the specifics of my visit.  The women lingered and showed more interest in my presence than the men.  All of the actors seemed jocular and bounced in and out of feigned challenges and character voices.

          This ‘practice joking’ is an indicator of behavior that helps one to develop and enhance one’s humor, but the other key point in developing humor is sensitivity to both the positive and negative feedback of one’s audience (Dewitte & Verguts 2001).  This also correlates to the sort of feedback relationship described by Schieffelin:

"…during the performance, the medium may form an assessment about the patient’s condition and gear the level of success of his invisible curing efforts to correspond with his notion of the most probable outcome.  In this way if he thinks the patient will not recover, he will have difficulty in locating the dismembered legs or find the patient’s wild-pig soul so injured that it can barely crawl when released from the spirit trap" (1985).

          The actors utilize a similar process in shaping their own performance as well as the arc of their show.  They gauge the reactions of the audience throughout the performance as a guide to what is important and should be explored more in the show.  In both performances, the shaman and the improvisers utilize a reflective process of call and response between the performance and the reactions and desires of the audience; the desires that are expressed in the suggestions, the suggestions being the element that a participant/audience member wanted to have explored or laughed about.  In the Kaluli séance, the desires are steeped in the questions and in the purpose of calling for the ritual (Schieffelin 1985).

          One performer noted that “If I feel like we don’t have the audience…I start thinking ‘What can I do that can win them over?’”, and another performer states that “if we can get [the audience] started then keeping them going is very easy, but if we don’t feel like we’ve gotten them started then we keep going back to it and trying to get them moving.  But once they are rolling, then they really give a lot back to us onstage (Personal Communication 2007).”  These were revealing statements when held up to some of Schieffelin’s discussion about ‘performance unity and integrity’:

"One of the most important skills was the ability of the medium to control the focus of everyone’s attention and maintain the right unity of mood throughout the performance…It is through the people’s participation…that their divided attention is brought together and focused, and it is through the content of the songs that the mood of pathos and nostalgia appropriate to speaking with the spirits of the dead (or of the land) can be evoked and intensified" (1985).

This ‘mood of pathos’ is important to note in regards to the movement of this improvised show, as there were certain characters who elicited a sense of pathos in their function onstage in particular scenes, which will be discussed below. 

             To step back to before the show, the audience filtered in over a half an hour.  As I was situating the cast’s camera and mine, the club owner, who I am acquainted with, approached me to ask what I was up to.  I revealed that I was there as an anthropologist. This led to an interesting discussion that centered on a comparison between jazz and improvised theater.  He contradicted me saying, “I don’t see the comparison.  Musicians can be hogs and grand-standers that steal the show or go into a solo way too long.  You guys have these rules of saying ‘yes’ to each other and trying to make each other look good, and stuff like that.  Jazz musicians don’t generally care about, or even know about, that kind of stuff (Personal communication 2007).”  From personal experience, I knew that the same could be true of improv performers, but I was willing to concede that Jazz performers don’t have a systematic set of performance rules (nor do they elicit suggestions from the audience).  Rather, musicians engage in a language of tone, melody, rhythm, and harmony.  However, I would be willing to say that improvisers communicate in a language of theatricality and performance in the spirit of kinesis, or “breaking and remaking” in the words of Bhaba (1990).

            The audience filed in.  There were approximately twenty-five in attendance.  The attendees were primarily white, middle class people between the ages of 25 and 40.  A majority of them were friends of the actors, improv students, or other performers.  I was able to sit down and informally interview two young women who were there to watch one of the cast members, who was their coworker.  It turned out that they had seen this ensemble a few times before.  “We like these guys the best.  We’ve seen other shows that [female performer] has been in.  Some other improv groups aren’t as good.  You go to see them and it’s not really clear what their goal is…or, I don’t know, they don’t bring stuff back.  These guys bring stuff like characters and stories back, and it just gets so much funnier.”  When asked why they thought people come to see improv shows like this, one of them replied “…I think that it’s because of the serotonin that gets released when you laugh.”  If that were the case, then why isn’t every improvisation show sold out?  However, their comments about the skill and ability of the cast to engage them personally support the comparison between Schieffelin’s Kaluli mediums and improv performers.  The efficacy of each performance instance resides in the performer’s ability to engage their viewers and continue the momentum through interesting narratives that have facets that depart and return, as well as familiar, unfamiliar and peculiar characters.   

            The show began with a spoken word piece by an NPR radio show host that focused on a memory of bicycling.  This was followed by a film that the performers had produced about a bike that could jump back and forth through time.  Then the improv show began.  After an intro and an ovation, one of the performers stepped forward and asked “What is something worth singing about?”  This was followed by random shouts of “springtime”, “Bicycles”, “Love”, and “Sex”.  The performer who asked the question issued the statement “I heard ‘bicycles’, ‘love’ and ‘sex’.  We’re going to go with those.”, and the first act began.  These are interesting offerings.  “Love” and “Sex” are very loaded symbolic words, as is “Bicycles” considering the context of Portland Oregon (a bicyclist’s paradise in many ways).  These could be viewed as “elaborating symbols” according to Sherry Ortner (1972).  She describes elaborating symbols as “valued as a source of categories for conceptualizing the order of the world. Or they may have primarily action elaborating power; that is, they are valued as implying mechanisms for successful social action (1972).”  Love and sex may be considered key symbols because of “their recurrence in cultural behavior or cultural symbolic systems (Ortner 1972).”  Survey data from a broad base of performers suggests that offerings like these are preferred for their ‘loaded’ nature.  These types of suggestions give performers a lot of options to explore without being too vague.

            The first scene began with a male actor posing as a boisterous, raspy, cigar-smoking father assisting a female actor, his younger daughter, with her bike repairs in preparation for a race.  The actor playing the father is short with a shaved head and a cropped graying goatee.  The actor playing the daughter is athletic with long blond wavy hair and glasses.  Another male actor mimed riding in on a bike and proclaims “Dad…Suzy…I just had sex.”  The actor playing the father doubles over and begins gasping and choking in a very guttural surprised manner.  The actor playing Suzy exclaims with exasperated squeals.  This is met with peals of laughter from the crowd.  The father ends up praising his son for his experience.  Another female actor enters posing as the mother and wife.  When queried by the wife about what is going on, the father exclaims in a crass manner “Mickey [the son] fucked somebody!”  This is followed by a surprised disturbed gasp from the mother, as well as more laughter from the crowd.  Another male actor enters as ‘the friend who always stays for dinner’, and he begins to discreetly display an emotional relationship with Suzy by offering to help fix her bike for the race while engaging in meaningful eye-contact.  This is interrupted by another announcement of Mickey’s accomplishment to the newcomer to the scene.  Mickey confesses that he wanted to “pull out and run away when it first happened.”  This too is followed by peals of laughter.  It should be noted that the actor playing Mickey is short and slender with an extremely youthful appearance.  He could pass as an adolescent, which heightens the reality of the fictional context.  The father positions himself between “Skinny Dave” and Suzy while miming the repair of her bike.  At this point, the entire cast is onstage and involved in the scene.  When pressed by Suzy to let Skinny Dave help her with her bike, the father, while looking menacingly at Skinny Dave, crudely states that he wants her to win the race but he “doesn’t want anything in her tonight”.  Once again, the audience erupts in laughter.  At that point the actors scatter and a couple of them come back to begin another scene.

            In this first scene, we see elements of family structure, gender roles, social appropriateness (or inappropriateness), competition, and courtship just to name a few.  Some of the primary values offered at the opening of this act are that of the pride surrounding male sexual accomplishment and, on the other end of the spectrum, female astonishment at the discussion of sex, and finally the control of female sexuality by a patriarch.  Much of the laughter came at junctures where inversions and transgressions of social norms occurred (instances where normally this behavior would illicit a high degree of social tension).  These inversions and transgressions not only allow the audience a vicarious crossing of the lines, but also help to comment on or define the appropriateness of what is being inverted, implicit social rules of discretion regarding sex and relationships.  It is also interesting to note that the theme of family falls well under both of the elaborating symbols of love and sex.  This element was not suggested.  It was asserted by the performers, and it tied the audience’s offerings together well.

            This creation of tension is a significant component in each instance where laughter erupted.  “…it is this tension that the séance must pick up and deal with, if it is to have an effect – and in the process become real (Schieffelin 1985).”  This creation of tension was also very much in the minds of the performers.  One of them offered “(first performer) I could see a big difference between the scenes that had the ‘urgency’ and didn’t have the ‘urgency’ as far as being fun and dynamic”, and when I asked for a clarification of what they meant by ‘urgency’, the reply was “(second performer) a sense of crisis, high stakes right at the beginning…uh…like, this is what we’re feeling ‘right now’ very strongly instead of, like, ‘let’s figure out how we feel’ (another performer) or ‘let’s have a discussion about something’, (first performer) and hopefully our feelings will arise from that.”  This focus on feeling states is very instructive of what sorts of imagery are key in involving spectators through depictions of emotionally intense social scenarios.

"Complex social concepts such as love and anger fall within the realm of imagery in several ways: They evoke basic feeling states, which we take to be inherent aspects of imagery.  They are usually expressed in terms of metaphorical imagery, as in the unity of love or the heat and pressure of anger.  And they incorporate social scripts, which themselves consist of abstract social imagery" (Palmer & Jankowiak 1996)

These image elements were present in the scene I described.  We had the surly father coming in between a developing affection, a young man experiencing his first time with a woman, another young man trying to get close to a young woman, as well as a husband-wife/father-mother and their confident familiar relationship.

            Also, if we look at the exchange of the performers in the previous paragraph we see that the performers seem to be finishing each others’ thoughts and building on each others’ ideas to get to a complete answer to the question.  Considering that this interview was done while the performers were still relatively ‘hot’ from the stage, it does seem to suggest that a sort of ‘communitas’ is in fact in effect.  There was almost no hesitation between the phrase of one performer and that of the next in answering the question suggesting a unity of thought and action amongst the performers.  However, one instance of this occurrence is not enough to prove anything more than anecdotally.

            We must also look at the humor and joking at this performance, especially since these elements are central to this form of performance.  This is the explicit outcome assumed by the performers and the audience, that this show will be comic in nature.  Considering the demographic of this particular audience, improvisational theater may be a way to foster a joking culture.  It may do this more than stand up comedy because of the ethics of collaboration and cooperation which are so central to its practice.

            Fine & De Soucey (2005), in their article on “Joking Cultures”, describe joking as being embedded, interactive, and referential.  It is embedded by way of being part of an ongoing relationship between the joker and the audience (Fine & De Soucey 2005).  It must be clear to the audience that these people onstage are ‘jokers’ because:

"It provides the potential for role distancing, so that the joker, by virtue of the trust established by the embedded relationship, achieves considerable role distance.  This allows the speaker to say things that he or she 'doesn’t’ really mean,' separating him or herself from the jocular remarks as a 'true' belief, denying it implicitly and as a matter of course" (Fine & De Soucey 2005, Sacks 1978).

This embeddedness was definitely a part of this performance considering the demographics of the audience.  Considering some of the commentary of the actors, this role-distancing would be essential to maintaining an atmosphere of good fellowship.

             Joking is interactive because it is part of an ongoing relationship and demands a response from other group members (Fine & De Soucey 2005).  Joking is also temporally immediate, and calls for audience involvement; the absence of a response becomes a judgment on the teller and/or the remark (Sacks 1974, Norrick 1993).  This element could be construed as the juncture where performers assess the success of there improvisations and choose their next move based on the presence/absence of a response.  It also may be why less experienced improvisers depend so highly on laughter as the sole measure of a shows success and will stop at nothing to achieve laughter at times, and more experienced improvisers seem less concerned with creating an atmosphere of constant laughter.  These facets of improviser development come from my own experience with performers.

            Finally, joking is referential in that it presumes that the performers and audience share references by which they make sense of the implicit meanings of the jocular interaction (Fine & De Soucey 2005).  Mary Douglas (1968) suggests that the decoding of the humorous metaphor is a decoding of the meaning structure of the social system in which it is embedded.  In the example scene above, the humor is steeped in familiar realms of family and love relationships along with memories of initial sexual experiences.  Presumably, most people attending would share these references to some degree.

            The reason for outlining these elements is to help establish how Fine & De Soucey’s (2005) work on “Joking Cultures” fits well with the longer ranging effects of an improvisational show in uniting an audience with the performers in a sort of temporally fixed micro ‘joking culture’ that emerges from a single show.  Since each show is unique to a large degree in that it is not based on any sort of prior plan or script, this leaves room for the audience to feel more like this is a one time experience that is for everyone who is there.  The humor, narratives, and characters may take on a greater meaning because of this notion of impermanence in the performance; that when the show is done only those present will know the references and interactions that were meaningful and why.  Fine & De Soucey state that:

"Five elements together affect the creation and continuation of themes within joking cultures: the items need to be known, usable, functional, appropriate in light of the group’s status hierarchy, and triggered by some collectively experienced event" (2005).

             The performance itself could serve as the ‘collectively experienced event’, and the contents of the show become the known, usable, and functional items.  The appropriateness of the group’s status hierarchy becomes a bit more nebulous in application.  Although in my own experience as a performer, I can attest to the fact of being approached and talked to as a friend by someone who attended a performance, whether or not we are even acquainted.  Often, they open with a description of the performance they attended followed by a narrative of how they have continued to use certain phrases or ideas from the particular performance in question.  This has happened frequently enough as to bear mentioning in relation to the discussion of joking culture.  This phenomenon suggests that through the performance an audience is made to feel like they are on the inside of the show because of these shared elements that were discovered more or less simultaneously with the performers.

            However, it does not fit entirely with Fine & De Soucey’s conception of a joking culture because it does not follow with the notion of group regulation.

"The process of group regulation through a joking culture includes the following effects: 1) smoothing interaction, creating an interactional focus, 2) sharing a collective identity through cohesion, 3) separating the group from others by drawing boundaries, and 4) securing appropriate action by means of informal social control" (2005).

             It may follow that these things play out in the audience and performers as discreet groups, but it only unites the performers and audience in a more cursory manner where only effects 1, 2, and 3 apply.  The fourth effect may only be appropriately applied to a group with more long-term intimate social bonds like a group of friends or colleagues who attend or perform a show together, which I have seen and heard about in my own experience.  This element of creating a joking culture with improvisation may also be a large part of why corporations are paying money for team-building workshops taught by improvisers and improv troupes.

Discussion

            As we can see in the few examples above, there is quite a bit to unpack in long form improvisational theater.  It appears from this one example that this sort of performance may be situated in the community of the performers more so than the community at large considering the demographic of this audience.  However, much more surveying needs to be done to establish this as a trend, let alone a pattern.  One thing does seem clear, and that is that an audience for this type of performance is interested in seeing an exploration of narratives and characters involving social and relational tension in one form or another, both positive and negative.  It is suggested by Palmer & Jankowiak that:

             Collectively performed images may be presented as ritual, theatrical, or aesthetic commentaries on other domains of culture.  Participants see or imagine the larger image in the collective performance, and they see themselves within that performance as actors, as conceptual products of its enactment, and as the targets of cultural commentary fashioned by performance (1996).

             In the case of this performance, the audience may not just be seeing themselves as the characters in the narratives, but, in the case of the other performers and students, they may also be engaged in a vicarious experience of being a performer doing an improvisation.

            Considering this adds another level to the entire event.  As the performers explore, depict, construct, and lampoon various social and cultural phenomena with their performance, they are also modeling the rules and structures that govern the process of theatric improvisation.  So as the lay audience, uninitiated into the codified rules of improvised performance, is enjoying and engaging in the explicit social and cultural messages being constructed and deconstructed through the process of the performance, the improv students and other performers may be engaging vicariously in the performance at a different level.  For them, the performance is not only descriptive but also instructive.  This is not to say that it is not instructive to a lay audience, but for the uninitiated, the instruction is on a level of situated social and cultural mores for the cultural and/or social backdrop that the improvisational performance is set in.  For those audience members who have been versed in the ‘ways’ of the improviser, this performance holds a value in modeling the success and difficulties of long form improvisational theater.  For those who have not, the performance holds a value in the vicarious exploration of the dangerous, torrid, passionate, and surprising realm of the “breaking and remaking” of social and cultural norms through the improvised performance.  Through the performance, a tenuous communitas is achieved between performers and audience through the creation of a situated set of references and experiences that were shared through the collective construction of this event via suggestions, reactions, and interactions.

Works Cited

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