The Applied Improvisation Mindset: Tools for Transforming Organizations and Communities 9781350143616, 9781350143609, 9781350143647, 9781350143630

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure
PART ONE Developing the Leaders We Need
1 Improv Is the Gym: Presentation Skills and Beyondat H4B’s Catapult College Kat Koppett
2 The Business School Collaboration Lab: TurningLeader Development into a Rigorous Experiment inCreative Collaboration Pamela Burke
3 Developing Strategic, Action-Oriented, and MindfulLeaders Petro Janse van Vuuren
PART TWO Developing the Youth We Need
4 The Improv Project’s Detroit Yes, And Peter Felsman and Tiger Veenstra
5 Spontaneity in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy:Valuing the “In-between” and “After” of AppliedImprovisation Moriah Flagler
6 “Of Course We Improvise!” What the BestTeachers Do (and How They Do It) Nick Sorensen
PART THREE Developing the Communities We Need
7 Trips to No-Mistakes-Land: Improvisation as aMeta-Skill for Doctoral Students Gunter Lösel
8 Transforming the Culture of Communications inSystems Biology at Harvard Medical School Raquell Holmes and Mia Anderson
9 Playing Around with Changing the World Carrie Lobman and Marian Rich
10 The Joy of Dementi
11 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Disaster:Reimagining Learning for the Humanitarian Sector Barbara Tint and Bettina Koelle
Appendix A: Key Improvisation Tenets and Terms
Appendix B: About the Workbook and List of Exercises
About the Editors
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Applied Improvisation Mindset

RELATED TITLES Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Edited by Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure ISBN 978-1-3500-1436-7 Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre Keith Johnstone ISBN 978-1-3500-6903-9 The Improv Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Improvising in Comedy, Theatre, and Beyond Tom Salinsky and Deborah Frances-White ISBN 978-1-350-02616-2

The Applied Improvisation Mindset Tools for Transforming Organizations and Communities Edited by Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Theresa Robbins Dudeck, Caitlin McClure, and contributors, 2021 Theresa Robbins Dudeck, Caitlin McClure, and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover images: Young Woman Building Grid; Young Man Carrying Pink Bar (© Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images); Man in Tie (© Dale Dudeck) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938160 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4361-6 PB: 978-1-3501-4360-9 ePDF: 978-1-3501-4363-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-4362-3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To our moms

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CONTENTS

List of Figures  ix List of Tables  xi Acknowledgments  xii

Introduction  Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure  1

PART ONE  Developing the Leaders We Need 1 Improv Is the Gym: Presentation Skills and Beyond at H4B’s Catapult College­  23 Kat Koppett 2 The Business School Collaboration Lab: Turning Leader Development into a Rigorous Experiment in Creative Collaboration­  63 Pamela Burke 3 Developing Strategic, Action-Oriented, and Mindful Leaders  97 Petro Janse van Vuuren

PART TWO  Developing the Youth We Need 4 The Improv Project’s Detroit Yes, And  127 Peter Felsman and Tiger Veenstra

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5 Spontaneity in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Valuing the “In-between” and “After” of Applied Improvisation  153 Moriah Flagler 6 “Of Course We Improvise!” What the Best Teachers Do (and How They Do It)  179 Nick Sorensen

PART THREE  Developing the Communities We Need 7 Trips to No-Mistakes-Land: Improvisation as a Meta-Skill for Doctoral Students  207 Gunter Lösel 8 Transforming the Culture of Communications in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School  229 Raquell Holmes and Mia Anderson 9 Playing Around with Changing the World  245 Carrie Lobman and Marian Rich 10 The Joy of Dementia  265 Mary Fridley and Susan Massad 11 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Disaster: Reimagining Learning for the Humanitarian Sector  281 Barbara Tint and Bettina Koelle Appendix A:  Key Improvisation Tenets and Terms  301 Appendix B:  About the Workbook and List of Exercises  307 About the Editors  318 Bibliography  319 Index  331

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1

Sample archetypes according to status/connection 36 What am I listening for? 44 Leadership learning team planning 66 Performing Curiosity Bookstore 70 Constructive Debate 74 Constructive Debate setup 93 Strategic Narrative Embodiment 98 The STORI arc of change 104 Move Through, positions A and C 117 Eighth graders at Detroit Enterprise Academy create characters and adopt different points of view in two-person scenes  129

4.2 4.3

The Improv Project students perform at Detroit’s Marlene Boll Theater for the 2019 student showcase  132 Students from Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit join teaching artists in a game of Eyewitness Story, and break news that moth people are invading Detroit’s

5.1

Belle Isle  144 Students drawing what they experienced during

5.2

“Tour of a Space”  162 “Vengo de la tierra seca de Tijuana, Mexico” (I come from the dry earth of Tijuana, Mexico)  164

5.3

Digital story screening in the school library 170

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LIST OF FIGURES

Theoretical framework showing the dimensions of teacher expertise 184

6.2

The four skills of improvisational teaching 188

6.3

Participants creating a visual dialogue 192

7.1

Gunter Lösel and Nicole Erichsen 209

8.1

Harvard Professional Presentations Workshop 236

9.1 The joy of ensemble 257 10.1 The Joy of Dementia workshop with hospice workers in New Hampshire 268 10.2 The Joy of Dementia participants in Boston  271 11.1 Applied Improvisation and Forum Theatre at the BRACED annual learning event in Dakar, Senegal, 2016 285 11.2 Participate! MOOC virtual training course 289 11.3 Energizing the humanitarian sector: AIN and RCCC partners in a joint drumming and dancing session at the BRACED annual learning event in Dakar (Senegal), 2016 295

LIST OF TABLES

1.1 Using high-/low-status guide 34 1.2 Playing your instrument 37 1.3 Story Spine prompts and examples 39 1.4 Playing your instrument in virtual space 52 3.1 First-, second-, and third-wave mindfulness business practices and their potential characteristics 102 6.1 The “Call and Response” strategies observed in Anne’s lessons 193

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The pandemic, on top of everything else that transpired as we brought this book to completion, distorted our sense of time. Days blended together—simultaneously we had too much and not enough time—and our internal clocks needed constant winding. Working on this book sometimes felt like a gift and, at other moments, a slog. It was during those “other moments” that our appreciation increased tenfold for the support of our families, friends, and colleagues. In particular, we are grateful to those who provided editorial assistance and thoughtful feedback at various points along the journey: Lacy Alana, Lisa DiDonato Brousseau, Tyson Hewitt, Sara Freeman, Daniel Knutson-Bradac, Teresa Norton, Mary Jane Pories, Barbara Scott, Patrick Short, Jacqueline A. Viskup, Jude Treder-Wolff, and the Improv Playdate ladies of Portland. Thank you also to Methuen Drama and Bloomsbury, especially to Mark Dudgeon and Lara Bateman, for their unwavering commitment to this project, helpful suggestions, and polite nudges. To our husbands, Dale Dudeck and Paul Rátz de Tagyos, keeping our clocks wound would’ve been more difficult without your constant companionship and love. Finally, to our teacher Keith Johnstone, who reminded us to “just be average,” advice that magically dissolved fear and made the creative process flow with more ease and joy.

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Introduction Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure

This second collection of Applied Improvisation (AI) stories and strategies reveals how this expanding field of theory and practice is profoundly changing how we develop leaders, reimagine communities, and engage youth, the three not being mutually exclusive. The authors of this book are professors, scientists, therapists, consultants, and performers applying the tools and theories of improvisation beyond the theatre in classrooms around the world. Unique to this second collection is how these facilitators unpack and define, in the context of their classroom setting, the improvisational mindset.1 Then they show us, in myriad ways, how adopting this particular mindset opens us all up to the emergent, generative ways of being in this world and interacting with others. It is not necessary to have read the first book to appreciate this second collection—they are companion pieces and inform each other. The first collection introduced readers to the depth and breadth of the field of AI, and focused heavily on its tools, skills,

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and theories. With that as a foundation, we felt ambitious enough to delve into the less tangible aspect of what it means to approach the world with an AI mindset. How does the practice of improvisation become the lens through which you view the world? What effect does it have? Can you impart this mindset to others? We know an improvisational mindset can be developed through improvisational practice; however, for the mindset to serve beyond the theatre stage and rehearsal room, and especially in moments of disruption and change, we must nurture what Improbable’s artistic directors, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson, in the foreword to our first AI book, called “metaskills.” They defined these metaskills as “attitudes and sensitivities that inform how we use the technical skills.” The first metaskill McDermott and Simpson called for was “an ability to be comfortable with uncertainty and ‘not knowing’” (xiv). Ellen Langer, the first female professor to gain tenure in the Psychology Department at Harvard University, takes it further: “Things are all the while changing. Rather than the illusion of stability, exploit the power of uncertainty” (2020). Exploiting the power of uncertainty is what the best improvisers do, and they do it joyfully. Because they have been honing their practice of impro and have developed this mindset, they can go onstage with absolutely nothing preplanned and use whatever is present to collaboratively create a new story.2 We believe this collection shows, undeniably, that adopting an improvisational mindset beyond the stage encourages us to engage all uncertainties as opportunities to transform.

What Does It Mean to Have an “Applied Improvisation Mindset”? In the first book of case studies, we defined AI as: “The umbrella term widely used to denote the application of theatre improvisation (theories, tenets, games, techniques, and exercises) beyond conventional theatre spaces to foster the growth and/or development of flexible structures, new mindsets, and a range of inter- and intrapersonal skills required in today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world” (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 1). We would like to add two new concepts to our AI field of research and practice: “improvisation mindset” and “applied

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improvisation mindset.” These concepts have much in common but also diverge, particularly beyond the theatre stage. We asked several of our contributors and a few additional AI facilitators we often work with to answer these questions: What does having an “improvisational mindset” mean to you? Is there a difference between an “improvisation mindset” and an “applied improvisation mindset”? Below is an amalgamation of their answers underpinned by the research of theorists and leaders we hold in high regard. But first, let’s look at the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “mindset”: An established set of attitudes, esp. regarded as typical of a particular group’s social or cultural values; the outlook, philosophy, or values of a person; (now also more generally) frame of mind, attitude, disposition.3 Everyone has a mindset or an established set of attitudes that shapes how we see the world and affects everything we do and the choices we make in life, love, and work. Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and foremost scholar on human motivation and mindsets, posits that our mindsets fall along a spectrum between “fixed” and “growth.” People with a fixed mindset/theory believe “their qualities, such as their intelligence, are simply fixed traits” that cannot be changed through education or practice. Someone with a growth mindset or a “malleable” theory, however, believes that “their most basic qualities can be developed through their efforts and education.” Dweck’s extensive research has shown that “people with a malleable theory are more open to learning, willing to confront challenges, able to stick to difficult tasks, and capable of bouncing back from failure” (2008: 392). People with a growth mindset see this same potential in all human beings. The improvisation mindset certainly falls into Dweck’s “growth/malleable” camp. The growth mindset qualities listed above are in alignment with the basic tenets of impro: accept and build on offers, inspire others, be willing to be changed, fail forward, listen responsively, commit, be present, and so on (Appendix A). These case studies illustrate that the practice of impro can develop this mindset. Having an improvisation mindset, therefore, means approaching the world and the beings in it like a good improviser (on and

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off stage). It is having a Yes, And attitude to life—an openness to seeing everything as an offer (including setbacks and mistakes) and committing to build on those offers; a willingness to engage in responsive listening and to be altered by what you hear; embracing spontaneity, trusting and inspiring your partner, responding authentically to the present moment. It is accepting stability as an illusion, transformation as inevitable, and uncertainty as an opportunity to learn, interact, create, and take action. This mindset is not some rosy, saccharine, unattainable vision of the world, but instead a hard-won, intentional choice to live life according to commonly held impro tenets, many of which go against the grain of what’s expected of us in society (e.g., treat mistakes like gifts). For many improvisers, adopting this mindset took years of work. Each impro game or scene puts our social interactions under a microscope—we engage with others, intending to make them look good or be altered by what our scene partner did, only to observe ourselves falling back into old, socialized habits and doing the exact opposite. This disconnect (between intention and action) causes self-reflection, followed by trying again in the next game or scene. Through this cyclical process, improvisers become consciously aware of the tacit beliefs—often not constructive and frequently limiting—that we hold about ourselves, others, and society; then we consciously choose to embrace a new set of principles to guide our actions. Approaching life with an improvisation mindset is as much about what we do not do as it is about what we do. An improvisation mindset is shared by all the contributors in this book. They also share an “applied” improvisation mindset. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “applied” (for our purposes) as follows: 3.a. Put to practical use; practical ….; b. Designating a discipline, or that part of a subject, concerned with the use of specialist or theoretical knowledge in practical or functional contexts, as applied biology, applied chemistry, applied economics, applied kinesiology, etc. Also: designating an expert in or practitioner of such a subject.4 As we proffer in the introduction to the first book, the tools of improvisation that we use in our AI practice are rooted in theatre improvisation and grounded in theory extracted from disciplines

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as diverse as sociology, social psychology, anthropology, neurology, kinesiology, ethology, philosophy, and so on. AI exists thanks to the pioneering improvisational work of Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone, as well as countless other teachers who have built this AI field and generously shared their discoveries. Johnstone’s work, in particular, has had a profound impact on the AI field because his teachings and writings provide students with a critical and theoretical understanding of why his games, exercises, and techniques exist, each one a tool created to address a specific problem.5 And we come full circle with Spolin, whose foundational theatre games were originally used to help immigrant children, newly arrived in the United States, to collaborate and unleash creative self-expression, to not only serve theatrical purposes but also build community across ethnic barriers. Having an AI mindset enables us to imagine how any community or organization might tackle problems and meet goals using the tools of improvisation. An AI mindset holds all the attitudes of the improvisation mindset plus a heightened awareness of the synergistic connection between improvisation and other disciplines to promote new forms of intelligence (e.g., social, emotional, bodily kinesthetic, inter- and intrapersonal). Having an AI mindset also means having a desire to find analogies between the theories that traditionally underpin our improvisational practice and the foundational theories that support practice in other fields. AI facilitators often validate, reinforce, and/or augment what they do (in theory and practice) with data from strategic management, organizational development, creativity, and/or pedagogical studies (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 4–5). For the AI facilitators in this book, it is not enough to simply provide a creative, theatrical experience for their participants. They are considered specialists because they strategically design learning experiences to address specific objectives (e.g., to help leaders give and solicit feedback or to help reduce social anxiety in students) and make explicit the benefits of an AI mindset. Furthermore, the best AI facilitators are excellent collaborators and, when they see an opportunity to bring AI to a discipline in which they are not subject matter experts, they almost always partner with an expert from that discipline who shares their passion for experiential learning and who sees the potential synergy of such a partnership. In both this book and the first, almost all of the case studies highlight this

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type of cross-pollination. Having curiosity and a passion to expand our understanding and knowledge of other disciplines so that the cross-disciplinary application of improvisation is effective and strengthens the entire AI field is one of the most important qualities of an AI mindset. Lastly, an AI mindset makes it impossible to see the world as anything but a stage and all life as a series of improvisational interactions. In the introduction to the first book, we remind readers that improvisation is for everyone, at any time in any location: “to benefit from improvisational practice, you do not need to come from theatre, or be a performer, or even an extrovert. You just have to be willing to adopt a set of improvisation tenets” (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 5) such as those found in Appendix A. But to possess an AI mindset we must be consciously aware of the performances we find ourselves in every minute of every day, have the ability to decode this coded behavior, and a desire to disrupt and change patterns of behavior that are not serving us. Practicing intentional awareness of self and self in relation to others can help us develop what Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis (2008) call social intelligence: “a set of interpersonal competencies built on specific neural circuits (and related endocrine systems) that inspire others to be effective.” It is a kind of intelligence that can be developed if you are willing to assess and change behavior patterns through daily intentional practice. “Because behavior creates and develops neural networks, we are not necessarily prisoners of our genes.” In other words, as Dweck proposed with the growth mindset theory, our brains are malleable and we can rewire them if we are willing to put in the effort. In summary, people with an AI mindset possess a growth mindset, an improvisation mindset, and social intelligence. They have a strong desire for collaboration, experiential learning, and for cross-pollinating data to make the translation/application of impro to other areas of endeavor more effective. We frequently equate AI facilitation with what a scientist does in a laboratory. In the lab, the scientist never stops questioning the knowledge or changing the variables in the experiment. The best scientists willingly scrap their own original research in pursuit of better knowledge, better science.6 Facilitators with an AI mindset are constantly questioning and testing their methodology in the classroom and taking advantage

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of the malleability of their brains to rewire, adapt, transform, and fine-tune the interactional performances of life.

How to Apply an Improvisation Mindset to the Current Moment What a moment we find ourselves in as editors of a book of case studies on AI, a field of practice that typically involves people coming together, face-to-face, to collaboratively experience, innovate, and create. The impro community thrives on social interaction and physical expression but in the early months of 2020, Covid-19 forced many AI facilitators and impro performers around the world to shift their work to online classrooms. This shift was not easy and access was challenging for facilitators and participants alike. More often than not, the pandemic revealed the wealth of generosity emblematic of this community as colleagues learned online facilitation techniques and immediately committed time to passing that knowledge forward. That generosity notwithstanding, 2020 has also brought fear, anxiety, and depression. Many of us have been isolated for months without sufficient human contact or locked into living situations that are emotional pressure cookers. Too many have lost loved ones, jobs, and hope. Families are stretched beyond the breaking point as schools are forced to move to remote, digital learning. While those with an improvisation mindset pride themselves on their resilience and ability to create with all offers (welcome or unwelcome), this moment is testing that resolve. A second profound shift underpinning the writing of this book is the call to action to address how this predominantly White field of improvised theatre has repeatedly failed its BIPOC colleagues.7 The death of George Floyd, a Black man brutally killed by police on May 25, 2020, ignited the necessary resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which stirred many of us (like the two White editors of this book) to take inventory of our privilege and responsibility for our role in sustaining a system of White supremacy. White improvisers have not ensured the same level of access and equity for everyone in our profession. To the extent that there is good

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news in these events, the greater conversation about equity in impro has shifted from merely noticing the scarce numbers of BIPOC improvisers in our classes—and feeling incapable of addressing the social forces that got us there—to a current feeling of momentum and hope for sustainable social change. We would be remiss if we did not mention that extreme climate events—record high temperatures, droughts, raging wildfires, hurricanes more powerful than ever—are also part of the current moment and have directly affected many of the writers of this collection. Global climate change is an existential threat to all of us, and disproportionately affects indigenous and marginalized peoples; therefore, our call to action must also include reducing our carbon footprint and fighting for the health of our planet. Given the intensity of the historical moment we find ourselves in, it would be careless to tell anyone that adopting an improvisation mindset will make everything better. But for those who already possess this mindset, this is an opportunity to do as Civil Rights leader John Lewis prescribed: “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”8 This is a call to action. Many of our current systems of interacting have failed us, and we have the opportunity and responsibility to rebuild a more collaborative, equitable, sustainable, and joyous world. An undervalued impro tenet is Give Up Control (Appendix A), which encompasses the concept of being willing to be changed or altered by the offers given. Improvisers are well suited for the type of self-reflection and transformation needed today, because they regularly practice letting go of what is known/safe/familiar to boldly venture into the unknown, eyes open for new offers. This often starts with fully attending to others around us. In her book, And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World, theatre director Anne Bogart wrote: The one gift we can give to another human being is our attention, and that attention, in turn, allows the possibility of change. We can be available and open to their change. Which means concurrently that we will change, too. The gift we give is not to hold onto some way we have decided that this person is. Perhaps this gift of attention is also a gift of love. (2007: 60–1)

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Bogart also reminds us of the power of theatre to communicate what it means to be alive now, in this moment. For the contributors in this book, improvisational theatre has provided a space for transformation to happen not only through language but through gesture, sound, emotion, and metaphor. Bogart calls the theatre, “a gym for the soul, the intellect, the imagination, and the emotions” (74). Several case studies in this book use the “gym” metaphor to point to how AI training has the potential to build awareness muscles and develop emotional intelligence in people of all walks of life, qualities we desperately need today, especially from our leaders. These case studies illustrate that strengthening impro muscles and developing an AI mindset does not magically happen overnight but requires regular, intentional practice. Luckily, this practice is synonymous with “play,” making it inviting and self-perpetuating. The discipline creates the mindset, and the mindset continues to inform the discipline. Finally, when the weight of the world seems too heavy to bear alone, improvising with others, even online, can deliver a boost of energy and inspiration and help build connections, resiliency muscles, and joy. All our contributors know this to be true. For one, laughter is almost always generated in an improvisation classroom—not at but with others—and the therapeutic effects of humor and laughter have been documented for centuries. More recent data on the physiological benefits of laughter reveal both short- and long-term effects such as decreasing stress and anxiety, stimulating circulation, soothing tension, improving the immune system, and even lessening depression (Mayo 2019). In leadership studies, data shows that “top-performing leaders elicited laughter from their subordinates three times as often, on average, as did midperforming leaders” (Golemen and Boyatzis 2008: 77). AI facilitators harness the power of humor and laughter to create an environment that promotes learning. When participants are feeling less anxious, they are more likely to be receptive to receive new information, to collaborate with others, and to engage in creative work (Savage et al. 2017). Laughter, like other expressions of emotional states, is contagious; when we are in a room full of laughing improvisers, it is almost impossible not to get infected (TV sitcoms still use laugh tracks precisely for this reason). So even those for whom laughter feels impossible in this moment cannot readily escape from the infectiousness of laughter in an improvisation

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workshop and will likely reap the benefits of that emotional release. Furthermore, as you will discover in several of the case studies in this book, an AI mindset and the laughter and care that emerge from improvisational processes can support the grueling work of social activists and of others in the trenches trying to bring about institutional change. These days, so many participants tell us their online impro classes are the highlight of their week. For example, in Theresa’s summer  2020 “Improvisation for Collaborating, Creating & Connecting” online class for Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon, fifteen participants of all ages, from every corner of the United States plus one from Paris (one of the surprise benefits of teaching online is that geography is not a limit), formed incredibly strong bonds over the four Saturday morning sessions. One participant expressed, “This class was exactly what I needed as I attempted to emerge from my Covid cocoon while trying to unravel the mysteries of Zoom.” All the participants in this class were coming to terms with how the pandemic had upended their lives and would enter the online classroom each week in various psychophysical states. Therefore, at the beginning of every session, Theresa facilitated nonverbal “check-ins,” because she noticed many participants seemed wary of articulating, in words, what they were experiencing. She knew that until they became consciously aware of their present state, they would remain distracted by it and not fully present in the class. (Plus, AI facilitators know that our psychophysical states are just offers with which to build.) One such nonverbal exercise she created actually encouraged participants to tap into their current psychophysical state (instead of trying to fix it), and use it as their creative source. Her Gravitational Silly Walk (Appendix B), inspired by both Michael Chekhov’s methods on building a character via a relationship to gravity and Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch, playfully propelled participants to use their bodies to bring clarity to their emotional state and connect with each other in a physical and visceral way, even through two-dimensional computer screens. We know of AI facilitators everywhere similarly inventing new tools to address the challenges of this moment and transcending the limitations of an online classroom to generate this same sense of joy and connection. Getting in good trouble means showing up, speaking out, and committing to the hard work ahead. It is time for those who have

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(or would like to develop) an AI mindset to take action, to exploit the power of uncertainty as an opportunity to learn, to shine light on our deficits of knowledge, and to work on creating culturally responsive learning environments, which will undoubtedly require building platforms for others to share their voices. Those who approach life’s challenges with an AI mindset tend to be generous with their ideas, letting others be in the spotlight. Our contributors have offered their best secrets with the expectation that you will take this work, make it your own, and positively transform your organizations and communities.

Consideration for Facilitators The first book of case studies, Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre, presented the range and diversity of AI work happening around the world in both for-profit and nonprofit sectors. One major goal of the 2018 book was to establish AI as a field worthy of independent investigation, separate from applied theatre where it has been traditionally situated.9 This second collection of case studies, we firmly believe, brings us another step closer to achieving that goal. We sought to make this collection as practical as possible to encourage facilitators to apply the knowledge ascertained from these stories and strategies to their own innovative frameworks and pedagogical approaches across disciplines. We also encourage those same facilitators to flood the AI field with published discourses that emphasize the necessity of this creative, practice-based research. The amount of AI research still does not proportionately represent the amount of AI practice happening around the world. In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, editors Estelle Barret and Barbara Bolt proffer that the academic community still devalues and underfunds creative arts/practicebased research projects because “innovation is derived from methods that cannot always be pre-determined, and ‘outcomes’ of artistic research are necessarily unpredictable” (2007: 3). Therefore, it is important, write Barret and Bolt, to convince the academe of the value of practice-based research, first by framing our case studies as “the production of knowledge or philosophy in action,” and

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then by highlighting the strengths of our approaches—“personally situated, interdisciplinary and diverse and emergent” (1–3). The case studies that follow, we believe, successfully do this. Many chapters also include processes for measuring outcomes as well as theories, models, and approaches to the work for other facilitators to adapt to their own needs. In our experience, we have come across too many colleagues who express dismay that their graduate programs set them up as subject matter experts but did not adequately prepare them to teach in classrooms and/or to create the ideal learning climates described earlier. Therefore, with this collection, we endeavored to shine a spotlight on a critical element of our field—AI is as much a philosophical approach as a tactical one. Incorporating impro games into your lesson plans is a good first step but does not confer the real benefits of this practice. What sets AI apart from other pedagogical approaches is that expert facilitators consciously engage their AI mindset in all that they do. With regard to pedagogy specifically, we encouraged our contributors in this collection to thoroughly unpack not only what they do but how they do it, that is, how an AI mindset guides them to, for example, adjust the tenor of their teaching to create a more collaborative learning environment, which often means going off-script! Good facilitators, like good improvisers, find the right balance between structure (e.g., our prepared lesson plans) and spontaneity in the classroom. Keith Sawyer, a leading expert on creativity and contributor to our first book, proffers that creative teaching is, essentially, improvisational performance: “Conceiving of teaching as improvisation emphasizes the interactional and responsive creativity of a teacher working together with a unique group of students” (2004: 13–14). Furthermore, Sawyer views the best teaching as “disciplined” improvisation, which requires teachers to balance “structures of curricula and their own plans and routines, with the constant need to improvisationally apply those structures” (2011: 15). To illustrate, in one of Caitlin’s leadership development workshops with a car interior manufacturing company, the twenty participants were repeatedly blaming their matrixed organizational structure for their inabilities to lead successfully. To help them, instead, see the matrixed organization as a set of offers with which to build, Caitlin (threw away the lesson plan and) spontaneously

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asked them to form two circles of ten participants each, anointed one person in each circle to be the “lead” and set them up to play the game she now calls Matrix Madness (Appendix B). She had never used this game to play with the challenges of being in a matrixed organization and hoped her hunch was right. Suddenly the room was full of laughter, structured confusion, groans, occasional peals of delight, and intense focus as these experienced leaders attempted to complete one task with one partner while being continually interrupted by others with competing demands. In other words, the game accurately replicated the feeling of trying to work within a matrixed organization. In the debrief that followed, participants clearly saw that the actions they took to succeed in Matrix Madness were the exact same actions needed to be successful in a matrixed organization. No longer was the matrix to blame. Action items were generated. Then Caitlin returned to her prepared lesson plan. Since publication, the 2018 book has been incorporated into the curricula at major universities, which we hope signals more openness to spontaneity in the classroom. It has been adopted as a textbook for graduate and undergraduate courses in applied theatre, in interdisciplinary STEM courses that explore theatre improvisation as a tool to build related skills, and as required reading in business and leadership courses. From numerous AI facilitators, we have heard that the first book not only supplemented their work with new theories and techniques but also continues to prove useful as a resource for clients who may, at first, be resistant to AI. The first book has taken on a life of its own: we recently talked with a change management champion (on top of her regular job, she volunteers to notice, reward, and create the conditions for change in her workplace) at one of the largest US fast food restaurant chains. She had taken an impro class, told her teacher she felt impro was exactly what her company needed, the teacher recommended the book, and it has been her “bible” in her work ever since. This second collection serves a similar, broad audience; however, the focus is less on the for-profit, corporate side of the field and more on how AI is being used to educate tomorrow’s leaders, facilitators, caretakers, humanitarian workers, and citizens for work across sectors. Take note that, given the uncertain moment we find ourselves in, more emphasis is placed on how AI facilitators intentionally create “brave” spaces where participants can

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confront issues, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of retribution, in other words, spaces where it is safe to not play it safe. A facilitator with an AI mindset will do everything they can to create this psychologically safe environment for their participants. Psychological safety is defined by Amy Edmundson as: The belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. The concept refers to the experience of feeling able to speak up with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able—even obligated—to be candid. (2019: 586) To create this type of climate, our contributors often participate alongside their students, putting into play all the qualities of an improvisational mindset to engage authentically and to consciously model the behaviors they want their students to reflect. Black feminist scholar and social activist bell hooks states that engaged pedagogy requires teachers to grow and to be empowered by the process in the classroom. “That empowerment,” she writes, “cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks” (1994: 21). In moments like the one we find ourselves in now, uncertainty often leads to apathy and silence because our deficits of knowledge feel so insurmountable we freeze from fear of getting it wrong, of making mistakes. We fear the loss of control that is part of revealing our vulnerability. But someone with an AI mindset believes vulnerability is essential to being human. When we reveal our vulnerability, we are creating a space that harnesses the power of emotions and love. We are creating a space where authentic, deep connections and transformation can happen.

Designing Your Own AI Experience Each chapter includes a workbook component outlining exercises used by the author(s) in their case study to give facilitators a model for their own application. All exercises can be adapted to meet the specific needs of a group and most, as noted, can be adapted for online classrooms. It is not necessary to start at the beginning of this collection—jump straight to the list of exercises in Appendix B

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or peruse the Table of Contents and dive into whatever case study piques your interest. Feel free to mix and match any of the theories and exercises within the entire collection to suit the objectives and context of your AI experience. We have worked to make this collection as practical and inviting as possible, but it would be irresponsible if we did not remind our readers that AI facilitation requires hard work, self-assessment, disciplined improvisation, and an AI mindset. As in the first book, we again point to experiential learning cycles that emphasize the importance of practice, application, and reflection: • Practice could be, but is certainly not limited to, enrolling in a variety of impro and AI classes, reading (or rereading) the two most formative books on improvisation, Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater ([1963] 1999), and Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979), and perhaps creating your own brave space for improvisational play and constructive feedback.10 • Application is the doing! Take a risk and propose an AI workshop at your organization or in your community; then facilitate it. • After the workshop, reflection must be on what happened (e.g., what worked, what didn’t?). Solicit practical feedback from participants, and then plan action items for your next cycle of practice, application, and reflection. This book does not claim to be a blueprint for your AI classroom. There is no right path for embarking on your individual AI journey with your unique group of participants. Rather, we hope these case studies and the workbooks at the end of each chapter serve as guideposts in your navigation and will activate a kind of “utopian thinking.” Speaking on the importance of critical pedagogy within educational institutions, Peter McLaren uses this term to describe a kind of mapping that is “something we strive for and wish to attain,” and a disentanglement from ideologies that keep us from living as authentic human beings (2019: 190). Utopian thinking suggests imagining a better future and a refusal to be limited by the current status quo or traditional institutional structures. It also implies that we are imperfect, in the process of becoming, and there will always be more work to do.

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Overview The case studies that follow cover a range of disciplines—from humanities to business, applied sciences, and social sciences—and provide our AI field with eleven powerful examples of practicebased research and learning happening in classrooms within and beyond academic institutions. Several chapters explore courses that have been fine-tuned over many years and are still ongoing. Other chapters tell of courses or projects that are relatively new and/or took place within a specific time frame for a specific community. The settings range from finite classrooms with a small number of participants to a virtual network of global participants. A few chapters are philosophical in nature, providing facilitators with exciting new ways to think about and approach traditionally prescribed processes with an AI mindset. The duration of the work also varies: the participants in some of the case studies invest scores of hours over an extended period of time, while others experience the “thunderclap” of a 2- to 4-hour workshop. Author and entrepreneur Seth Godin distinguishes the “drip by drip” from the “thunderclap” in a 2017 blog post. He says the drip by drip of “incremental daily progress (negative or positive) is what actually causes [cultural] transformation” over the long haul. But sometimes, in the short term, organizations need to accelerate change and ignite action. That’s the time for a thunderclap: “the coordinated, accelerating work of many people, that causes those in power to sit up and take notice.” We call the shorter workshops in this anthology “thunderclap” experiences because they disrupt business as usual and the learning outcomes reverberate, beyond the classroom, shaking up the organization or community’s culture. Part One,“Developing the Leaders We Need,” opens with powerful case studies on leadership development that should convert anyone skeptical about the power of AI into ardent advocates! In the first chapter, Kat Koppett takes us on a journey through her leadership communication intensive at H4B’s Catapult College. Since 2012, Koppett has been using AI to develop new talent in the healthcare advertising industry. Originally hired to strengthen presentation skills, Koppett’s intensive grew to become the launching point of

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the entire program because it so successfully laid the foundation for Catapult College itself. Pamela Burke then provides a detailed look at her “Leading Creative Collaboration” lab at Stevens Institute of Technology. This groundbreaking, semester-long Business School course cultivates an AI mindset in leaders through continual practice of AI skills on the job—conquering real-world challenges—as well as in the lab, where students connect, reflect, and support their fellow experimenters to become the creative leaders they want to be. To end this section, Petro Janse van Vuuren shares the work she is doing in South Africa and beyond, helping leaders develop the seemingly contradictory impulses of being mindful and un-attached from outcomes while simultaneously driving hard to achieve their organization’s business objectives. The inspirational and life-changing work of the Detroit Creativity Project (DCP) launches us into Part Two, “Developing the Youth We Need.” Since 2012, DCP in partnership with Y Arts has provided free semester- and year-long improvisation classes to middle and high school students in Detroit area public schools. The Improv Project has been offered at thirty-three schools and now reaches over a thousand students annually. Data shows the program reduces teen anxiety, which has been linked to higher levels of unemployment and lower educational achievement. The authors, Peter Felsman and Tiger Veenstra, share detailed lessons learned from launching such an ambitious program, which can serve as a model for other school districts to do the same. Moriah Flagler then shares an intimate portrait of her residency with a sixth-grade Spanish for Heritage Speakers class in Austin, Texas. She observed how AI—and the informal conversations between the activities—helped the students value their cultural heritage and heighten their awareness of the pressure to assimilate, all too common in our academic settings. Nick Sorensen concludes this section by sharing research he conducted with secondary school teachers in the south west of England. His research unearthed that expert teachers are constantly improvising as they teach, and that the ability to approach their work with the skills and mindset of AI is what differentiates them from the rest. Part Three, “Developing the Communities We Need,” looks first at how AI is being used to transform academic communities and second, to drive social change. Gunter Lösel describes his work

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helping doctoral students at Zurich University to adopt an AI mindset so they can build with their academic fears (such as the Fear of Going Blank or the Fear of Being Scooped) rather than be paralyzed by them. They “travel” to No-Mistakes Land in shared “cocoons” to experience support, trust, and vulnerability, and then incorporate their newfound freedom in their daily academic lives. Raquell Holmes and Mia Anderson take us next to Harvard Medical School. Since 2012 their Professional Presentations workshop has been helping science students build an ensemble attuned to each other’s needs so that they can better communicate and present their work. Moving beyond academia, Marian Rich and Carrie Lobman share the work they have been doing since 2004, developing Performance Activists from around the world in the year-long International Class of the East Side Institute located in New York City. The linchpin of their work is “play” as a radical act to help communities break out of personal and ideological stalemates. Next, Susan Massad and Mary Fridley invite us to one of their workshops where people with dementia come together to play with their community of family and caregivers. Rather than blame, stigmatize, or ignore those with cognitive decline, their work brings laughter (with, not at one another), joy, growth, and new possibilities to each “dementia ensemble.” Finally, bringing this anthology to a close, Barbara Tint and Bettina Koelle describe their work in bringing improvisational principles and practices to the global humanitarian sector, specifically the world of climate change intervention. Their face-to-face and virtual work, pre-Covid-19, spans six years of engagements designed to mobilize collaboration for adaptation and resilience in vulnerable populations. At the beginning of this introduction, we shared a quote by Dr. Langer advocating for exploiting the power of uncertainty. Several of our contributors, at the end of their chapters, have added a postscript that shares how they have creatively exploited the power of uncertainty and continued their work even in the midst of today’s enormous challenges. “The heart of improvisation is transformation,” wrote Viola Spolin (1999: 39). We find ourselves in a moment of radical transformation, a moment that presents an opportunity for improvisational expertise to transform old and tired ways of leading, collaborating, relating, and innovating to build a more

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benevolent, equitable, and sustainable world. The contributors in this collection are practical utopian thinkers, imagining a better world and putting into practice new ways of being and learning that we know can bring people to understand and adopt the values intrinsic to an improvisation mindset. We now invite you, our readers, to let yourself dream and dream big …

Notes 1 We are using the term “classroom” to denote any space (boardroom, conference center, community center, virtual space) where improvisation is being applied. We use the term “facilitator,” instead of teacher or educator, because it denotes someone who facilitates a process, makes a process easier, and/or facilitates learning in communities and organizations. Good teachers are often called “facilitators of learning” when they create environments for students to co-construct knowledge together. AI professionals also use titles such as coach, instructor, practitioner, and trainer. 2 “Impro” and “improv” are used throughout this book of case studies dependent upon each author’s preference. Both are synonymous and abbreviations for “improvisation.” The preferred use of one or the other often depends on how “improvisation” is spelled, pronounced, and syllabified in other languages. As we advised in the first book, it is important for facilitators to be inclusive to improvisers everywhere. By simply asking participants in your classroom, “Do you prefer ‘impro’ or ‘improv’?” you are reinforcing this inclusive climate (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 10–11). 3 “Mindset, n.” OED Online. June 2020. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/view/Entry/252842?redirecte dFrom=mindset (accessed September 6, 2020). 4 “Applied, adj.” OED Online. June 2020. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/view/Entry/9713?rskey=nssF Dj&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed September 6, 2020). 5 A few examples: Johnstone connected theories on fear and anxiety from the field of behavioral therapy to “stage fright” in his studio classes at the Royal Court Theatre in the 1960s; many of his status and pecking-order games were adapted from ornithological studies on jackdaw colonies; and so forth (Dudeck 2013; Johnstone 1979). 6 In Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography (Dudeck 2013), Dudeck often likens Johnstone’s process as an impro creator and educator to that of a scientist who uses the theatre classroom/stage as a “scientific

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laboratory to investigate the nature of spontaneous creation” (107; see also pp. 59, 96, 105, 111, 116, 193). 7 See New York Times article by Melena Ryzik and Jake Malooley titled “Second City’s Race Problem Is Out in the Open” (August 16, 2020) and New York Magazine article by Megh Wright titled “Improv Communities Demand Theaters Address Systemic Racism” (June 18, 2020). BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. 8 John Lewis speaking on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 1, 2020, at a ceremony commemorating Bloody Sunday, 1965. 9 See section “Applied Improvisation: A Field of Its Own” in Introduction (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 2–5). 10 At the 2012 Applied Improvisation Conference in San Francisco, Patricia Ryan Madson, author of Improv Wisdom (2005) and Professor Emerita at Stanford said: “You can learn to improvise three ways: You can take a class, you can perform, or you can teach it. And you can do any one of those immediately” (McClure’s personal notes from the conference).

PART ONE

Developing the Leaders We Need

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1 Improv Is the Gym: Presentation Skills and Beyond at H4B’s Catapult College Kat Koppett

Kat Koppett is President of Koppett, a training and consulting company specializing in the use of improvisational theatre and storytelling techniques to enhance individual and group performance, Co-Director of The Mopco Improv Theatre, and co-host of the podcast Dare to Be Human. Her book Training to Imagine: Practical Improvisational Theatre Techniques to Enhance Creativity, Teamwork, Leadership, and Learning (2013) is considered a seminal work in the field of Applied Improvisation. Kat holds a BFA in Drama from New York University and an MA in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University. In 2019, she received NASAGA’s Ifill-Raynolds Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Ten hand-picked workshop participants stand in pairs, half of them facing the screen at the front of the room, their partners facing them. The ones facing the screen begin to recount a recent experience—an interaction they had with a colleague or the details of their morning commute. As they speak, instructions flash on the screen hidden from those listening: Continue telling your story “as if” you are a small mouse; you are running an auction; your body is made completely of fingers; you are Oprah. After cycling through ten such instructions the participants switch places and listeners become speakers: You are a drill sergeant; it’s a secret; you are a fortune teller; you are Elvis. Dutifully following instructions, the participants leap and shout, crawl and wiggle. Sometimes, frankly, they freeze and peek around awkwardly at each other. But then another prompt appears and they dive back into their stories. However they engage, one thing is certain, they are pushing the boundaries of their normal behavior. This Do It As If exercise (Workbook 1.1) has been intentionally chosen to jumpstart our two-day presentation skills and leadership communication intensive with the members of H4B’s Catapult College. Health4Brands (H4B) is one of a cluster of healthcarefocused advertising agencies that collectively make up Havas Health. Now in its ninth year, Catapult College was designed by Cathy Infante, Head of human resources at Havas Health, Pat Chenot, H4B’s Training Director, and their colleagues. Catapult College’s purpose is to develop mid-level agency operations and creative staff who were otherwise missing opportunities for leadership growth and client exposure. Chenot says the team conceived the program to meet four main objectives: 1. To develop leadership internally from the bottom up 2. To increase attraction and retention of world-class talent in a highly competitive field 3. To provide opportunities to pitch and interact with clients for folks who were, under normal circumstances, lacking access to them 4. Inspire the larger Havas Health network The H4B group is headquartered in Hamilton, New Jersey, a suburban town near Princeton, an hour and a half drive from

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New York City. Hamilton is home to a plethora of major drug companies—a perfect location for an agency that specializes in serving this industry. Being near New York but outside of it, H4B provides an ideal environment to grow a culture with high standards that recognizes the high-stakes game it is playing in but also has room for creative experimentation and conscious internal culture-building. The program solicits internal applicants from whom ten high-potential professionals are chosen each year. Over the course of a few months, those ten attend courses and workshops on various topics and work in two subgroups to develop and ultimately pitch real campaigns for a real pro bono client. As the program was initially conceived, the subgroups would develop competing pitches a la the TV show The Apprentice, which they would then present to the client who would declare a winner. The winning work would be given gratis to the client in exchange for their time and feedback. In 2012, a year after the program launch, Cathy Infante approached Koppett & Company about contributing a course to the developmental mix. At first blush, she seemed to be seeking a simple presentation skills course meant to prepare the group for their formal pitches; but after a short conversation, it became clear that we could help with deeper and broader needs. As theatrical improvisers, we do not see performance skills as limited to formal presentation contexts. Havas quickly realized that an improvisation mindset could help with the general leadership communication and personal–professional branding that their developing leaders needed. We crafted a sixteen-hour course with the following learning objectives: • Acquire tools for structuring clear and compelling presentations; • Apply storytelling, metaphor, and imagery to enhance a presentation’s impact; • Practice gathering and assessing audience needs; • Engage techniques to strengthen their physical and vocal instrument for increased influence and impact; • Identify best-practice strategies for using paper and electronic materials to support their message

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• Plan, develop, and deliver multiple individual and group presentations; and • Receive individual coaching and feedback that will enhance personal understanding of one’s strengths and areas for growth. Koppett, like many of our applied improvisation (AI) compatriots, believe that human beings are inherently performers— that we are performing all the time. Sometimes when we first present this idea, people get uncomfortable. “I don’t like the idea of ‘performing’,” they say. “I don’t want to feel ‘fake’. I want to be myself. I want to feel ‘authentic’.” This prompts an important clarification. When we say human beings are performing all the time, we are not implying that we behave inauthentically—we may or may not, in any given moment, choose to act in alignment with our values and feelings. What we mean is that we are continually making choices about how to “show up”—how to speak, move, respond. Those choices are different depending on what “scene” we find ourselves in. For example, how I show up with my husband cuddling on the couch in the evening differs a fair amount from how I show up with my accountant going over my year-end tax report or pitching a new project with my major client or cooking soup with my daughter or cooing over a friend’s six-month-old baby. I endeavor to engage authentically in all those contexts and certainly there may be some coherence across scenes that people recognize as core personality traits (although increasingly psychologists debate even this; see Walter Mischel’s work on personality theory); but in many ways my performances will diverge. Imagine if I treated my accountant the way I treated my friend’s six-month-old. “Ooh, do you like that coffee? Look at you, drinking coffee! Yumm. Good job!” So, if it is true that we make these varied performance choices constantly, why are more of us not comfortable flexing our styles and making conscious performance choices in the moment? Although humans perform naturally, we also tend to get stuck performing unconsciously and habitually. Most of us, by the time we are adults, get stuck in—even identified with—these set patterns of behaviors, which can become limiting. Sometimes we recognize our ruts as such. “I’m stuck,” we might say. “I need to find a new way to do this.” But often, as adults, we do not even realize that

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we have reified complex behaviors, for example, we assume that becoming an “adult/professional/expert/authentic” means taking on one “right” or “coherent” way of being that is predictable, comfortable, and familiar. As children, at least in healthy environments, we recognize learning, growing, and transforming as our job. Caregivers and teachers provide opportunities not just for knowledge acquisition but for identity and behavioral exploration. When a toddler, for example, begins to move from crawling to walking by pulling up on a table, taking a few teetering steps and falling, we cheer and applaud. Neither we nor the baby think, “Ah, clearly they are an ‘authentic crawler’ and an ‘inauthentic walker’.” That would be ridiculous. But as adults, we are expected to appear fully developed. Personality and behavioral-type indicators such as Myers-Briggs and DiSC only exacerbate our tendencies to identify with certain ways of being as “true to ourselves.” No one around us cheers when we try something new and teeter and fall the first time we create a PowerPoint presentation and get our slides out of order. We have learned to limit our ranges and shrink our comfort zones. When we do this, we limit our capacity to connect and influence commensurately. The good news is, human personality has proven to have much more flexibility than these indicator tests imply. In fact, these instruments have limited construct validity and even more limited correlation with performance outcomes in the workplace (Pittenger 1993). Some psychologists, like Walter Mischel of the famed marshmallow/self-control study, question the very existence of a coherent definable personality at all, as opposed to a set of tendencies or probabilities that interact with environments in more or less predictable ways (Mischel and Yuichi 1995; Mischel 2014). In other words, people have much more capacity for and often behave with much more variability across circumstances than we give them—or ourselves—credit for. Enter improvisation! When we share the tools and techniques of improvisational theatre, when we create protected space for adults to explore our performance choices, we allow ourselves to recognize and stretch our field of play. At Koppett we have two goals. We want to help clients: 1. Expand their awareness of their current performance choices and the impact those choices have;

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2. Expand their range of options so that when the impact is not aligned with their goals or intentions, they can shift. Improvisation activities, like Do It As If above, break us out of our habitual ways of being and thinking. That, in and of itself, regardless of the results of the immediate performance, has great value. In this way, improv becomes the gym for exercising our performance muscles. The point in this exercise is not to choose a “correct” or aligned performance—in fact, the opposite. We begin by simply exercising our willingness to take the risk to expand our range. Then, once we realize we have this capacity to behave in ways beyond the habitually narrow and unconscious, a whole new world reopens to us. Ironically, what allows us to make choices better aligned with our intentions in real life is our willingness to try out performances that seem outrageous or inappropriate for a given context. Once these performance muscles are toned and exercised, we can come to high-stakes interactions like meetings or client presentations or conversations with our kids with increased self-awareness and options. When we become more conscious of our habitual choices and then more willing to step outside them deliberately we also become more effective. For example, imagine Syd’s standard way of interacting in meetings is to listen intently, wait for others to make contributions, and then add thoughtful comments when—and only when—Syd feels confident they will add value that has not already been offered. This behavior has much to recommend it. People probably view Syd as collaborative and easy to get along with. Syd’s style leaves room for others to voice their opinions, supporting an inclusive environment. Syd can test their assumptions and learn from others. But is the performance option chosen always best aligned with their goal or intention? Perhaps not. What if Syd needs to lead the discussion rather than just following someone else’s agenda? Sometimes they may want to claim space so that others recognize their intelligence and creativity rather than letting their colleagues claim credit for their ideas. Sometimes they may not know whether their thought has merit until they say it out loud and everyone discusses it. Even our best ingrained ways of showing up do not serve us equally well in every circumstance. Like Syd, we all have things that hold us back from making different performance choices. Are we afraid to look foolish by spouting a less than perfectly formed idea? Are we worried we will seem aggressive or egotistical? Have

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we labeled ourselves an “introvert” and feel inauthentic speaking in group meetings? Has it ever entered our mind that we could behave differently? Once Syd recognizes each moment as an opportunity to notice and consciously make performance choices, broadening their variety, think how much more impact they might have. So here we are acting as if we are mice and drill sergeants and Oprah, warming up our participants’ performing muscles and getting them ready to take risks as we ask them to stretch their habitual performance comfort zones. Rather than present these underlying philosophies in lecture format, we introduce them through activity and debrief. That is how most of the day will go. Talking about these dynamics is one thing—just talk, cerebral. Experiencing them is quite another—whole body, subjective, allowing space for all ten participants to have ten unique reactions. Right off the bat, we have asked our participants to stretch their performance range for no other reason than to prove to themselves that they can. The stakes are indeed high, and time is expensive. The participants will expect significant return on their two-day investment. We will get to more “serious” and “practical” tips on presenting, but we begin with this admittedly wacky activity to introduce a few foundational concepts. We ask them about their experiences. How did that feel? “Fun!” “Weird.” “Uncomfortable.” We unpack their answers. What was fun? “Getting to play and behave in unusual ways.” “Not having to be ‘right’.” “Being expressive.” “Watching my partner make a fool of himself.” What was uncomfortable? “Not having any idea how to do it ‘right’.” “Being expressive.” “Having to behave in unnatural ways.” “Feeling like I was making a fool of myself.” They became consciously aware that the same things that delight us scare us. Individually and collectively, the group starts to recognize how narrowly they have defined their acceptable circle of performance choices. Already they notice how much more open to and generous they are with others’ performances than they are with their own in which they feel vulnerable and thus self-critical. We invite the participants to use these two days as a performance lab and to stretch their habitual range. For example, if they tend to be the first to speak, we encourage them to leave space for others. If they tend to wait until they have fully formed, perfect comments, we prevail upon them to blurt out their imperfect ideas. We invite them to embrace discomfort throughout our time together and to support each other to do the same.

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Introducing the metaphor of “Improv as a Gym” for exercising our leadership communication and presentation muscles we say: If you went to the gym and felt completely comfortable, never breaking a sweat or expending any effort, it would be a waste of your time, right? The same is true here. We don’t want you to feel traumatized or unsafe, but we do want you to get a good workout. Improv is the gym for human performance skills. Calibrate your workout for maximum impact. For the next two days, our gym metaphor holds. We run participants through a series of exercises designed to strengthen various “muscles.” Each activity is followed by debrief and discussion intended to deepen the participants’ awareness of their habits, mindsets, and personal impact and to help stretch and widen their options. The two days are divided into four sections: Play Your Instrument (of which Do It As If is the first exercise), Craft Your Presentation/Tell A Good Story, Connect With Your Audience, and Adapting In The Moment.

Play Your Instrument Exercise: Status Picnic As with the rest of our course, we lead with a practical experience before diving into theory. We split the group into two halves and tell the participants they are all at a summer office party and that they are happy to be there. Their goal is to connect with as many people as possible at the party. They know each other and are some version of themselves—no need to play any kind of big character— but we are going to give them some specific behaviors to try on as they interact: • Group A we instruct to take up as much space as possible: big voices, big gestures, plant their feet, make strong eye contact, shoulders back and down, head relaxed and still. • Group B we instruct to take up as little space as possible: touch their face and hair, say “um” and “uh.” “You’d like

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to make eye-contact,” we say, “but it kind of stings a little bit so you have to look and then look away.” Act as if the floor is kind of hot if you stand in one place too long (the instructions are clearly audible to both groups). Our participants are primed, remember, to try on new performances. They have already been mice and Arnold Schwarzenegger, so once the office party begins, we see Group A move with seeming confidence and enthusiasm to greet the others. As instructed, they take up lots of space. They seem boisterous and perhaps even aggressive in their eagerness to connect. Group B members hang back, make themselves small, and avoid eye-contact. After a few minutes we instruct the two groups to switch behaviors and continue the party. We start the debrief by highlighting how easy it appeared for everyone to successfully take on the behaviors we assigned, even though they were relatively extreme performances. Then we ask what they noticed. While some say the whole thing was just generally out of their comfort zone, many others felt comfortable in either one or the other scenario and report a strong preference. They are surprised to hear that colleagues may have had the opposite preference. Many started to see that as they changed their external behaviors, their inner attitudes and feelings changed as well. It is only at this point that we introduce the term “Status.” Drawing from the status dynamics work of the great improvisation guru Keith Johnstone and a number of organizational psychologists who have integrated his insights, we explain that the instructions we gave them illustrate examples of “high-status” and “low-status” behaviors, otherwise known as dominant and submissive behaviors (though that language, we joke, can be a little uncomfortable in the workplace).1 We point out that status in this context is a primal way we engage and that we observe these behaviors in all social animals. We point out that we are highly attuned to the status dynamics in interactions because, evolutionarily, our place in a hierarchy determined how much we got to eat and who got to procreate. And we link back to our core theme stating: You can consciously choose a status performance, and when you do, it will affect not only others but yourself. Status and power are complicated concepts that get discussed in myriad ways throughout the literature, so let’s define our terms.

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A relatively standard definition of “power” comes from New York University Stern professor Steven Blader and Cornell University professor Ya-Ru Chen who say, “Power is best conceptualized as control over critical resources—that is, outcome control” (2012: 995). Within groups, there are two (non-exclusive) paths to acquiring power: “authority,” defined as formal rank, title, or responsibility, or “status,” defined as prestige, respect, or place in the hierarchy. In the animal kingdom, status and authority are one and the same, but as humans we have, for better or worse, with our complicated systems, found ways to disentangle them. Johnstone as a theatre director recognized and underscored the idea of status as something we “do,” not something we “have.” He looked merely to create more realistic and compelling theatre, but his insights open up transformative riches to anyone who wants to impact the power dynamics in a given moment, whether that is to claim focus and credibility as a speaker or to build trusting relationships or to create inclusive space. We continue with the discussion. When asked to describe people performing with opposite behaviors, nearly everyone used negative language. The “high-status” people describe the “low-status” people as meek, boring, needy, or stand-offish. But the “low-status” people say the “high-status” people are obnoxious, overbearing, intimidating. Within groups of similar status, people are much more comfortable. We acknowledge some of these negative labels are about extremes, but the conflict also uncovers the second key point about status: Communication is facilitated when status is equalized. Even in the military, arguably one of the most formally hierarchical of organizations, leaders learn that in order to establish trust, and therefore instill loyalty and commitment, they must seek to equalize the status dynamics. Those with the highest ranks maintain their ranks—what they have—but become adept at giving status—what they do. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of the US Joint Forces under President Obama, for example, talks about one of his tactics for establishing trust by equalizing status when entering a new leadership role: Regardless, the number one thing I try to do is develop personal relationships with key people in the organization. I try to exhibit trust in small ways. In a briefing, if somebody asks me for a decision, I might turn to a subordinate and ask them to handle it.

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I don’t ask for specifics, and I’m very overt—almost theatrical— about it. Everybody else sees it. The message is: “I trust you guys to handle this stuff,” and that can grow virally throughout an organization. (McGuinn 2015) This last point deserves a moment, because it highlights why performance flexibility and range matter so much. It challenges an unspoken assumption that many of our participants hold, whether they know it or not: they believe that as leaders and speakers, they should always be as high status as possible. Suddenly, they see that a more effective approach is to read the room, connect with their colleagues and clients, and choose status performances that will affect the status relationship in ways that will align with their intention. Sometimes that means they should learn to perform big and “take status.” In these moments, traditional presentation skills course tips apply. At other times, they may want to “give status,” perhaps by taking up less space, giving focus, and/or asking a question rather than making a statement. At this point in the course participants are not yet skilled at this dance of giving and taking status but eager to explore this facet of human behavior that had previously been hidden.

Giving and Taking Status Status is always dynamic and exists only in relation to something else.2 If the status between you and someone else is unequal, in this case your status is higher, and you wish to equalize it, you have two options: you can lower your own status or raise the other person’s status (or both). Either of these moves is a way of “giving” status to another. If you want to recalibrate the status balance the other way, so that your status is higher in relation to someone else’s—either to equalize the dynamic or to take control—then you will want to “take” status. There are a variety of ways to do either, and various circumstances in which you might choose to make those moves. The following are illustrated in Table 1.1: 1. Behaviors that can help you raise or lower your status 2. Situations in which you might make that choice

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TABLE 1.1  Using high-/low-status guide (© 2011 Koppett) Effective Low Status

Effective High Status

• • • • • •

Take up less space Ask questions Seek permission Respond rather than initiating Use titles/formal names Use straightforward, common language • Listen attentively • Clarify and confirm understanding

• • • • •

Choose these when you want to

Choose these when you want to

• Allow space for others to contribute • Demonstrate willingness to learn and make mistakes • Show respect • Encourage participation • Build intimacy • Support a sense of competence

• • • • • •

Take up more space Make statements Initiate topics Offer opinions Back up opinions with facts and examples • Use specific professional language • Make requests • Set limits when necessary Establish credibility Capture attention Set limits Regain control Defend others Settle a debate

To test and deepen our understanding of these status dynamics, and to illustrate how they play out in everyday interactions, we introduce Status Pass.

Exercise: Status Pass The participants stand in a circle. In Round 1, they take turns lowering the status of the person to their left; in Round 2 they raise the status of the person to their left. We intentionally start with the more challenging action: lowering the status of the people with whom they are beginning to build a trusting relationship. In our experience, the act of explicitly engaging with status in this way— where both the lowerer and the lowered signal to each other that they are playing with status—builds more trust and elicits a richer debrief than if we started with Round 2.

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We instruct the group, “Let’s see how many different ways we can find to lower the other person’s status verbally or nonverbally.” Immediately, people resist. Even before they engage it sounds bad— they are new to concept of status but not its effect. We offer a number of disclaimers before diving in, “We are practicing to enhance our awareness and flexibility. We are not recommending you do this during the entire course.” Safety net in place, the participants give it a go. They say and do things including: • Ask a question without looking up from their phone to acknowledge the other person or their response in any way. • Ignoring the person while enthusiastically greeting someone next to them. • “Will your boss be joining the meeting, too?” • “Uh, yeah—I already answered that question. Weren’t you listening?” • “You’re late! I’m going to make you sing a silly song in front of the group.” In the discussion that follows Round 1, they share that in addition to confirming that having one’s status deliberately lowered can elicit a lot of negative feelings, participants admit that not only have they been on the receiving end of this behavior, but they have perpetrated it as well. Why, we ask? Well, they consider, mostly because they were not paying attention. Every now and then, someone will say they deliberately meant to shut someone down or battle them for a place in the hierarchy, but more often than not, the slight was unintentional. We discuss how, as they step into more roles with more formal authority, they will, by definition, have more power, and their moves will be scrutinized in new ways, leading to even more opportunities for unintended slights. How important will it be, then, to stay vigilant and make conscious choices? Out of this discussion, we make the key distinction between status and connection. Often, we conflate these two qualities, believing that high status means we are mean to others and cause disconnection. But in fact these are separate axes we can navigate. Successful leaders are status masters and endeavor to stay connected, regardless of the status performance they choose. Imagine different archetypal characters (Figure 1.1) and you can get a sense of how

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high and low status can interact in various ways. As our participants begin to learn, playing high status does not require disconnection. A tyrant’s actions will most likely be high status and disconnected from those over whom she wields power. A pastor’s actions, on the other hand, can also be high status, while still creating connection. Conversely, an archetypical butler’s actions reinforce his lower status while being deeply attentive and connected to his master, whereas an archetypical scullery maid might act low status and intentionally disconnected. To be clear, labels on this model are meant merely to be evocative: nurses in real life can and often do play high status, and they may or

FIGURE 1.1  Sample archetypes according to status/connection (© 1990 Proteus International Inc. & Koppett).

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may not connect well with their charges. The image is used to invite participants to easily distinguish between the two concepts. In Round 2 of our Status Pass activity, participants take turns raising each other’s status. They notice that they can successfully do that from either a high or low position of their own, but that for the recipient to authentically feel raised, the giver of status must seem connected. For example, if I say to my partner, “Hey, Jesse! Great work on the proposal last week,” but I’m not making eye-contact and or saying it with conviction, it can feel dismissive and actually lower my partner’s status. Or if I say, “Wow! You’re so smart! Can you help me with this?” and seem too focused on myself rather than my partner, the other person can feel put-upon rather than valued. Only after having explored the concept of status and practiced consciously affecting status dynamics, do we now introduce specific presentation skills tips. All of them, participants note, come down to high-status moves that enable them to raise their credibility, command focus, and own the room while maintaining connection with their audience. The advantage to introducing status before moving to formal presentation skills is that now these tips make

TABLE 1.2  Playing your instrument (© 2011 Koppett) Tips and Tricks for Body and Voice Body (ready position)

Feet under hips, shoulders back, hands at sides, head up, look forward.

Movement

Support the content and structure by moving only with intention or purpose.

Hands and Gestures

Can be bigger than you think. Bring focus above your shoulders, not below.

Eye Contact

One person, one point. Focus on receiving, not giving.

Voice (VTIPS)

Vary your Volume, Tone, Inflection, Pitch, and Speed.

Words and Pauses

Avoid jargon and filler words, use pauses to maximize impact and give time for information processing.

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coherent conceptual sense. Rather than just a set of random “dos and don’ts” they crystalize the concepts we have been exploring and focus them into a little mnemonic cheat sheet.

Craft Your Presentation/ Tell a Good Story Having spent time on the how of delivering a message, we turn our attention to the what. Having a clear, focused, compelling, memorable message has always been desirable. In today’s fast-moving, competitive communication landscape, it is imperative, especially in an ad agency. An overlooked aspect of theatrical improvisation is that improvisers write as much as they act, creating their scripts as they go along, so improvisation has much to offer in the content creation part of the “gym.” Specifically, we draw from a rich trove of storytelling exercises and techniques. At Koppett, we do not relegate the idea of storytelling to a nice communication “extra” for only certain special people or contexts. We believe, as cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruener says, that “story is meaning.” In other words, human beings make sense of the world by gathering data and making up stories about what they see and hear. We are constantly telling stories to ourselves and others—that is how we understand the world. That means when leaders present, the question is not “Should I tell a story?” but “What story should I tell?” Or perhaps even “Am I aware of what story my audience is hearing? Is it the story I want to be telling? If not, how can I shift my story to better align with my intention?” From this philosophical position, we set some traditional groundwork for our full-fledged practice that is to come. Participants choose topics and identify their audiences, objectives, and desired outcomes by answering six key questions: 1. What is my key message (a.k.a. the moral of my story)? 2. Who is my audience? 3. What do I want them to do differently?

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4. What is in it for them? 5. What obstacles or challenges exist for them? 6. What do they need to know/do/feel? Then we dive into two classic storytelling improv activities. First, the Story Spine, perhaps our most popular tool of all time, helps people figure out the narrative core of their story. Originally created by Kenn Adams at Freestyle Repertory Theatre in New York City as a tool to help improvisers improvise full-length plays, the Spine has been used by thousands of leaders, speakers, and artists since its socialization outside the tiny pond of performance improv.3 Storytellers in so many contexts embrace Adams’ tool because it is a simple set of sentence prompts that straight-forwardly capture the Aristotelian dramatic structure that nearly anyone familiar with Western storytelling has come to innately expect. Here it is, with section titles added by Koppett:

Exercise: The Story Spine TABLE 1.3  Story Spine prompts and examples (© 2011 Koppett) Section Titles

Story Spine Prompts

Examples

The Platform

Once upon a time … Every day …

Once upon a time … there was a little girl who lived on a grey and boring farm in Kansas with her Aunt and Uncle and little dog. Every day … she dreamed of having a more exciting and colorful life somewhere else.

The Catalyst or “Tilt” (as Johnstone would say!)4

But one day …

But one day … a cyclone came and swept her and her house over the rainbow.

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The Consequences

Because of that … Because of that … Because of that … (xN)

Because of that … her house landed in a colorful magical world (on top of a witch). Because of that, she felt lost and worried about her Aunt and Uncle. Because of that … she had to find a way home. Because of that … she was told the Wizard could help her. Because of that, she had many adventures, making friends and enemies along the way, trying to get help to get home.

The Climax

Until finally …

Until finally … she discovered she had the power to get home inside herself all along.

The Resolution

Ever since then (The moral is … )

And ever since then … she’s been happily back home with her real family and friends. And the moral of the story is … There’s no place like home.

At Koppett, when working in organizations or with speakers, we have also added a final line that Adams did not originally include, “The moral is … ”. Although not all good stories require explicit morals, we encourage the speakers we coach to know the point of their story. In fact, we advise them to start with this line and craft a story that drives toward that moral, because in most presentation contexts, the goal is to move the listener in a specific direction, toward a specific action. When used in this way, the Spine can also help stress-test an argument.

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We instruct participants to quickly draft a story using the Spine, giving them perhaps 5–10 minutes, and we emphasize, “You don’t have enough time, so it doesn’t have to be good.” It is important that even as we start to draft content, we keep the improvisational spirit in the room—the intention here is to exercise our storytelling muscles, not to write the perfect story.5 Once the stories are sketched out, the participants share their stories in pairs. As they do, we engage in the second activity, Color/Advance (Workbook 1.3). If the Spine results in the narrative “spine” of a story, then to continue the metaphor, we still need to add flesh to the bones.

Exercise: Color/Advance (Workbook 1.3) As the storytellers recount their stories, their coaches prompt them in two ways. They may say, “Advance,” which means continue moving the action forward to the next part of your story; or “Color the ___,” which means add description. Through this relatively simple process, participants deepen their understanding of story structure and exercise their storytelling skills in a number of different ways. First, they distinguish description from action, something many of us are remarkably undiscerning about in our regular communication. Second, each storyteller gets a sense of which storytelling skill dominates their habitual style. Do they tend to color more comfortably or advance? What kind of color— physical, emotional, philosophical—comes most naturally? Ultimately, the storytellers have the experience of responding in the moment to cues from their listeners and adapting their stories on the fly to their needs and interests, rather than just telling their story by rote. It is this last skill that we build on next.6

Connect with Your Audience Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the mindset improvisers develop is their focus on their partners rather than on themselves. The improv tenet “Inspire your partner” (there is no tenet to “be funny” or “look good”—that would isolate an improviser rather than connect them) acts as a north star for many an improviser and allows for the magic that we experience at improv shows. The ability to do this rests on an even more fundamental improv

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skill, Active or Responsive Listening. We often say the great genius of the most talented improvisers is their ability to notice and receive information. This same outward focus can help in business presentations or one-on-one conversations, so we spend time with our participants exercising their listening and awareness muscles, encouraging them to spend as much time thinking about their audience as they do about themselves and their message. Put simply, listening might be the most under-recognized and under-appreciated skill of great improvisers. Whereas laypeople, when polled, usually point to a clever wit or quick timing as the qualities that make star improvisers the best, we improvisers know that what distinguishes the true artists in our field is their ability to notice, retain, and use information. Listening may also be the most important transferable AI skill. In the business world, listening also receives a lot of praise, but few people acknowledge how difficult great listening really is or know how to strengthen their listening muscles. This is our next area of focus and again we start with an exercise designed to uncover two key points: 1. Listening is hard; 2. We can listen for much more than data or facts.

Activity: What They Said Four volunteers stand at the front of the room. We recruit one of them who says they have a true, short (1–2 minutes) anecdote they are willing to share publicly. “Something with enough detail and action to be compelling, though it doesn’t need to be life-changing.” Alex volunteers and becomes Person A.7 We assign letters B, C, and D arbitrarily to the remaining three volunteers. We explain that that C and D, Carlos and David, will leave the room while Person A tells her story to Person B, Bella. When Alex is finished, Carlos will come back into the room and Bella will repeat the story as if she is a video tape recording of Alex. We stress that we want the story recounted as exactly as possible. “If Alex says, ‘So I went to see … what’s the name of that movie again? Oh, yes! Star Wars!’” then Bella should say, “So I went to see … what’s the name of that movie again? Oh yes, Star Wars!” After Bella finishes, David will enter and Carlos will tell the story to him. Finally, David will repeat the story to the whole group. In each round, we remind them, the goal is to tell the story exactly as you heard it.

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We run the game. In this case, Alex shares the story of a live bat she discovered in the hallway of her apartment building one morning on her way to work. She wanted to help the bat but did not want to call animal control because a friend had recently told her that animal control simply freezes and disposes of animals they are called in to supposedly rescue. Alex retrieves a Tupperware, scoops up the bat and, making some excuse to a befuddled neighbor, releases it into some nearby bushes. For the rest of the day she worries about the bat and feels relieved when she checks later and it seems to be gone. She assumes the bat must have survived and is free and happy. By the time David, the fourth person, tells the story, the bat is found on the street rather than in a hallway; the neighbor’s judgment is palpable and harsh, and he labels him a “murderer.” Plenty of details, gestures, and story points had remained intact; but through peals of laughter, the group sees that enough had changed to bring our two points into strong relief: 1. Listening is hard; 2. We can listen for much more than data or facts. We discuss how much more we miss than we think we do; how we forget and misunderstand what we hear; and how we fail to know when we have listened well and when we haven’t. We go on to introduce the improv term “offer.” Using this new term we talk about the kinds of offers that remained consistent throughout each version of Alex’s story and which were dropped. We examine the types of offers we can tune our awareness to and listen for (see Figure 1.2). In Alex’s story, for example, we discuss how each storyteller retained some facts but dropped others. The emotions expressed shifted explicitly from concern to self-recrimination. The values of compassion for animals and personal responsibility were caught and heightened. But perhaps heightened so much that the intent of the story was lost. What do our participants take away from this exercise in terms of presentation skills and leadership communication? • They are aware that they have listening habits and preferences—some of them listen habitually for facts but miss emotional offers; others tend to engage by listening for intent but fail to capture important details. • They grasp that clarifying and confirming their understanding is imperative. Even the most adept listeners are not machines who capture everything perfectly.

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FIGURE 1.2  What am I listening for? (© 2011 Koppett)

• They realize that the more offers they pick up, the more information they have to understand others, build relationships, solve problems, and resolve conflicts. • They appreciate that listening is a muscle they can exercise and strengthen, and that the effort is worth it. Having engaged in this playful activity meant to awaken insight into listening, we move to a more practical and realistic exercise designed to give the participants a chance to exercise their listening in a more real-world context.

Exercise: Here’s What I Heard (Workbook 1.2) In this activity, participants share a pet peeve with a partner then have the listener try to accurately repeat what they heard the speaker say and what they heard the speaker cares about. The exercise draws from many standard active listening practices and is

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a simple way to work on the concepts we have been exploring. The partners silently listen to the complaints and then say, “Here’s what I heard you say,” and deliver a summary of the specific information they heard—not exactly like a video tape as in the exercise before, but a close, literal summary to confirm understanding. Then they continue, “Here’s what I hear you care about.” In this stage, they are invited to read between the lines and share what they think are their partner’s values, emotions, and intentions: What matters to them? Why might this incident have bothered them? What is important to them? With these two cueing sentences, our participants practice listening for all four categories of offers (facts, emotions, values, and intentions) and get immediate feedback on how well they observed, retained, and verbalized what they heard. In our debrief we make sure to underscore that the point of the exercise is not to train folks to literally use these phrases in conversation, any more than we suggest that they start all stories with “Once upon a time … ” The phrases help us exercise our ability to listen in deeper, broader, and more nuanced ways and expand our range of options on how to respond to and connect with others. We ask what it is like to listen in this way. People recognize that they have listening habits and biases—some listen first or mostly for facts, others for emotions or intention. We discuss what it feels like to be listened to in this way. Participants report feeling validated, understood. Some say, “Wow! I didn’t even know myself, why I cared about this until my partner told me what they thought they heard.” Others say, “My partner didn’t get it exactly right but that didn’t matter. I was happy to correct them. The fact that they were trying so hard to get it right felt great.” Most people agree that listening and being listened to in this way seems rare. Before engaging in the activity, the group had said listening well takes too much time. Afterward, there seemed to be consensus that this kind of listening not only shouldn’t take any more time than a typical conversation but might even save time in the long run.

Performance Practice and Coaching The part of our course that participants most fear and ultimately most praise is the recorded presentation practice. We devote approximately three hours in the afternoon of both days to this

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work (15–20 minutes per person). Having explored their physical performance range and relationship to their audience, identified an objective, and crafted a story, they now create 3–5 minutes of content to present. Some of them will present segments or high-level overviews of real-life work topics. Others will create presentations from scratch based on the prompt “This I believe … ”. Finally, some will choose to “teach us something.” As each person prepares to present, we ask them to share their personal presentation goal, such as to speak more slowly or to add more “color” to their presentation and not just list the facts. We also ask the audience to specifically watch for three things: • What worked well? Especially, specific observable behaviors linking back to all the skills we have discussed throughout the day and with a focus on what the presenter mentioned they were working on. • What is this person’s “super power,” meaning, that special quality or strength that distinguishes them and gives them an edge as soon as they walk into the room (e.g., warmth, youthful exuberance, scientific expertise)? • What is ONE thing that would make the presentation even better? As the speaker presents to the rest of the group, a fellow participant records the presentation on the speaker’s phone. Once the speaker is finished, we ask them for some self-assessment, encouraging them to start with positive feedback (this almost never happens). Then we facilitate a discussion around the three questions above with the audience. Up to this point, our practice feels relatively standard, but next we sprinkle a little AI into the mix. Rather than ending with the giving of feedback or a simple redirect like “be louder,” we ask the speaker to give their presentation again, this time offering specific performance redirections that are often playful and scenario-based. We design these redirections, similarly to the Do It As If exercise, more to help participants expand their capacity and range than to find the one “right” way a presentation can be done. The redirections come from a store of ideas we have gathered over the years and impulses we have on the spot. Some examples of our redirections include:

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• Marion speaks consistently too fast; we direct her to perform a minute of her presentation as a 150-year-old yogi dispensing wisdom. • Joe has trouble making eye-contact; we set up that we are a skeptical jury that he, a powerful lawyer, needs to convince. • Mohammad tells his story with great authority but is stiff and monotone; we instruct him to tell it again as if it is a ghost story told to seven-year-olds around a campfire. Some of our directions are more physical than psychological, primarily working from the outside in: • Sonia speaks quietly and without confidence; we place another participant at the other end of the room and ask Sonia to imagine she is standing in the endzone of a football field and must project physically and vocally to be clearly understood by her partner. • We have Juanita pick three places in the room and move deliberately from one to the other to keep her from pacing. • We have Chris move back and forth from really low-status to really high-status physicality while sitting in front of a screen as he presents virtually. No matter how we direct them, we clearly state that we are playing and that this is not how we expect people to perform in real life. What astonishes them as they expand their range and try on these supposedly ridiculous ways of being is how often their colleagues say they look great and could absolutely show up just like that in reality. This reaction is why we record. What we look like and what we feel like when we stretch outside our habitual ways of being are vastly different. More often than not, participants report watching their recordings and being pleasantly surprised at the results. The results of our play show that our expanded range provides many more useful options than the participants might have anticipated. As we subversively apply the principles and tools we introduced in the morning (status flexibility, storytelling, connection to audience) in these extreme ways, our participants try on new ways of being that they begin to recognize are not so outrageous after all.

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Adapting in the Moment Having set the foundation on Day 1, we spend Day 2 raising the bar of difficulty in a number of ways, addressing the reallife challenges our participants run into: dealing with resistance, handling objections, managing technical issues, and co-facilitation. Although the details differ, one improvisation principle underlies everything in this section—the Yes, And principle. The afternoon of Day 2 is spent with subgroups of participants crafting and delivering real presentations that they will then show to their bosses. The topic is: “A Change We Would Like to See.” These are not the pro bono client projects they will work on as the culmination of Catapult College, but a chance to practice and apply the skills from Day 1 holistically and in groups. Topics over the years have included: Improve the Recycling Program, Institute a Shorter Work Week, Bring Pets to Work, and Offer Daily Yoga.

Results Measuring the results of training can confound even the best data scientists, so we will tread lightly with our claims. We must acknowledge that Koppett’s course sits alongside others in Catapult College—courses on writing, business management, client and project management. We are always the first to tell our clients that true professional and personal development does not come from a one-off training event any more than getting in shape results from one trip to the gym. With that disclaimer in place, we will admit to taking pride and delight in the reports we hear from our H4B graduates. Over the last eight years, feedback from the participants has been exceptional, especially for our course, and the program got a reputation for having “life-impact,” not just “work-impact.” Participants have said: • The presentation skills, bits, and tips [Koppett] equipped us with are something we will take with us throughout the corporate world and even into our personal lives. • Not only did Kat teach us how to give presentations that make the most of each of our individual styles and talents;

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she taught us how to listen effectively, communicate appropriately in our work setting, and strengthen our leadership skills. • Although some of Kat’s methods were initially jarring, all were designed to inspire comfort in ourselves through the powers of external observation and internal reflection. She taught us the phrase Yes, And, which is a positive and powerful response to questions as opposed to the negative and dismissive “Well, but … ” or other non-affirmatives. • Kat’s training session reminded members of the class why we went to work at an ad agency in the first place. In addition to personal skill development, a number of the internal initiatives worked on in the course were actually pitched and implemented. Recycling has been upgraded, wellness programs improved, and work schedules modified. The Catapult College program has evolved over time as well. Our course was originally offered toward the end of the program as the participants were preparing to present to the pro bono clients. After the first couple years, two big changes were made. First, our communications intensive was moved to the beginning of Catapult College, recognizing the value of play and deep listening in helping the participants bond as a cohort, in addition to giving them the presentation tools and shared language to weave throughout the few months. Second, the team competition aspect was retired because the participants worked so collaboratively with each other, and the work was so good that the clients accepted both pitches and combined the best ideas from both teams. Eventually, the agency started having the participants create work for and pitch work to real existing clients rather than having them do pro bono work for adopted nonprofits. The feeling from within the agency, and from clients who heard about the program, was that the quality of the work coming out of Catapult College was good enough that these real clients could benefit from the output of these developmental teams, and the clients themselves started to offer up projects on spec. The work produced was received very favorably. Nine years after the start of the program, a significant number of participants have remained at Havas and worked their way up to higher leadership positions. Other Havas member agencies are looking to replicate the program.

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What We Learned The opportunity to deliver this course over a number of years has been highly developmental for the Koppett facilitators as well. This course not only allowed us to iterate and hone but required us to expertly practice what we preach. If we dared to facilitate a course on how to present, lead, tell stories, and listen, we had better be darned good at those things. In addition, when we first began our work at Havas in 2013, we thought a great deal about creating “comfortable” environments. We knew our client, as much as they theoretically valued what we did, also felt nervous about it. Frankly, we did too. Could we mention improv straight on? Did we have to couch our approach in academic or corporate jargon to sneak it past the doubters? How much could we push people? What kind of activities could we do? What if people felt uncomfortable? Would they like us less? Trust us less? Learn less? Not want us back? Over the years, our Catapult College participants taught us that they valued the discomfort. Our gym metaphor arose from our work here. As we have reflected on the difference between safety and comfort, so has the world around us, for example, universities currently struggle with the topic and the work of Amy Edmondson (2019) on psychological safety in work teams, a topic that exploded on the corporate scene years prior.8 Luckily for us, the principles of improv once again align with the most cutting-edge research. In this case, our shift from thinking about keeping people comfortable to creating a space where they were comfortable with discomfort allowed them to grow and go deeper. Time and again we found that when we practiced what we were preaching we succeeded. Finally, we discovered that the greatest fulfillment for ourselves and our students came from surfing the polarity of structure and spontaneity that lies at the heart of improvisation itself. When we as facilitators stuck too closely to a pre-ordained agenda, we missed precious chances to respond to participants’ insights and needs in the moment. On the other hand, if we completely disrespected our prepared flow, we often left behind valuable content that our thoughtful planning included for a reason. And no matter what choice we made, there were always myriad other possible right choices—and probably a number of not so right ones. What a challenge. What a delight. The gift of Catapult College for us turned

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out to be a deeper appreciation of the techniques we shared, for their simplicity, for their complexity, for their nuance, and for their bottom line practicality in helping our clients increase their ability to lead and influence. What is true for our participants and true for us as facilitators is true for us all. We are all performing all the time. Whether we are pitching a campaign, leading a team, facilitating a workshop, hanging out with our kids, or rallying a political movement, when we can expand our conscious awareness of the choices we make and the impact those choices have, we open up possibilities for ourselves. When we expand our range of options, we increase our influence, build more trusting and fulfilling relationships, and achieve our objectives more effectively and efficiently. How do we increase our awareness and range? As we said in the beginning: Improv is the gym.

Postscript As the world reels from the effects of a global pandemic, highlighting and exacerbating already dire crises including economic inequality, social and political polarization, and climate change, we at Koppett find ourselves fixated on two thoughts. First, we are fascinated by what is not different at this moment. Not to overstate the point, of course, some lives have been inextricably altered, many many lives have been lost. But in terms of the conversations we are having with clients, what people bemoan and ask for remains the same. We want connection. We struggle with focus. We seek clarity, purpose, safety, respect, and a sense of belonging. We dislike uncertainty, loneliness, fear, and boredom. Given this, perhaps we should not be surprised that even our most interactive, experiential programs have successfully transferred to virtual space. At first, we asked what can we do online? Now we simply ask the same questions we always did: What are the desired performance outcomes? What are the performance gaps? How can we most effectively close them? Now and then we run into a logistical issue and adapt an activity to address it—just as we would have in an in-person space if we found ourselves in a room with a large conference table instead of an open space in which to move around. That said, see Table 1.4 for some of the logistical tips we offer for translating Presence to Virtual Space.

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TABLE 1.4  Playing your instrument in virtual space (© 2011 Koppett) In Virtual Space Body

Check in with your breath and body, whether you are sitting or standing. Move so you are in the center of your screen.

Movement

Be easily seen using lighting and camera position. All movements are magnified.

Hands and Gestures

Use slow, deliberate movements. Make sure the audience can see your hands from time to time.

Eye Contact

Look directly into the camera to look at the audience.

Voice (VTIPS)

Make sure you are easy to hear. Use a highquality external mic if possible.

Words and Pauses

Silence and pauses are rare in virtual space, but they are powerful.

Manage Focus

Close programs you don’t need and turn off notifications.

The second thought we find ourselves coming back to time and again is this: improvisors were made for this moment. What has always been true is simply more obvious to us all now—we are not promised tomorrow; we cannot know what will happen next. Skills and mindsets that allow us to surf uncertainty and chaos and accept and build with whatever exists in the moment are the most precious tools we can possibly have. Bottom line, reader? You have come to the right place! Be well.

Notes 1 For more on Johnstone’s original ideas on status, read the “Status” chapter in Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). For more on status in an AI context, see Chapter 7 in this anthology and Chapters 10 and 11 in Dudeck and McClure (2018). 2 Status can also be determined by how we relate to the space or room we occupy and to the objects within that space. For example, the height of a cathedral is intended to make a human feel low in status.

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A dirty subway bench might unearth high-status behaviors. When you leave your comfortable personal office and walk into your boss’s office, your status to the space may go from high to low, and so forth. At some point, Adam’s Story Spine made its way through improvisation coaches to the animators at Pixar and was eventually published among their storytelling tips and is known in some circles as “Pixar’s Story Spine” or “The Pixar Pitch” (Pink 2012). Johnstone (1999) uses the term “tilt” to point to an event that disrupts the status quo, that is, tilting a static routine and throwing characters into the unknown future. See tenet Be Obvious in Appendix A. For more on storytelling and these tools, see Koppett (2013) and Adams (2007). Participant names are made up. Edmondson defines psychological safety as: “The belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. The concept refers to the experience of feeling able to speak up with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able—even obligated—to be candid” (2019: 586).

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WORKBOOK 1.1 Do It As If In this exercise, participants tell a story to a partner while receiving a series of performance instructions on slides only they can see. The goal is for the storytellers to playfully expand their range of performance and begin to go outside their “comfort zone.” By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • exercised their spontaneity, • taken risks to perform in unfamiliar ways, • celebrated playfulness, • explored the difference between authentic and habitual behavior, and • expanded their sense of their performance range.

Running the Exercise 1. Before running the exercise, create twenty slides with performance directions. Include a combination of attitudes, physical directions, and character traits, such as “You are a mouse,” “You are running an auction,” “Your body is made completely of fingers,” “You are a drill sergeant,” “It’s a secret,” or “You are Elvis.” Put a “Stop” slide after the first ten slides. 2. Ask participants to stand up and find a partner and position themselves in the room with one participant facing the screen (Participant A) and the other facing the partner, with his or her back to the screen (Participant B). 3. Instruct Participant A to think of a short story to share. It can be anything—the story of that morning, a story he or she often tells at parties, the summary of a fairy tale. Make it clear that the content is not the focus of the exercise. 4. Tell Participant A that, as the slides are revealed, he or she must continue their story using each new direction. 5. Start the slide deck. Stay on each slide long enough to allow Participant A to try something new and experience it before advancing to the next slide (approximately 10–15 seconds per slide).

IMPROV IS THE GYM

6. When you have reached the first “Stop” slide, instruct participants to give their partners a round of applause and have them switch positions and roles. 7. Repeat with Participant B by advancing through the next ten slides.

Debrief • What was it like to perform with direction? • Which directions were hard? Which ones were easy? • What did you discover about your performance range? Did you do some things you wouldn’t normally do? • What did you notice about your partner’s performance range? • How does having more performance options help us connect with an audience? • What is the difference between authenticity and habit? • What does it mean to be authentic in presentations?

Suggestions • It’s important to note that we are not advocating for participants to present as if they’re Sylvester Stallone or as if their hair were on fire. This exercise is designed to flex and discover range. • Use references that are culturally appropriate and familiar (not everyone knows Sylvester Stallone). • During debrief, listen for expressions of comfort and discomfort. Listen for when participants equate “comfort” with “authenticity.” Listen for delight with the partner’s performance and validate.

Online Delivery Option 1: Simultaneous workouts 1. Share instructions (3) and (4) above. 2. Have all participants do the exercise simultaneously. They can choose to have their cameras on or off with their sound unmuted

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or muted, depending on their level of comfort, as you project the slides with the performance instructions. 3. Debrief as above.

Option 2: Small breakout groups with a coach 1. In groups of three or four, participants take turns performing for each other. 2. Give the general instructions before sending participants to breakout rooms. 3. Instruct participants to choose an order (A, B, C, D). 4. Participant A goes first, Participant B reads instructions for them as they are broadcast to the room. Participants C and D observe. 5. After every seven or eight slides, broadcast instructions to rotate and continue until everyone has been the storyteller. 6. Call participants back to the main room and debrief.

Connections: For another exercise that encourages participants to expand their performance range and to try on new behaviors outside of their comfort zone, try Keith Johnstone’s (1999) FastFood Stanislavsky.

1.2 Here’s What I Heard In this exercise, participants take turns sharing a pet peeve or annoying incident. The goal is for the listeners to “read between the lines” and share what they think their partner’s values, emotions, and intentions are. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • exercised their listening muscles, • learned how to listen for positive offers underneath complaints, and • felt the power of being listened to with empathy.

IMPROV IS THE GYM

Running the Exercise 1. Have participants find a partner and decide who will be Participant A and who will be Participant B. 2. Instruct Participant A to share a pet peeve or annoying incident. The stories should be true, about 60–90 seconds long, and from any period or aspect of his or her life, whether personal (“It drives me crazy when my spouse criticizes my clothes”) or professional (“My boss put me in charge of a project and then micromanaged every step of it”). 3. Tell Participant B to listen only—no interrupting or asking questions. 4. When Participant A finishes, Participant B then feeds back two things: a. “Here’s what I heard you say” (facts, exact words) b. “Here’s what I hear you care about” (values, needs, goals) 5. Participant A does not have to affirm or deny what Participant B says but is free to share if something especially resonates. 6. Participants then switch roles and repeat the exercise.

Debrief • How was it to listen in this way? • What was different from how you typically listen? What do you habitually listen for and what did you catch this time? • How did your experience change knowing you would have to repeat the story you were hearing? • What was it like to be listened to in this way? • How does this kind of listening help you? • Moving forward, what will you do differently?

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Suggestions During debrief, make sure to underscore that the point of the exercise is not to literally use these phrases whenever you are listening to someone. They are practicing their ability to listen in deeper, broader, and more nuanced ways, training to listen for all four kinds of offers: facts, values, needs, and goals.

Online Delivery Option 1: Fishbowl sharing 1. Either you or one volunteer participant shares a pet peeve or annoying incident. 2. Facilitate the rest of the group through the listening steps collectively. a. “Here’s what I heard you say” b. “Here’s what I hear you care about” 3. Debrief as above.

Option 2: Small groups in pairs or triads 1. In groups of two or three participants, run the exercise as designed above. 2. Give the general instructions before sending participants to breakout rooms. (You may choose to model with Option 1 first.) 3. Instruct participants to choose an order. Participant A goes first, Participant B listens. (If there is a Participant C, then B and C can work as a team.) 4. After five minutes (2 minutes for the story, 3 minutes for discussion), broadcast instructions to switch roles. 5. Call participants back to the main room and debrief.

Connections: For other listening exercises, try What They Said in Chapter 1 (p. 42), Radical Relationality (Workbook 9.2), and the Active Listening exercise in Bowles and Nadon (2013).

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1.3 Color/Advance This exercise is designed to help storytellers distinguish between the descriptive details (color) of a story and its narrative action (advance). In pairs, one participant tells a story and the other acts as a coach, cuing the storyteller to “color” something they mention or to “advance” the action. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • gained a better appreciation for overlooked elements of their story, • become more flexible in responsive storytelling, • recognized their personal strengths and preferences when storytelling, and • gained a better understanding of their story listening preferences.

Running the Exercise 1. Have the participants find a partner and decide who will be Participant A and Participant B. 2. Explain that Participant A will begin by telling a story, either something Participant A has been working on for a presentation, one he or she often tells, or one made up in the moment, depending on the context and program objectives. 3. Tell Participant B that he or she will be the storytelling coach and can do one of two things: • say “advance” when Participant A should move the action of the story forward, or • say “color the _______” when the coach wants to hear more details about something Participant A has mentioned. 4. Give examples of the different types of details that can be colored, such as people, objects, environments, emotions, data, and events. For example, if Participant A mentions a meeting with her boss, B could say, “Color the meeting.” Participant A

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might say, “This is our regular Thursday four o’clock meeting, in my boss’s office, which is gloomy, has three dead plants and a flickering lightbulb.” 5. Explain that when the coach says “advance,” the storyteller should continue with the action of the story, concentrating on moving the narrative forward. When the coach says “color,” the storyteller must continue to provide additional details until the coach again says “advance”—even if it feels uncomfortable! The point is for Participant A to exercise both storytelling skills: description and action. Take the pressure off the storyteller by emphasizing that it is the coach’s responsibility—not the storyteller’s—to make a good story or presentation. 6. Instruct the coach to take risks, rather than worry about offering prompts at the “right” moment. The point is not to create the most appropriate version of the story but to play with it and discover new things. Encourage the coach to offer a prompt approximately every fifteen seconds. 7. Demonstrate the exercise with a volunteer, if desired. (If you are the sole facilitator, take the role of coach. It is more important to model good coaching, as good storytelling results are not the main goal of the exercise.) 8. Let the exercise run for 3–4 minutes. 9. Cue the participants to switch roles and repeat the exercise.

Debrief • When you were storytellers: � How did it feel to be led? � Did you find it easier to advance or to color? � How did the action and the description influence each other? � If this was a story you had told before, what did you discover about it?

IMPROV IS THE GYM

• When you were coaches: � How did you decide when to call “color” and “advance”? � What sorts of items did you color? � How compelling were the stories that your partners told? • What is the power of being able to color effectively? • What is the value of being able to advance? • How many of you feel like you are better storytellers than you thought? • What will you apply to your storytelling in the future? • How else might you use this concept of awareness?

Online Delivery If breakout rooms are not available, the exercise can be demonstrated with volunteers: one storyteller and one coach or one storyteller and multiple coaches. No major modifications are necessary for this exercise if breakout rooms are available. 1. Verbally explain the instructions and distribute them in written form (e.g., in the chat) before sending pairs of participants to breakout rooms. 2. At two minutes send a one-minute warning, and at three minutes have partners switch roles. 3. At five minutes send a one-minute warning, and at six minutes close the breakout rooms.

Connections: This exercise was originally adapted from Viola Spolin’s (1999) Explore and Heighten game and Freestyle Repertory Theatre and published in Training to Imagine (Koppett 2013).

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2 The Business School Collaboration Lab: Turning Leader Development into a Rigorous Experiment in Creative Collaboration Pamela Burke

Pamela Burke builds collaborative learning environments with companies and universities. Her early work leading innovation teams at Bell Laboratories led her to love curious people who strive to craft more generative futures for their teams and the world. Now, as a leadership development consultant, adjunct instructor, and perennial improv beginner, Pam’s creativity playground is broader than she imagined when she completed her social psychology PhD at Cornell and post-doc at Stanford University. Her recent research asks the question: How can we foster breakthrough collaborative curiosity in 100 percent remote work environments?

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Traditional business school classes use case studies, articles, models, and discussion to help students learn the myriad practices and approaches necessary to successfully lead organizations. For years, I followed that same approach, but despite great class discussions, structured reflection, and detailed individual development plans, my students still did not see themselves as creative, skillful, or brave enough to truly effect change. When I was honest with myself, I questioned if this education changed anyone’s behavior in a significant way. The trouble is the stakes are high: these students and their employers are investing huge amounts of time and money to develop leaders who will be successful in today’s constantly changing and complex business conditions. That means business leaders must be able to bring groups together despite vast differences in experience and perspectives and lead innovation in all parts of the business and at every level. The best teams cross every boundary, listen, imagine, and collaborate their way to exceptional business results—business leaders must be able to foster the conditions for their teams to do so. My graduates left their programs wanting to be this kind of leader but not knowing how to use or grow this ability to lead collaboratively. Nine years ago I was given free rein to turn my curriculum inside out and invite cohorts of Executive MBA students at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, to create their own improvisational learning lab. If I offered the space, tools, and provocation to cultivate improvisational mindsets and the skills needed for breakthrough thinking and innovation, would they embrace the challenge? Would this result in sustainable change in collaborative behavior? Ultimately, Leading Creative Collaboration became the final required semester-long course in the leadership segment of the degree program. As an applied playground for developing skills and confidence by doing, it also became a lab for my own development as a facilitator, improviser, and novice ensemble director. This is the story of this discovery lab—theirs, mine, and ours—where improvisation became our lab bench.

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Overview of the Leading Creative Collaboration Course Structure and Students Leading Creative Collaboration (LCC) is a three-credit, one-semester course offered in the third and final year of a three-year, part-time EMBA program, where the “E” stands for experienced. All students have multiple years’ professional experience, primarily in technologydriven industries like finance, pharma, telecommunications, cosmetics, construction, and computer technologies. Students are representative of the diversity of technology professionals in the United States with cultural backgrounds from India, China, Iran, Turkey, Europe, and elsewhere. Roughly two-thirds are male and ages have ranged from twenty-two to sixty. On-campus courses run for four hours every other Saturday, eight times per semester. LCC typically meets in the afternoons after a four-hour class in corporate finance.

Course Components There are four main components of the course: Content Topics, Readings, Leadership Learning Teams, and Assignments. 1. Content Topics: The semester is divided into three “Acts”— (1) The Creative Self, (2) Foundation Collaboration Skills, and (3) Leading Organizations (each with mini-lectures, readings, and course activities). 2. Readings: Two required texts provide some structure to our discussions—Cathy Salit’s Performance Breakthrough: A Radical Approach to Success at Work (2016) and Keith Sawyer’s Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity (2013). These are supplemented with dozens of articles from the business press.1 3. Leadership Learning Teams: Each of the eight 4-hour classes includes new topic content and improvisation exercises initiated either by me, the instructor, or the Leadership Learning teams. On the first day of class, people

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FIGURE 2.1  Leadership Learning team planning (Photo by P. Burke).

volunteer for one of these five Leadership Learning teams. Each team has a mission to accomplish and their success is rated by their fellow students at the end of the course. The missions are: • Brain Gym Team: run a bootcamp to exercise and build our creative muscles. • Self-Awareness Team: coach us to observe, appreciate, and build on our creative, collaborative experiences. • Class Collaboration Space Team: create an online space so inviting we build community, deepen discussion, and share challenges every day. • Knowledge Distillery Team: facilitate maximum learning and growth from the readings. • Consultants Team: ensure we apply what we’ve learned to our workplaces. All teams provide structure, provocation for change, and opportunities for shared reflection for others while using their teams as mini-collaboration labs for themselves. Cross-team collaboration becomes a key learning point as teams create—and then knock down—silos. 4. Assignments: We start with self-assessments and individual Play Dates and move into collaborative assignments as

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the semester progresses, described in more detail below. Between their ongoing missions and online discussions in the Class Collaboration space, students work on collaborative projects with people from other teams throughout the course.

Setting the Stage When new students walk into the learning lab, they see tables and chairs jumbled at the periphery and whiteboards on three walls. Fast Zydeco accordion music plays from the speakers. The ten to twenty-five mostly male students hesitate, looking for a place to plug in their computers and a table to sit behind. One whiteboard says, “Drop your stuff somewhere, you don’t need anything for this class.” Really? The discomfort rises as they gather in the middle of the room, nothing in their hands. Their crossed arms tell me most are here because it is a mandatory class. If they’ve read the syllabus in advance, they should expect to be uncomfortable but knowing that doesn’t seem to make them any happier. We move around the room keeping a beach ball in the air without touching it twice in a row while counting each hit out loud.2 When the ball hits the floor, with groans and whoops, the game begins again starting from “1.” I occasionally pause the game to ask them if the way we are each behaving is similar to how the cohort usually behaves together. The discussion begins to unpack the cultural norms that we each bring with us as we attempt to form our new “organization.” As the teacher, I am constantly trying to balance offering enough structure and provocation to advance and deepen the conversation with a lot of space, sometimes uncomfortable space, for students to begin to see that they are responsible for creating the climate of the room, not me. For instance, I may ask them to share what they are noticing. They may say that they notice that the competitive, outgoing, and talkative students are “all in.” The students who hang back are the same ones who roll their eyes when certain peers take all the airtime in other classes. I ask them to sign the ball with a marker—a tangible reminder that this is their ball and their climate—and go back to the game, side-coaching them to “show up.” “Showing up here means showing up with all you are. Give yourself permission. Decide to commit to yourself and

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the team.” The game becomes livelier and the counts soar. I breathe easier seeing once again how offering a game with rules enables even the most reticent people to engage. We move chairs into two concentric circles, creating a fishbowl for four talkers in the middle and enough chairs for the whole group around them. Our Four-Chair Fishbowl rules are: When in the middle, be part of the conversation. You choose when to be in a talking or a listening chair. In the middle, add thoughts, change the topic, have your say, and then leave to open a chair for someone else to hop into the talking space from outside. When you are outside, you are the audience—listen. The topic we discuss is what creativity and collaboration look like in their lives and how the culture that this cohort has developed over two years embodies—or doesn’t yet embody—the creativity and collaborative leadership skills that this course will require. If we become an improv troupe that creates its own experiential learning lab where each of us is essential to the collective, what might that look and feel like? Their bodies unwind as they lean in to listen and make eye contact in the small circle. After roughly thirty minutes we end the fishbowl. In the debrief, people notice how easy it was for them to stay focused and interested in the discussion, because they were responsible for choosing when to talk and when to listen and, in either case, always had a role to play in “the scene.”3 Most haven’t attempted to define creativity or collaboration before and volunteer that the conversation made them more interested in the course material. I’m relieved that they’re convincing each other to be interested, rather than me telling them why they should be. This first day is an experiential introduction to a new way of learning together. After only one hour, everyone has revealed something no one else knows about them, even after working together for two years. Only at this point, once we’ve started to create a sense of ensemble, do I explain how the class is structured and what is expected of them.

Act 1. The Creative Self: Creativity, Imagination, Curiosity, Play, Mindfulness The first objective for Act 1, the first third of the course, is for students to recognize and challenge their mindsets about their personal

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creativity, imagination, curiosity, playfulness, and mindfulness. The content is focused on raising awareness about the value of these skills, assessing current strengths and blind spots, and expanding skills and confidence. The second objective of Act 1 is to scaffold the course supporting structures. The scaffolding includes continuously driving connections between the Leadership Learning team experiments, readings, and the application of what we are doing to the “real world.” These early forays into collaborative leadership and learning are essential to achieving the overall course mission which is: to enhance the capacity of all members to be creative and collaborative so we can lead others to address meaningful problems and possibilities everywhere we find them.

Act 1 Content Shared by Teacher and Students The job of each Leadership Learning team is to introduce course concepts through experiential exercises, either of their own invention or soliciting input from me. The Brain Gym team might stretch creativity skills by having teams combine a set of random objects into an invention. The Self-Awareness team might invite sensory awareness by blindfolding everyone and having them rate characteristics of soft drinks. The Knowledge Distillery team might share the relevance of a reading to their own lives. The Consultants team might make people practice envisioning the future by having them draw themselves solving a challenge they face at work. In particular, the Collaboration Space team plays a vital role sparking continuous exposure to class ideas and maintaining spontaneous conversation between class sessions. While usually fun, more importantly, being able to promote useful and inclusive asynchronous discussions is now an essential job skill as more companies use online networking tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams for fast cross-hierarchy, cross-location, cross-project collaboration.4 Early in the semester students use the online space to share news articles and videos about creativity, photos, questions, completed assignments proposed by other teams, and inside jokes. In the best semesters, the Collaboration Space team accelerates participation by creating activities like asking each team to design a logo or post a photo of a 3D self-portrait created from items on their desks. Seeing

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themselves on the threads makes the space personal and reflective rather than academic, which reminds leaders that in the workplace they have a role in creating the psychological safety (Reynolds and Lewis 2018) and personal vulnerability that teams need to excel. Teams request class time in advance without telling me how they’ll use it. On average, three or four of the teams engage the class each session creating nearly half the class content. I arrive to class with objectives and supplementary exercises to round out and drive home key points. During Act 1, I add games and exercises like Neva Boyd’s Kitty Wants a Corner (Spolin 1999) and Salit’s Be a Beginner (2016) that make people experiment with showing up differently and take even bigger risks with what they bring to the class. If no team brings a curiosity exercise, I use the Performing Curiosity Bookstore exercise (Workbook 2.1) to practice approaching topics and people with an open mind. To prepare people for the Play Date assignment (below), I have each student write and share their own play history using prompts from Stuart Brown’s book, Play (2009), in class. The room gets loud as people describe how they loved building kites as a kid or what it felt like to pitch a tent in their backyard. Many realize that they no longer experience the kinds of play they once loved, which motivates them to embrace the assignment.

FIGURE 2.2  Performing Curiosity Bookstore (Photo by P. Burke).

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Act 1 Assignments Readings The readings in Act 1 explore the connection between creativity and business success (Brodhursen et al. 2017), the imperative for lifelong play (Brown 2009), how curiosity drives continuous growth (Kashdan et al. 2009), fostering creative thinking in groups (Sawyer 2013), accessing different ways of using your brain (Carson 2010), and the many benefits of allowing oneself to be a beginner (Salit 2016). The readings, which use theory and data to make the case for self-awareness and growth, provide the theoretical grounding and credibility necessary to make students come to class willing to give me the benefit of the doubt that the “crazy” things we do in the classroom will have value. In turn, they often share these readings with others in their workplaces, helping to break down any resistance they may encounter as they implement the same collaborative practices we are co-creating in our Learning Lab.

Self-assessments The purpose of taking these assessments early is to keep the concepts of creativity and curiosity front-of-mind for experimentation throughout the course. We tie many class activities back to the data and debrief how specific exercises expand their repertoires. Everyone retakes the assessments in the final week as they question what is different individually and collectively because of their work together. We start with a self-assessment directly from the Sawyer (2013) text. Students check off behaviors they do regularly related to eight categories of creativity practices.5 They’re often surprised that they score lower than expected on areas they perceive as strengths like “thinking,” “choosing,” “asking,” and “learning,” and even more surprised that “looking,” “playing,” “fusing,” and “making” practices have fallen off their radar as adults. The Kashdan Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (Kashdan et al. 2009) shows how much they challenge themselves to experience new things and how much they enjoy the uncertainty of engaging in new experiences. Most students in the cohort score around the norm, which provides a benchmark for those who want to increase their curiosity.

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The Carson Brainset States inventory (Carson 2010) shows how people differ on the ease and frequency of shifting into different mental states using the “CREATES” framework: connecting, reasoning, envisioning, absorbing, transforming, evaluating, and streaming. Here, many students see that they rely more heavily on reasoning and evaluation brain states than states that foster novel thinking and imagination. They typically activate deliberate mental pathways involving explicit planning and intent, more so than spontaneous pathways that allow unexpected insights to emerge. Discussing this inventory encourages students to value and build a more varied creative thinking repertoire while congratulating them on the strengths that they already use so well.

Play Date The only instruction is “Do something fun that you deliberately choose to do that you might not have done without this assignment, and write two paragraphs on what you did and what you learned about yourself.” The Play Date assignment gives people permission and an excuse to reconnect with things that bring them joy. Some choose physical play like biking, hiking, dancing, or joining a pick-up basketball game at the park. Others “say yes” to social activities they wouldn’t create for themselves, like joining friends at a Korean bar’s karaoke night or playing table tennis with someone they don’t know well at work. Some describe deliberately taking risks such as going on the roller coaster with their kid even though they usually “just watch.” Others relish having time to themselves to go for a massage, take a guitar lesson, write poetry, lock themselves in the bathroom to practice makeup contouring, use the kids’ trampoline when no-one is home, or fix and play an old computer game system their kids have never heard of. What emerges from the first few classes about creativity, imagination, spontaneity, play, and being a beginner shifts us all from knowing to curiosity, from proving to becoming, and from protective isolation to enlivened interdependence. They begin to see these same patterns (knowing, proving, protective isolation) at play in the workplace and how they limit them as leaders. I’ve learned to begin classes asking what they did for fun since we were last together. Play becomes part of the course lore, owned by the

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students, not me. It shows up in postings on the class collaboration site with videos of people racing in dinosaur costumes. Play shows up in the creativity of the leadership learning team activities and as an imperative in the team advice videos that they record for the next cohort. The scaffolding provided by theory, assignments, class activities, and conversation focused on play prepares the group to embrace the improvisation and vulnerability required to achieve the objectives of Act 2.

Act 2. Foundation Collaboration Mindsets and Skills: Listening, Hearing Offers, Yes And, Making the Other Look Good, Creative Abrasion The objective in Act 2 is to embrace this possibility: a person can be a successful professional and still miss major opportunities for personal and business success, because they don’t use foundation collaboration skills that no one talks about and no one teaches. The material explicitly teaches improv skills and demonstrates how these skills make professionals better at things they do on their jobs everyday—listening to understand others’ ideas, facilitating purposeful and creative meetings, surfacing and resolving conflicts, influencing decisions through story, and creating inclusive environments where diverse perspectives lead to innovation.

Act 2 Class Content As described so well in this and other books on applied improvisation, we practice listening, empathy, skillful discussion, and creative abrasion through the improv tenets of hearing offers, using Yes, And, and making the other look good. Depending on what the Leadership Learning teams bring, I might add classic improv exercises like Mirror (Spolin 1999: 61) to embody alignment, Conversation with a Time Traveler (Salit as cited in Pink 2016: 91) to practice perspective taking, or Counting, How High? (Lobman and Lundquist 2007: 41) to listen to the whole system. We

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FIGURE 2.3  Constructive Debate (Photo by P. Burke).

always use some creative abrasion formats, meaning activities that spark vigorous debate to challenge perspectives (Leonard and Swap 2005: 20), like Argue Like a Philosopher and Constructive Debate (Workbooks 2.2 and 2.3). Starting with Salit’s admonition to “Be Brave” (2016), we take a hard look at the habits we have that guarantee lousy conversations then practice deeply listening in a structured conversation. Then we challenge ourselves to make listening our priority behavior or, in Salit’s terms, our priority performance. Part of being brave is willingness to listen to others’ experience with an open heart without judgment, even when it makes us uncomfortable. To further prime them for the conversation to come, I show an internet video from 2010 (“Sustained Dialogue”) of groups of students displaying excellent listening and empathy skills as they discuss their experience of race relations in the United States. Rarely has this style of deep listening been demonstrated for them. I ask people to find a partner who they perceive as most different from them, and then to find another pair that is most different from the two of them. With the lights dim for a more intimate setting, each foursome takes turns listening to each other’s stories from this prompt: “Describe a personal experience that shapes how you see, feel, and understand difference in the world.” Although I facilitate conversations about race and difference in other settings and know we’ve created a supportive space for these conversations here, my adrenaline still rises as I watch each person lean in to listen to the others. With their partner they do what Salit asks, which is to be in the same scene and stay there, meaning they hold

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eye contact, mirror nonverbal signals, and respond to what is being exchanged in the moment rather than focusing on what’s going on in their heads. In the whole-class debrief, people articulate what true listening looks and feels like and appreciate the power and vulnerability of committing to learn about each other. This conversation practice changes them: As a cohort, they have deepened their trust immeasurably. As leaders, they are being given the skills to influence the conditions in their workplace to contribute to authentic listening to diverse ideas. Teams have brought countless Yes, And exercises to their cohorts. One Knowledge Distillery Team designed an exercise called Portrait to communicate the observations by Keith Sawyer in his “Jazz Freddy” example in Group Genius (2017: 19–20) about adding to a scene, even if what you add doesn’t end up going anywhere. People were asked to sit in two lines across from each other. Each person on one side held a small canvas and a marker. Each drew a line or feature of the person across from them. Then that line of people stood up and moved one chair to the right leaving their artwork on their previous chair. They picked up their new canvas and added a line or feature to the portrait of the new person sitting across from them until everyone on that side had contributed to every portrait. Then the lines switched sides and the sitters became the artists. Besides experiencing hearing offers, Yes, And, and making the other look good, students were surprised and proud of the results, even I remember watching the video on people having candid conversations around how they perceived their life experiences from different backgrounds. We were asked to connect with the person most unlike us in the class, and I believe we all walked away with such incredible respect for the person we might not have been able to see before. If the world needs more of anything, it is this. (Student from 2018 cohort) In a very strange way, I needed this course. The ideas and methods presented were eye-opening to me personally. Listening and play for example were not in my consciousness. Now, at the end of the journey, they are forefront in my mind. (Student from 2019 cohort)6

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though all had groaned about their lack of artistic ability when given the task. They experienced Sawyer’s premise that improvised innovation is full of mistakes, good ideas don’t always get noticed, yet innovation can’t happen if people don’t risk adding something new to the mix. One student from the 2018 cohort clearly made the connection between this exercise and leadership: “In order for a portrait to look like the person we draw, each one of us needs to not only observe the person being drawn, but also needs to pay attention to the lines and curves other classmates previously drew on the canvas. Only through creative collaboration, a portrait can take shape.”

Act 2 Assignments Readings Salit’s (2016) text combined with many business press articles on teaming, the value of group diversity, and innovation through conflict provides the context and rationale for improving improv skills.

Application Project About halfway through the semester, students complete the Application Project either alone or with others. The task is to choose a problem or possibility that has significant personal meaning and then explore the topic and potential solutions by applying a dozen or more tools and ideas from the course books and discussion. Topics range from deeply personal desires (repairing a marriage, building lifelong close relationships with children, supporting a spouse starting a medical practice, planning and having a wedding in two weeks, making the most of living in New York City while working crazy hours, fulfilling a lifelong dream of becoming a lyricist by writing Hindi songs), to community dilemmas (creative ways to debate and resolve town re-zoning and development project controversies, starting a voluntary community health clinic for immigrant seniors), to workplace change projects (influencing the company to offer on-site daycare, increasing creative collaboration across manufacturing and product design), to technology innovations that address societal

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This course was strange, in the best sense of the word …. The ideas and methods of this course are different. The teaching style and environment of the classroom are different. The class activities were different and uncomfortable at times. But as we moved on and the course progressed, it became clear that this was exactly the point (Student from 2019 cohort). For me personally, I was so impressed with how well the transformative thinking worked for us on the Application paper, that I have tried to focus on re-orienting my thinking in all aspects of my job and life more generally, to look ahead to the future more to what the goal is, and not get so caught up in dealing with the issues in the present (Student from 2017 cohort).

concerns (reducing distracted driving, designing a flood resilient car, building proactive school protective systems that spot guns near campus). Applying the tools to a real problem in their lives is a turning point for many students. When they share their sense of accomplishment and describe how they think differently having grappled with applying the tools in the Application Project, I relearn to trust the process. Because of the novelty of the course content and approach, the long runway before lift-off requires patience, from all of us. Like any business leader who holds a vision, I’ve learned it helps to regularly provide signposts of where we’ve been and where we’re going so that by the end of Act 2, most students see the big picture and the benefits of the journey.

Act 3. Leading the Organization: Creating Creative Collaborative Cultures, Bringing the Outside In By now, the ensemble spontaneously manages the room set up and competes for time to share content. In Act 3, the challenges become:

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How do we create and maintain creative collaborative cultures in organizations to drive innovation? And what can leaders at all levels of an organization do to cultivate the skills and mindsets we’ve been applying all semester? Implicit in these questions is the understanding that they are now the subject matter experts and the responsibility is theirs to spread this new way of working. As Julie Huffaker and Karen Dawson (2018) describe, we must first see the fishbowl in which we swim. We begin by exploring the concept of organizational culture then how to observe, embed, and change an organization’s culture using work by Edgar Schein (2017). The Ten Commandments exercise gets at Schein’s definition of culture as “how we do things around here.” The class breaks into groups at whiteboards to list the ten “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” rules operating in the cohort. These are not the school policies or attributes described in the glossy brochures; these are the unique, implicit, unquestioned assumptions, beliefs, and values that drive behaviors that have become the operating system of the group. With some side-coaching from me to prompt them to say what is true, not what they think should be true, the lists include rules like, “Thou shall be social—always, even if you don’t feel like it,” “Thou shall check your ego at the door,” “Thou shall take and give heat (feedback),” “Thou shall not be a parasite (pull your own weight),” “Thou shall not suffer in silence (speak out and get others to back you up).” We discuss how these rules emerged and how they are enforced within the group. My favorite exercises around spanning boundaries and organizational change involve using creative methods for wholesystem interventions including Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space technology, World Café, Listening to the City, and other collaborative ideation and organization redesign practices (Bunker and Coleman 2014). For example, teams read a case study about a company attempting to merge three organizations with very different cultures. Their task is to devise plans for a successful merger using any approach we’ve used in class. When I see groups argue for the kinds of relationship building, communication approaches, and whole-group collaborative applications of creative thinking and culture building tools we’ve explored, I know they now have the language and perspective to advocate for change in their own organizations. They might even have the courage to

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initiate whole-system experiences, trusting the emergent processes and the intelligence of the group to solve complex problems.

Act 3 Assignments Readings A chapter on collaborative webs (Sawyer 2017) and industry articles on spanning organization boundaries (Ernst et al. 2011) and building innovative organizations (Hill et al. 2014) provide the theory and research for discussion.

Field Trip Assignment The key assignment in Act 3 is to bring the outside in. Simply put, the instructions are: “With at least one other person, go find a person or group you don’t already know doing unique creative and collaborative things, visit with them, then share what you’ve learned in some interactive way in class.” To prepare, we brainstorm potential questions for interviews then practice asking these questions to each other while extracting meaning using improv techniques like Color/Advance (Workbook 1.3; Koppett 2013; Salit 2016) and Kenn Adam’s Story Spine (2007).7 Two months earlier, this assignment would have been met with blank stares and a lack of comprehension. Now, students find creativity and collaboration everywhere—at a jet pilot flight simulation training center, an escape game room business, a bespoke men’s shoe design and sales company started by a 22-year-old, a llama farm for tourists, an emergency management war room, a homeless shelter, at trendy restaurants, breweries and cheese makers, or the design department of a global candy company. Rarely does a student come back and merely tell us what they learned. A report-out is one-way and would not engage our full selves. So we might learn about being a gallery owner by having to select and pitch jewelry collections from pictures of art from a gallery field trip or practice interrogation with an actual detective someone brings to class. The debrief is about how good leaders constantly seek insight from unlikely places, are courageous in attempts to discover new perspectives, and can apply a viewing lens like creative collaboration to any new experience to test their assumptions. This

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prepares and inspires them to seek other perspectives outside their offices at work, to ask discovery-style questions, and turn insight into collective action in their own work groups.

Preparing-to-Close Assignments The highs from the field trip experiences set the stage for closing the show. What did we do together and what did we learn? To prepare, the Collaboration Space team creates an online method for sharing appreciations and feedback among teammates and the other Leadership Learning teams, and each student writes an individual self-reflection paper or creates a video about their personal growth and brings it to the last class.

Closing the Show The objectives of the last class are to celebrate what we’ve created together, redesign the course for the next cohort, and share what’s different about us because of the effort we put into creating our own, unique learning lab. I encourage candid discussion of missed opportunities and failed attempts that led to deep learning. We hold a World Café on these topics (including lots of food, even though the World Café methodology is based on the conversation aspect of cafés, not the food!). Specifically, the four Café table rotations involve drawing and discussing these questions: 1. For you, what were the most provocative and helpful ideas and activities in this class? 2. If you were designing the class for a future cohort, what would you change, add, or delete? 3. If you could wind the clock back to start the class over, what would you do differently? 4. What is different for you or about you because of your effort in this class? As we watch a slide show I created of class photos and videos interspersed with concepts we explored, we see the events that enabled us to construct this unique ensemble. With a sense of

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nostalgia for what is ending, each Leadership Learning team creates a pass-it-on video for future teams. Often, the Brain Gym, SelfAwareness, or Consultants team can’t resist bringing a final activity to do together even though they’ve met the requirements for the course. The Collaboration Space team shares usage analytics and prizes for people who made an exceptional effort to make that space worthwhile. Almost always, if we do the Count How High exercise (Lobman and Lundquist 2007) again before we go, we see that the group truly knows how to listen to the space and each other ten times better than they did on the first day. I leave grateful that I was part of this one-of-a-kind community we created together, happy to think that I get paid for doing this meaningful work.

Looking Back At the end of the semester, most people report feeling different about themselves, their jobs, and their futures. It’s easy to imagine that all this positivity comes from the rush of finishing the semester, which is typically their penultimate semester for their degree. Who wouldn’t feel great to get that far? But what happens to this euphoria and self-awareness years later? I surveyed nine cohorts who took the class between 2011 and 2018. The average response to the question, “Looking back at the classes that had an impact on you in your EMBA experience, how would you describe the personal impact that taking Leading Creative Collaboration has had on you?” was 6.7 on a seven-point thumbs-down–thumbs-up scale. More than seven out of ten report being more aware of ways to include people who might think differently than they do, opportunities to improvise, creativity around them at home and work, and opportunities to use conflicting views to spark innovation. They report being more likely to listen to learn rather than judge, take initiative to stretch themselves and their teams, say Yes, And to build on others’ ideas, and encourage teammates to think differently. Three-quarters or more report being a better listener, collaborator, and being more mindful. More than half report being more curious, more confident leading diverse groups, and more excited to address problems and possibilities at work and home. They are more likely

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to seek feedback or advice from people around them and say “yes” to spontaneous suggestions and invitations to play. All this, as much as seven years after being in the class, gives me confidence that a collaboration lab format drives significant leader development.

Eleven Coaching Tips for Future Coaches Here is a list of things I remind myself to do that you might find helpful when you implement an improv lab like this one: 1. First impressions matter—advocate for a classroom that has movable furniture, lots of whiteboards and plenty of space for free movement. Use the physical space to decrease status differences so that it is immediately clear that this is a co-led endeavor. Sit in the group, don’t stand at the front, even when talking about requirements. Be in it with them, not above them. 2. Allow time to set up and break down the set together each class. Moving chairs and tables from lecture style to open space and back again reinforces accountability for creating the learning environment. 3. Make the improv foundation of the lab explicit by continually reinforcing the use of theatre language—set, audience, scene, players, performance, scripting, unscripting, story, ensemble, improvisation, and so forth. This drives home the concepts of choosing when and how to lead, taking new roles in creating success, being fully present, embracing flexibility and emergence, deliberate practice, using whatever is at hand, and growing through being in relationship with others. 4. Begin each class with casual discussion of what they remember, observed, or used from the last class to encourage experimentation and reflection. The two-week gap between classes is critical incubation time for seeing connections between the classroom content and real life. Use that time to explicitly offer signposts about where we were, where we are, and where we are going.

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5. When a dilemma arises over and over, get the class to own and solve the problem. For instance, graduate students with full-time jobs and families find many ways to avoid reading. Given the “flipped” classroom structure that stresses experience over lecture or reading review, outside reading is necessary. Creating the Knowledge Distillery team was the brainchild of an earlier cohort’s end-ofsemester course redesign process. This team receives a lot of encouragement from me and gratitude from the class. 6. Model what you want people to model back at work. Be a beginner with the class. Share your in-the-moment insights as a learner. Thank people and groups that enable you to test your own assumptions. Be curious. Express wonder. Smile and laugh along with everyone. As a member of the troupe, I side-coach myself in class, sometimes out loud: Shut up! Ask questions from curiosity, not knowing! Say what you’re noticing! Step into the performance space rather than set yourself apart as an audience or evaluator. 7. Resist the urge to do their work. The first few semesters, I made over 50 percent of the posts to the Collaboration Space! I feared they weren’t “getting it” and anxiously stepped in with articles, thought questions, and my personal experiences with the course content. It felt comfortable and useful to be back in the old paradigm of being a teacher who tells stuff, rather than being a learner myself. Just like managers everywhere, I struggled with the fine line between being a role model and a know-it-all. Once I reminded myself that I had delegated the task to generate 100 percent participation and find creative and provocative ways to engage their peers, I could step back and simply add to the discussions as one of many. 8. Encourage use of cell phones in class so everyone captures pictures or videos of what happens. Use these on the Class Collaboration Space and in the retrospective course slide show at the end. Many show up in graduation festivities because they capture great moments in the cohort’s friendship and collaboration. Smart business leaders create artifacts that support the desired culture.

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9. No matter how wise you think you are, let the teams debrief the activities they bring to the class. They need to practice facilitation skills so they can lead skillful discussions at work. That said, teams appreciate it if, before you move on, you deepen the debrief to include connections to readings and prior classwork that may not have emerged yet. Yes, And! 10. Make time every few classes for the Leadership Learning teams to seek and receive candid feedback. These critical business skills take practice. More recently teams want interim feedback from me even though it is their peers who ultimately rate their success. Reduce ambiguity and anxiety by sharing what you appreciate, referring to what you learned on the collaboration space between classes, and asking about what they are attempting to accomplish. 11. Put as much effort into course closure as you put into first-class environment design. Having teams make “pass it on” videos for the next cohort, doing the World Café on their learning and course redesign for the next group, viewing the highlights of the semester in a slide show or video presentation, reviewing the Leadership Learning team peer accolades and final feedback, all leave the group with a sense of personal and collective accomplishment and appreciation. Highlight how leaders who make time for closure back at work energize people and enable them to move on when a project is complete. If the day feels like a bachelorette party in New Orleans, all the better. Good change leaders acknowledge what people are leaving behind before they start their new beginning. I find I love every cohort by the end. That teaches me to love the next one from the beginning. They are all different. Groups that seem to have the farthest to go always go somewhere. Trust the process. Trust the people. Trust yourself. Here’s where doing some of those breathing exercises from the Self-Awareness teams really help! Embracing improv as the foundation for learning has changed my world. It made me question the role of a “lowly teaching adjunct” enough to propose changing the core curriculum of a business school. I found a faculty member who also lives Yes, And

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[The class] delved into the ‘missing pieces’ from most fields of study and really focused on the psychology of people in business. Without the knowledge provided, nothing else I learned can have any traction because this is, by far, the most important element in life and business [i.e., people]. We know this in our hearts, but this course backed it up with the research which is important because it’s the only ‘language’ business understands (Student from 2018 cohort). This was the first time throughout the whole EMBA program that I felt we were free to communicate and try to solve problems among ourselves without any knowledge or expectation that if we did not have an answer then the professor would give us the answer … that free feeling of liberation and accountability for one another is what makes me believe that we grew as a team and individuals (Student from 2019 cohort). This course expanded every one of us in the program opening our minds up to an entirely new world of information. I think people learned how to really connect with people … I mean truly connect with people. The course obliterated comfort zones in all the right ways (Student from 2018 cohort).

to champion the idea to the curriculum committee as an experiment for one semester. Having gone public, I had to act, despite my doubts about being a techie social psychologist with only a voyeur’s experience with theatre improv. I had to trust that the improv theatre and applied improv communities would support me if I dared to engage with them as a beginner. The best part for me is seeing people embrace the class mission: to enhance the capacity of all members to be creative and collaborative so we can lead others to address meaningful problems and possibilities everywhere we find them. I use segments of the course in workshop versions to build improvisational mindsets at companies around the world. Stevens now offers the course to as many as five cohorts each year. Improv professionals everywhere are turning a degree in business into a ticket to delight their teams and their customers through unlimited creative collaboration.

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Postscript In March 2020, halfway through the semester, we transitioned to 100 percent online remote sessions overnight. Looking back, we just did what made sense. No obsessing about creating the most creative “online experience” or worries about letting go of my darling field trip assignment. The positive energy and growth that happened as described in final reflection papers had much more to do with having built a caring, collaborative, and accountable team environment (by design) during the first half of the semester than anything about the tactical redesign of the material or processes we did later. For me, that was the ultimate test of what the lab purports to teach. We collectively reevaluated the learning priorities, jettisoned some assignments, and focused on applying what we were learning to our immediate lives. Being a corporate cohort in a pharmaceutical company on the front lines of fighting the virus, topics like creating collaborative webs with new external partners and governments, and mobilizing people to reinvent what they do became intensely practical. We found that the mindsets of curiosity and improvisation were the path through collective fear and uncertainty. Here it is the Fall 2020 semester and LCC is now an online course, start to finish, for the foreseeable future. Thanks to the openness and generosity of an online Open Space community of improvisers, I’ve learned dozens of tools, methods, and games for stripping away boundaries and creating generative remote spaces— working with what’s around. Their Zoom “hacks,” like creating simple ways for people to change their own breakout rooms before Zoom added that feature, transformed my summer classes by inspiring us to create new ways for running class activities like fishbowl discussions and constructive debates. I’m embracing the possibility of my own growth here, too. As one student said in his reflection paper after the pandemic began, “If one were a believer in higher powers, it’s almost as if this entire Covid spring was an experiment in providing aids to support our classroom study. You can be confident that I will fully commit to becoming a master of ‘Creating with Crap!’ (Salit 2016). Truly, can you imagine a more useful skill?”

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Notes 1 Both Cathy Salit and Keith Sawyer are also contributors to first anthology (Dudeck and McClure 2018). 2 Variations of this ball exercise appear throughout improvisation literature and are taught in theatre groups such as Bay Area Theatresports (BATS). For a fuller description, see Playful Mindfulness by Ted DesMaisons (2019). 3 By design, we use theatre language to describe the format of the course and our behavior in class whenever possible. As Salit describes in the text we use and in her human development work at her company, Performance of a Lifetime, “Every one of us has the innate ability to inhabit new characters, develop new performances, and make new creative choices as we navigate the scenes of our lives and work” (2016: xv). 4 Of course, online networking tools have become even more essential in most organizations now that so many people are working remotely because of the pandemic. 5 In Sawyer’s Zig-Zag (2013), he organizes dozens of individual and group creativity tools into eight “steps” for applying creative practices to any problem or possibility. The eight steps—Ask, Learn, Look, Play, Think, Fuse, Choose, and Make—advocate different approaches to creativity. The Personal Creativity Assessment (13–18) helps the reader identify steps that they already apply readily and others that may require more effort and exercise. For example, when students score low on “Ask,” I encourage them to spend extra time practicing tools that help them define the problem before jumping to solutions, for example, Sawyer’s “Ask 10 Questions,” “Find the Bug,” the “CIA checklist: Rise to the Occasion,” and other practices in the “Ask” chapter enable them to find the question, search the space, and transform their perception of the problem. 6 Quotes from students were collected via a 2019 email survey of students from 2011 to 2018 and from individual reflections submitted in student papers through 2019. 7 The first known citation of Color/Advance is in Koppet (2013). You can also find it in Salit (2016). The Story Spine is outlined in Chapter 1 (p. 39–40).

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WORKBOOK 2.1 Performing Curiosity Bookstore Deep and broad curiosity fuels innovation and energizes meaningful relationships. This exercise invites participants to slow down, explore something they had not intended to encounter, extract and articulate insights from what they notice, and invite others to be curious along with them. It demonstrates the value of being simultaneously curious about the person in front of them as well as the ideas at hand. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • recognized that curiosity is a skill that anyone can develop and expand with practice, • become more willing to break up routine to follow an interest in the moment, • gained confidence in their ability to get others excited about ideas they’ve just discovered, and • become tuned in to others who are expressing curiosity about things they personally didn’t think would be interesting.

Running the Exercise 1. Create a “bookstore” by placing actual books on tables or shelves. 2. Have participants break into pairs. One participant will be the bookseller and the other the customer. 3. By asking a series of curiosity questions, each bookseller should suggest a book for the customer to buy. Continue until the customer has chosen a book that resonates with him or her. 4. Then have each pair swap roles and repeat Step 3. 5. When everyone has sold and purchased a book, instruct participants to read for 7 minutes, looking for one idea that interests them. There are no rules—participants can start anywhere in the book.

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6. Ask the group to form triads and have each participant share one thing he or she found interesting. Give the group 10 minutes to share their ideas.

Debrief • How did that go? • What does “curiosity” feel like to you? • How did you demonstrate genuine curiosity in the other participant? • What did someone do or say that made you more curious about what he or she was sharing? • How does your curiosity show up in your own life? • What if you activated your curiosity more at work? At home? With specific others?

Suggestions • Bring books on improvisation, innovation, and creativity. These books are not only interesting for most people, they surprise the group about how many people are thinking, writing, and reading about creative collaboration. • Observe the body language of participants as they get deeper into their private reading and then again when they share what interested them. During both periods, the intensity and joy expressed are very similar to what you’d want to generate in any team that is approaching a new challenge or task. Share what you observe in the debrief and ask what could be done to replicate this in their team or organization. • Consider using these alternative designs: � Rather than having participants play being booksellers, ask participants to mill around as customers while asking each other for reading suggestions. After a few minutes, coach them to find at least two surprising things of common interest between themselves and one or more other customers in the store.

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� Create an improv scene at a bookstore where three participants at a time are the invited authors on a panel. The audience asks questions, and the authors react to and build on what their co-panelists offer from their books— none of which anyone has read. � For the group sharing portion of the exercise, create a scene where each participant stands and extemporaneously reads out loud a letter they wrote to the author(s) of the book they bought, thanking them for a specific, potentially life-changing insight and asking them a question that they are truly curious about.

Online Delivery Create an online version of this exercise by giving students an array of websites to choose from instead of physical books. Link each website URL with a visually appealing picture to simulate the visual prompts in a real bookstore that stimulate curiosity. Connections: As improvisers, we are taught to invent tools to help us address new problems and challenges. This becomes a deeply embedded habit as part of our improvisation mindset. Pamela Burke created this exercise to help participants practice approaching topics and people with an open mind. Many Yes, And-type exercises encourage this behavior. For example, What I Like About That asks participants to practice curiosity by stating what they value about a partner’s offer before adding anything new to the discussion topic (Dudeck and McClure 2018).

2.2 Argue like a Philosopher Collaboration requires skillful listening to understand and skillful advocacy for your own ideas. Failing to balance advocacy with inquiry can lead to hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and entrenched positions. This exercise builds personal communication skills while also giving participants group discussion techniques they can teach and use in their own organizations. It is part of a larger canon of exercises on creative abrasion that build psychological safety and maximize benefits from cognitive diversity.

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By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • shifted their mindset from “being right” to “being influenceable,” • recognized the need to slow down to listen deeply to someone with a conflicting opinion, • become more willing to wait their turn to advocate or challenge, • communicated that they’ve heard, understood, and value someone else’s opinion, and • become able to run a group discussion on a contentious topic using this method.

Running the Exercise 1. Set up two rows of chairs facing each other. 2. Instruct participants in Row 1 to think of an opinion they have about a current problem that might be controversial. Have them share that opinion with the participant across from them. 3. Instruct participants in Row 2 to: a. Attempt to re-express their partner’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that the partner says, “Thanks, I wish I had thought of that.” b. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). c. Mention anything they have learned from their partner. d. Only then are they permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism. 4. After 3 or 4 minutes, ask the participants in Row 1 to move one chair to their left. Repeat the exercise with the same participants initiating the conversation and Row 2 practicing the listening steps again. 5. After one or two more rounds, ask the rows to switch roles. Row 1 now listens to Row 2. Repeat the exercise.

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Debrief • When listening, what did you need to do to follow the directions? What was hard for you? • What did you learn about the other participant’s perspective? • What did it feel like when your partner restated what you were trying to say? • For both sides: Did your intention shift from wanting to win to listening to learn? • How does this connect with what we’ve learned so far about elements of improvisation, especially hearing offers, Yes, And, and making others look good?

Suggestions • Participants can use the same opinion more than once as they move down the line. • If in the first round participants are not choosing controversial enough topics, allow them to find out their partner’s position and choose a different topic if they already agree. Connections: The listening instructions come from the article “Argue Like America’s Most Controversial Philosopher” by Drake Baer (2013) in Fast Company Online. For other exercises that develop listening skills and strategic responses for conflict situations, see Ann Elizabeth Armstrong’s case study on facilitation training (Bowles and Nadon 2013) and Barbara Tint’s chapter on AI for conflict resolution (Dudeck and McClure 2018).

2.3 Constructive Debate I often use this exercise in conjunction with Argue like a Philosopher to help participants further develop the balance of advocacy and inquiry. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • understood that it’s possible to debate a difficult topic without feeling personally challenged or at risk,

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• recognized that they are more open to influence on complex topics than they initially appear to be, • become more willing to ask others to deliberately argue against their ideas to get to better options and decisions, and • learned to run a group discussion on a contentious topic using the constructive debate method.

FIGURE 2.4  Constructive Debate setup (Image by P. Burke).

Running the Exercise Part 1 1. Divide participants into groups of six. Place two Side 1 cards next to each other on a table, place two Side 2 cards across from the Side 1 cards, and place Observer cards at either end (see Figure 2.4). Provide paper and a pen next to each Observer card. 2. Ask participants to sit before showing the debate topics. 3. Have each group choose a debate topic. 4. Instruct the groups that they must argue the side of the debate

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related to their card, even if they don’t hold that position. Each Observer will divide the paper into Side 1 and Side 2 columns and simply write down the arguments as they are discussed. 5. Round 1: Have participants discuss the topic for 3 minutes. Both sides will advocate for their current position until you ring a bell to stop. 6. Round 2: Instruct everyone to get up and move two seats to the left. Both sides will advocate for their current position, no matter what the participants believe. Remind the new Observers to write down what they hear, not to be thinking about what they will say when they rotate to a side for Round 3. 7. Rotate again and repeat for a total of five rounds.

Part 2 1. Instruct the groups to look at the Observers’ notes and summarize the best points for all sides. 2. Have participants look for new perspectives or a synthesis that suggests a course of action that is better than either initial side.

Debrief • How did your thinking and feelings change as you changed positions? • How is this similar or different from how you usually act in a debate or argument? • What happened in the group dynamics when you put away the cards and worked together? • A lot of creativity emerged. How did that happen? • More generally, what are the benefits of using a process like constructive debate? Share these if they don’t emerge from the group: � allows participants to understand multiple points of view, � does not force participants into being identified with one position,

THE BUSINESS SCHOOL COLLABORATION LAB

� decreases partisanship and the sense of “winners” and “losers,” � sets up the expectation that disagreeing is important for understanding complex topics and making good decisions, � reduces the influence of power hierarchies in the group, � gives teams a protocol for exploring and synthesizing differing views that is fun and nonthreatening, and � builds a culture of intellectual collaboration.

Suggestions • Offer topics that either relate to the purpose of the team or a current conflict, or offer general topics that anyone could talk about. Examples that have worked well in the United States include: � marijuana should be legalized and regulated at the federal level (Side 1 Pro, Side 2 Con), � increasing taxes on the wealthy is a practical and desirable solution to the income-disparity in this country (Side 1 Pro, Side 2 Con), and � voting should be a requirement of citizenship (Side 1 Pro, Side 2 Con). • Require that participants get up and change chairs instead of just moving the cards. The visceral experience of taking the other side makes it playful, and it is easier to argue against “yourself” from another place. • Remind participants that it is their duty to argue as strongly, intelligently, and as creatively as they can for each side and to “Yes, And” ideas that come from either side.

Online Delivery This can be done in six-person breakout rooms. Ask people to rename themselves with Observer, Side 1, or Side 2 between each turn to highlight roles.

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Connections: This version of constructive debate is related to Roger Greenaway’s Turntable exercise. His version includes some additional competition and judging options and was given to Pamela Burke by a student who encountered it at an Agile Software Developer’s conference.

3 Developing Strategic, ActionOriented, and Mindful Leaders Petro Janse van Vuuren

Dr. Petro Janse van Vuuren has worked in the intersection between applied performance and community/organization development since 2004. She has a PhD in Drama and Performance studies and uses her art to craft organization training and development processes geared toward sustainable transformation. She is also a certified master coach with the Institute for Management Consulting (South Africa). Petro is Head of the Department of Drama for Life in the University of the Witwatersrand School of Arts, where she lectures, researches, supervises, and practices in the field of applied performance. She is also a total embarrassment to two teenage boys who know more about leadership, improvisation, and life in general than she does.

Mindfulness practices have become increasingly popular in the workplace where they have been shown to reduce stress (Grégoire and Lachance 2015), improve employee well-being (Mellor et al. 2016), and increase job performance (Reb, Narayanan, and Ho 2015; Altizer 2017). In 2017 the former chief executive of

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healthcare giant Medtronic, William George, definitively said, “If you’re fully present on the job, you will be a more effective leader, you will make better decisions, and you will work better with other people” (UNC Executive 2017). My research funded by the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, has shown that, while beneficial, traditional mindfulness practices, such as meditation or breathing exercises, do not sufficiently develop the habits leaders need in the workplace: the ability to stay open and present to the moment around them while, at the same time, remaining goal oriented and driven to achieve strategic objectives.1 In fact, the very idea of working toward a goal, against which all decisions and activities are measured, is at odds with traditional forms of mindfulness that require relinquishing the drive toward something in the future in favor of being in the present moment. Traditional mindfulness seeks an attitude of nonjudgment, in complete contradiction to the need to measure and evaluate each action and thought. This chapter asks: Is there a brand of nonjudgmental action that leaders might cultivate for embodied leadership mindfulness? What might the characteristics and value of such mindful nonjudgmental action be? It further argues for the incorporation

FIGURE 3.1  Strategic Narrative Embodiment (Photo by Petro Janse van Vuuren).

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of applied performance and applied improvisation (AI) processes to foster a mindfulness practice that is interpersonal, strategic, and action based while still honoring the character and contribution of traditional contemplative mindfulness. It will also provide exercises and a design structure—Strategic Narrative Embodiment (SNE)— for using AI in this mindful manner.

The Benefits and Challenges of Traditional Mindfulness Practices in the Workplace Studies have found that practicing mindfulness at work: • reduces employee absenteeism and turnover; • improves cognitive functions (i.e., concentration, memory, and learning ability); • increases employee productivity; • enhances employer/employee and client relationships; • improves job satisfaction; • cultivates imagination and improves mental health; • improves teamwork and team relations; • improves decision-making by helping clarify objectives; and generating options.2 These benefits come from the central idea in contemporary mindfulness that stress is not caused by what happens to us but rather by our relationship to what happens—our thinking about it. If we can separate the occurrence from our thinking about it, we might be able to change that thinking to a form that is less detrimental. For instance, if I get stuck in traffic on my way to work (what happens) then I get irritated and stressed because more people should use public transport, the city should be better designed, and road repair should be planned for after hours (my thinking about what happens). If, instead, I can reframe my thinking—ah well, here we are again, this is a good time to listen to that audio book or enjoy some music—there is less frustration and discomfort.

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Mindfulness is a set of practices that enable this separation of the thing that happens from our reaction to it and the adaptation of that reaction.3 Unfortunately, work cultures often promote identification with a challenge rather than the greater perspective afforded by the practice of separation. Another important principle of mindfulness, and one that can also be at odds with organizational culture, is the absence of “drivenness” (Kabat-Zim 2004). Instead of being focused mentally and emotionally on the attainment of a future goal, mindfulness invites you into the wealth of information and experience that is available in the present moment. This leads to a letting go of the need to judge everything in relation to its relevance to the goal. Counterintuitively, it can be the very relinquishing of the drive or need to attain the goal that can allow a leader to access the information in the moment that can more effectively meet the same objective, but traditional mindfulness practices do not help leaders cultivate that duality. Additional resistance to mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) can be attributed to how they are integrated or not into the organizational culture or aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives. An organization as a whole will not benefit from these practices unless participants, first, clearly see the relevance of what they are doing as it applies to organizational and even personal–professional objectives; and, second, feel these practices are welcome in their workplace (Altizer 2017). No matter how strong an individual’s interest and willingness to approach their work in a mindful way, if their corporate culture doesn’t support or encourage it, that practice stands a good chance of being ridiculed or ostracized. The idea of slowing down to concentrate on the present can seem at odds with a corporate culture of speed and goal attainment. Furthermore, “Employers are not easily convinced that investing in reflection, openness, and thoughtfulness will impact the bottom line” (UNC Executive 2017). Some workplaces may avoid MBPs altogether because of concerns that their possible spiritual connotations may clash with their employees’ own spiritual or religious practices. Or perhaps they see mindfulness as altogether too soft and spiritual for the workplace where hard business should be the focus. From the learning and development officer or the facilitator’s point of view, other objections arise like the fact that too many

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mindfulness programs wrongly assume that knowing something automatically translates into doing something. This is especially true of short-term workshops and interventions that rely mostly on presentational forms of training (Reddy and Srinivasan 2015). Even where action learning is employed to increase the effectiveness of experiential processes, the outcome is not ideal. On the one hand, the action learning cycle of (1) Practice, (2) Reflect, and (3) Apply the learning in a next round of practice is effective for implementing a new behavior (Baron 2016). On the other, this behavior change only promotes the kinds of behavior of typical mindfulness processes—breathing, stretching, focusing on a word or phrase—it does not necessarily promote a mindful attitude to everyday work activities. Finally, and not insignificantly, traditional mindfulness is a solo pursuit and thus misses out on the value of developing social awareness, an integral part of work-life.

The Third Wave of Mindfulness Practice: Mindfulness++ First-Wave MBPs are those that remain mostly true to their Buddhist contemplative roots and often incorporate other processes, such as using neuroscience to form a bridge between leadership and mindfulness.4 Second-Wave MBPs build on the practices of the First by adding the critical component of relationships and interpersonal interaction and can be referred to as Mindfulness+ (plus the interpersonal dimension).5 Third-Wave MBPs respond to the strategic action-based nature of leadership and organizational contexts, and thus are called Mindfulness++ (plus the interpersonal dimension and plus the strategic action-based, or embodied, dimension). I argue that it is only the third kind that will address the needs of an organization, specifically in the form of SNE, described below, and its employment of AI. Table 3.1 below illustrates that while all three Waves help participants develop many shared characteristics, only Second- and Third-Wave MBPs develop relational awareness and it is ThirdWave MBPs alone that help participants develop informed action.

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TABLE 3.1 First-, Second-, and Third-Wave mindfulness business practices and their potential characteristics (Table by Petro Janse van Vuuren) Potential Characteristics of Mindfulness Practices

First Wave

Second Wave

Third Wave and SNE

1. Focused attention—I am not easily distracted from my work and objectives (Dreyfus 2011: 41–54).

Yes

Yes

Yes

2. Self-reflexivity—I can get an accurate view of myself in the world (Teasdale and Chaskalson 2011).

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes 3. An embodied sensorial experience—I ground myself in my body, here and now, keeping my thoughts from running in circles (Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson 2007: 39–40).

Yes

Yes

4. Nonjudgment and compassion—I let go of pre-conceived judgments building better relationships with clients, colleagues, and superiors (Salzberg 2011: 177–82).

Yes

Yes

Yes

5. Levels of consciousness— Yes I may move through increasing levels of consciousness deepening the effect of the practice (Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson 2007: 33).

Yes

Yes

Yes 6. A lingering effect— the positive effects carry past my practice session into the workplace (Chaskalson 2011).

Yes

Yes

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7. Personal interiority— I can withdraw from the clamor around me and find calmness inside (Lutz et al. 2008).

Yes

Yes, And6

Yes, And

8. The practice of silence— I am still of voice, body, and thought reducing my anxiety (Potter n.d.).

Yes

Yes, And

Yes, And

9. Relational awareness— I am attuned and can adjust to the needs and contributions of my team and they to mine (Kline 2002).

No

Yes

Yes

10. Action orientated— my practice helps me know what to do when in a manner that is relevant and effective.

No

No

Yes

Strategic Narrative Embodiment I created SNE to help business leaders develop a mindfulness practice that is interpersonal, strategic, and action based while still honoring the character and contribution of traditional contemplative mindfulness. SNE is an applied performance methodology that leverages the transformational effect, story shaping, and ensemble building skills of stage performance to invigorate work performance (Janse van Vuuren and Bester 2016).7 SNE’s roots are in applied performance theory, but the final practice was ultimately shaped and influenced by trends in organizational and leadership development. These trends include mindfulness and neuroscience, systems thinking and systems coaching, narrative coaching, sensemaking, and gamification (Janse van Vuuren 2015). The SNE model can be used as a guide for both designing and facilitating workplace mindfulness interventions that are tailored to

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the realities of leaders. SNE is an adaptable model and can be used to address any number of organizational needs, including leadership, sales, customer service, knowledge management, innovation, team development, and strategic planning. SNE does not have to teach mindfulness directly but can bring mindful action to all of these matters.

Using SNE for Instructional Design SNE uses a narrative arc to shape the flow of an engagement such as a mindful leadership training workshop. This arc itself mirrors the stages of change as represented by the classic S-curve (based on the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross [2014]). I named the five stages so they spell the acronym STORI to help us remember them (see Figure 3.2).

Strategic Intent The process starts with an identification of the group’s strategic intent for the session, informed by the strategic objective of the organization that participants belong to. It’s necessary for each participant to identify a specific business objective within their sphere of influence to make the workshop personally relevant, in addition to focusing on the overall goal of the organization, for instance, wanting its leaders to build resilience skills. If a group consists of individual participants from various spaces, like in a

FIGURE 3.2  The STORI arc of change (Illustration by Petro Janse van Vuuren).

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public workshop, we still map and share individual objectives to create a picture of the various objectives in the room. This first step is crucial to assure participants of the relevance of the work. Because the nature of leadership is inherently strategic, this is important to help the participants trust the process and feel safe within the boundaries of the objective. Furthermore, the strategic objective as the framing element ensures that the work is removed from a spiritual context and placed firmly within the organizational context.

Transition The Transition stage of the design uses exercises that will help participants transition from the day-to-day operational mindset to a more reflective mindful state. It is vital that the strategic objective be “parked” outside the process as a marker during this phase and the following Open Experimentation phase; participants return to their “parked” objectives during the Reflection stage of the workshop. In this way, their objective does not drive the content but rather frames it from the outside, allowing the action inside the workshop to be “mindful” without the contradictory element of “drivenness.” During the transitional stage, participants are invited into a mindful state characterized by a shift from awareness of self only to an awareness of self in relation to others, from being mostly “in one’s head” and thoughts to also being present in one’s body. Participants also transition from thinking of past and future experiences (including thoughts of goals and objectives and judging the relevance of the present experience) to being only present here and now, focused on others in the room. This awareness happens on the level of technique. The following breathing meditation is one of many ways one can inject traditional mindfulness technique with improvisation during the transitional stage. I ask participants to sit together with eyes closed and sometimes back to back with their backs touching each other (if the level of comfort and cultural permission are present). In this position I ask people to become aware of the other person’s breath and allow their own breathing rhythm to be influenced by that of their partner. Becoming aware of breath is a mindful action. Becoming aware of another’s breathing is inter-relational. From here people may be invited to join a second pair, turn all four

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backs to one another, and again find a common breathing rhythm. The group can grow one more time to six or eight. In the next round, I may ask each group to begin to move in keeping with the rhythm—arms waving, bodies swaying, heads nodding, whatever feels comfortable. This exercise combines mindful breathing with improvisational movement. Some groups stay with the first phase of this exercise and that is enough for them to transition.

Open Experimentation The Open Experimentation stage is characterized by creating conditions for the easy switching between reflection and action. Pioneers in the field of applied performance talk of the performative state where the person is both acting and watching himself in action, reflecting and acting at once. Spectating and acting at the same time is a state the Brazilian practitioner and pioneer of applied theatre Augusto Boal called being a spect-actor (1979, 1995). In Boal’s work the proverbial fourth wall of the theatre falls away to allow the audience to act on stage and, eventually, in their own lives. Role theorist and drama therapist Robert Landy (1994) explains how this state of being and not being (acting and watching the action) at once is the very ability that allows human beings to notice behavior that they can choose to change. This state of reflection/action is not the same as the operational state we typically use in our everyday lives. This state is described by performance-maker and researcher Kate Hunter as one where, “I can refine as I go, with attention to all my perceptive skills at the ready. I draw from past, present, and future images, layering, interspersing, overlapping, transmuting, adapting into a dense and full narrative with implications and potentials and unsaid things” (2017). This description calls to attention the need for a leader to hold in mind all the complexities of a situation, as well as all the people it involves, when needing to make important decisions. It is in this reflection/action phase that mindful action becomes a more intelligible term as participants become more deeply attuned to each other as well as more invested in the process, that is, in the playing of exercises such as Moving Stories (Workbook 3.1). At the heart of this stage is an applied performance principle: the deeper the investment in the playing, the greater potential for learning and transformation (Morgan and Saxton 1989). This investment

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refers to an immersion of a person in the present moment, which is a key principle of SNE, mindfulness, and AI. Researcher and AI practitioner Jordan Cole describes this immersion: By being present, improvisers move away from the thoughts in their head to become more aware of their surroundings, gathering full-sensory information that can drive more intentional, rather than automatic, choices and reactions. This heightened presence is similar to other cultivated states of immersive moment-bymoment awareness, otherwise known as mindfulness. (2016: 48) Cole proceeds to call this kind of presence a “multifaceted presence” (2016: 49) because it goes beyond individual presence to encompass fellow participants, environment, and props (workshop material and ultimately anything in the participants’ work environment like stationary, computers, water bottles, etc.). At the very core of both the interactive quality of this practice and the idea of mindful action is the principle of Yes, And. This principle captures the essence of AI and of Mindfulness++. The Yes refers to the complete acceptance of whatever is present in the moment and whatever another performer, or participant, might offer. It mirrors the detachment and nonjudgment of mindfulness practice as well as the sense of compassion with self and others. The Yes is only possible when one has entered into a non-distracted space of stillness and attunement through the body and its senses with the other bodies and subjects in the room. We can identify in this Yes state the altered state of consciousness that is characteristic of mindful leadership practice, and we might be able to construe a sense of different levels of such attuned consciousness. In the Yes we have therefore encapsulated all the characteristics of traditional mindfulness, what I describe as First- and SecondWave mindfulness practices. It is then in the And that the embodied action characteristic of Third-Wave practice is captured. The And refers to the action one might take in response to what has been offered and what one has already Yes’ed. These actions become mindful as a direct flow from and in direct response to the other participants—the actions are mindful because they are invested by everything that is encapsulated in the Yes.

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In pairs across the room, participants X and Y stand in front of each other as in front of a mirror. Participant X begins to move slowly while Y follows closely mirroring the movements. After a while the pair swap so that Y now leads the action while X follows as the mirror image. In the final round, the distinction between leader and follower falls away so that X may lead with some of the action while following Y in other parts of the movement. They are “following the follower.” An attentive silence descends on the room, punctuated by bursts of laughter as participants release into play and explore unfamiliar movements with a sense of curiosity. The above is a description of Viola Spolin’s Mirror/Follow the Follower exercise (Spolin 1999: 62), an illustrative and often-used example of this Yes, And principle in action. Imagine yourself as described above where you are simultaneously accepting the movement of your partner and offering a movement that builds on it. Yes, And, like the state of simultaneously acting and observing, happens at the same time, not one after the other. Participants talk of getting into the “zone” where neither of them, nor an observer, know who is leading and who is following. This kind of action can be understood as being nonjudgmental and non-driven by an external objective. It is, in that sense, mindful. The exercise is just one example of those that are being cited in leadership and organizational writings, including Zaffon and Logan’s The Three Laws of Performance (2011) and Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human (2013). Techniques such as Mirror/Follow the Follower can be used in SNE in any of the narrative stages of the design; and it can be built upon, extended, or interwoven with other exercises to make for a longer structure that draws participants deep into an experimentation around any number of themes relevant to a leadership or organizational context. Employee engagement expert, Janet Du Preez, describes such a longer structure around the theme of complexity and decision-making, interweaving the mindful action process with more familiar processes in the leadership development space, like Nancy Kline’s (2002) thinking partnerships. Du Preez explained that the body work provides a fresh entry into stale concepts and brings a mindful awareness to aspects of a problem or situation that participants in her workshops have missed or have

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allowed to recede into the margins, inviting them to bring these back into the center of mindful consideration. She explained that mindfulness in leadership, for her, can never be about a blank mind but is always about finding fresh ways to consider all the aspects in a system that pertain to a strategic issue. Breathing, shutting out, managing my emotions—it’s got use, but the most important thing for me … It gets you out of your clichéd way of thinking. So the objective of this exercise is to get people to become aware (mindful) in a different way. (Du Preez et al. 2016) Again, for leadership development, it is not the absence of thought that is needed but, instead, mindful consideration amidst everything else that is also present in the system of relationships between ideas, thoughts, people, and things that are part of any given situation in the context of a strategic objective.

Reflection and Integration It is in the final two stages of the arc, Reflection and Integration, where participants return to the original strategic intention that was “parked” outside during Transition and Open Experimentation phases. Here participants get the opportunity to relate whatever they experienced during the attuned interplay of the Open Experimentation phase back to the original Strategic Intent and identify valuable insights and actionable steps toward achieving their objectives. It is not uncommon for people to receive insights similar to those that might be expected from a meditation session, for example, a sense of relaxed attention, a renewed feeling of being connected to others and less alone, or a lingering sense that “I can.” In fact participants often also experience a clear sense of what decision to make or what action steps to take in relation to the Strategic Intent. Additionally, because this was a collective experience, people agree on the next actions and support each other in following through when they return to the workplace. Reflection and integration are not necessarily present in traditional mindfulness practice, but they are essential for making sense of the mindfulness experience in the context of people who lead others to achieve strategic objectives. In fact, this is true of

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most applied performance and applied improvisation processes— it is the reflections that lead to insights that can be immediately integrated in the workplace. Also, the narrative design of an SNE intervention ensures that no MBP following the arc will fall into the trap of having a purely cognitive learning experience. It will also include embodied, reflective, and action learning, even if it is a shorter process than what the convention might be. Conventional thought is that this type of training only works in longer term programs, but I have seen Mindfulness++ effects from even short programs using the SNE structure. Every AI exercise in itself can follow the same arc: state the purpose of the exercise (Strategic Intent), demonstrate it (Transition), try it (Open Experiment), reflect on what worked (Reflection), and implement the learning (Integrate). In this way the narrative arc of SNE is fractal—what is true of the parts is true of the whole.

A Note on Action Action becomes an important differentiating characteristic of Third-Wave MBPs. Activities like the Tangible Concept (Workbook 3.2) help participants become experientially aware of two very interesting characteristics of mindfulness in a leadership context. Firstly, it suggests that mindful leadership practice should be purposeful and help the practitioner clarify concepts and issues. But even this clarification has another end in mind: to solve a problem and generate a solution that can be acted upon. Secondly, it contains active movement. It is not only action oriented in the sense of leading to action but incorporates action in the practice of generating the solution. Furthermore, the action is not prescribed (as in the case of a yoga posture or sequence of postures), it is improvisational. Practice of this kind embodies the nature of leadership, because a leader must make in-action decisions as problems arise often without a clear script of dos and don’ts. Burgert Kirsten, Agile Scrum Coach and AI practitioner, explains the difference between the kind of action that is encouraged during mindfulness practice and the kind that is typical back in the workplace. Action inside the improvisational mindfulness space is infused with a sense of playfulness, nonjudgment, curiosity, and creativity while lacking “drivenness” and anxiety. In the high-stress

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work environment, the lack of stillness and safety does not allow for such embodied improvisational action. Ester Kruger, expert on neuroscience and leadership, concurred explaining that it becomes important for the mindful leader to consciously move out of the operational mindset and into a reflective mindset. The former is characterized by dense, fast-moving alpha brainwaves, while the latter is characterized by slower, wider beta brainwaves. If a leader reflects on an experience consciously entering beta brainwave state, they may generate insight that can help them make good clear decisions. However, for the insight to be remembered and remain impactful, it is important for them to take immediate action. Such action informed by reflective insight may be called mindful action. In her own work, Kruger finds improvisation exercises to be the most effective tools for helping leaders switch from an operational state into a reflective state. These exercises develop the ability to (1) consciously enter a reflective state, (2) accept the insight it generates, and (3) respond with immediate action in the context of group activity (Kruger 2016).

Expected Effects of Mindfulness++ Even after only a two-hour session, research participants concurred with claims made by the literature on First-Wave mindfulness MBPs relating to the lingering effects of the practice. Their responses also included effects that point to the interpersonal dimension of Mindfulness+ as well as the embodied action-oriented aspect of Mindfulness++. The list of effects includes: 1. Empathic listening to team members, customers, and clients (Kline 2002; Mindful Revolution 2016). 2. Compassionate leadership (implying compassion with those you lead as well as with yourself) (Mindful Revolution 2016; Gitelson and Carles in Du Preez et al. 2016). 3. Emotional intelligence (the ability to control and regulate your own emotions but also to understand and work with the emotions of others, i.e., team members, clients, and customers) (Gitelson in Du Preez et al. 2016; Kruger 2016).

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4. Creativity and innovation, where innovation is understood as creativity in action (Mindful Revolution 2016; Du Preez in Du Preez et al. 2016). 5. The ability to make wise decisions and take wise actions with the big picture and the future in mind (“wise” being a synonym for “mindful”) (Kruger 2016; Kirsten and Van Vuuren 2011; Gitelson in Du Preez et al. 2016). 6. The ability to move through your day and through every action and choice mindfully (Gitelson and Carles in Du Preez et al. 2016). SNE as an application of applied performance and applied improvisation can enrich mindful leadership training programs. It can provide ways in which to train leaders in a mindfulness that fully accepts the relational, or interpersonal, and strategic action orientation that is inherently part of organizational leadership. Furthermore, this brand of mindfulness distances the practice from spiritual connotations and helps to integrate it with organizational strategic objectives addressing some of the skepticisms raised against traditional mindfulness practices. At the same time, it incorporates multifaceted learning styles making it more effective in closing the gap between what we know and what we do.

Postscript At the beginning of 2020, my role in the world changed. I went from freelance facilitator and researcher of applied performance methods for transformation to running the applied performance department at our university as head of the department. Suddenly I was no longer the outsider facilitating, observing, and researching. I was the one in the hot seat, leading a staff of about thirty lecturers, artist-researchers, and administrative staff plus a hundred postgraduate students. And then … the pandemic hit, and with it, all its complications. I note here the improvisational leadership principles that kept me sane in these times (if indeed any of us are still sane). First, I clung to the value of the two transitional moments of the STORI model:

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• Transition from operational mindset into Yes, And mindset: Each management meeting and each large staff meeting was started with: (1) The clarification of the intent (agenda); and (2) an AI exercise to facilitate the mindset shift. This was particularly valuable for meetings that dealt with strategic decisions or untangling complex issues. • The transition from the “flying by the seat of your pants” state when responding to demands by students, superiors, and outside influences, to responding mindfully: We did this by taking moments to reflect, ground, and share learnings. These moments provided new insights and behaviors to integrate into strengthening our response to moving our classrooms online, or in response to the current moment, for example, to the Black Lives Matter movement and its effects on our community. Second, I embraced the principle of not acting out of a state of tension and anxiety. Each time I caught myself responding from a place of non-presence, I would stop and deal with the fear, anxiety, or tension before taking action. Sometimes I did not catch myself in time and then had to make amends or proceed with an acceptance of my own (or another’s) apparent failure, embracing the offer and continuing with presence from there. Finally, I remembered the importance of interpersonal mindfulness. Often I would recognize the need to connect with others on a more meaningful level than just problem-solving on Zoom. To work within the constraint of connecting exclusively online, I would schedule one-on-one Phone Calls in the Garden and “meet” colleagues “in” the individual green spots we had each found. Other times we facilitated moments of collective embodied processing online using exercises like Tangible Concepts.

Notes 1 Research complied with ethical standards: Conflict of interest—The author is the originator of the Strategic Narrative Embodiment model and process. SNE is registered under the creative commons license agreement. Ethical approval—All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical

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standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent—Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study; The work was part of a postdoctoral fellowship based at drama for Life University of the Witwatersrand School of Arts. Drama for Life focuses on the applied arts and arts therapies in research, education and community engagement for social transformation and healing. Some of the other effects that carry from a mindfulness session into the workplace are: Stress reduction (see J. Kabat-Zinn et al. 1985); Emotional health like cultivation of positive qualities such as equanimity and compassion (Lutz et al. 2008) and emotion regulation (see Urry et al. 2003); Physical health including improved immune system (see Davidson et al. 2003), reduction of heart rate (see Takahashi et al. 2005) and relief from pain (see Kabat-Zinn et al. 1985); Increased self-reflexivity and self-awareness (Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson 2007: 57–8 and 63–6); Increased flexibility and adaptability and an increased ability of the brain to integrate conscious and unconscious processes simultaneously (Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson 2007: 57–8 and 63–6); Increased resilience to maintain one’s identity, emotional equilibrium, and ability to focus despite distractions and fluctuations that affect concentration (Chaskalson 2011). A feature that has been explored and employed in combination with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (see Ong, Shapiro, and Manber 2009: 30) and Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) theory (Teasdale and Chaskelson 2011b). Perhaps the most influential and widely adopted trend of First-Wave MBPs in corporate contexts has been the use of neuroscience. For example, in response to work stress our brains go into the fight or flight mode abandoning the higher functions of the prefrontal cortex. Mindfulness can reduce the frequency and intensity of this instinctual response. Also, since our brains mostly function in a narrative mode— telling stories about the world that fit within already established belief systems—MBPs can help us focus instead on our direct experience so that we can enter a situation without judgment and remain open to the possibilities that arise from the present moment. Such arguments are supported by structures like the Institute for Neuroleadership created by neuroscientist David Rock and his colleagues (Rock and Ringleb 2013). This “interpersonal mindfulness” is evident in the work of Gregory Kramer in contemporary secular mindfulness circles (see Kramer’s Insight Dialogue: The Interpersonal Path to Freedom [2007]), and the work of Nancy Kline (2002) in the organizational and leadership

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space. Kline’s work emphasizes the importance of bringing focused attention to relationships and providing a “thinking environment” where people are able to think creatively thanks to a lack of distraction and interruption. This kind of mindfulness practice is termed here “mindfulness +” (mindfulness plus). 6 Second- and Third-Wave MBPs—by including the social element— invite participants into the practice of Yes, And (lines 7 and 8) which may result once a group has entered the attuned and improvisational play state. The improvisational state cannot be entered without first moving through a moment of individual and/or collective stillness, nor is it achievable without each individual being internally and personally aware. Collective moments of pause and reflection in an organization are essential for team attunement but are very different in quality from the stillness and interiority achieved from First-Wave mindfulness practice and must be distinguished from it. 7 For the purposes of this chapter, applied performance is seen as an umbrella term that includes applied improvisation, drawing from other theatre and performance forms as well.

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WORKBOOK 3.1 Moving Stories This Strategic Narrative Embodiment (SNE) exercise uses movement to help participants gain fresh perspective on when and how they get stuck in dealing with challenges. This exercise is ideal for the Open Experimentation phase of STORI (see p. 104). By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • clearly identified the nature of their stuck state and identified the thought patterns that keep it in place, • found embodied solutions for working through their stuck state, • employed their imaginations to discover alternative ways to respond to old situations, • identified clear actions for future situations, • connected with others in similar situations, and • experienced a sense of letting go and releasing bottled-up stress and anxiety.

Running the Exercise Though the participants all work simultaneously and are not being directly observed by the others, this exercise can make them feel vulnerable. Use other AI exercises to get participants into a Yes, And mindset beforehand. Part 1: Create and Explore Positions A, B, and C 1. Position A: Instruct participants to move around the space and take a physical position that symbolizes what they really want. Explain that they will be returning to this position later in the exercise, so it should be distinct and repeatable. Have participants breathe deeply three times to set Position A. When they are finished, ask them to step out of the position, close their eyes, and imagine it in their mind.

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2. Position B: Instruct participants to find a physical position nearby that symbolizes the obstacles they face when they try to achieve their objective. Have them breathe three times to set Position B and then step away and imagine it in their mind. 3. Instruct participants to move through Positions A and B a few times. Challenge them to do so with complete awareness. Prompt them to experiment with speed, direction, and style of movement. 4. Position C: Instruct participants to take a physical position, apart from the first two, that embodies how they usually react when they come face-to-face with obstacles. Have them breathe three times, and notice the kinds of things they usually say to themselves in these situations. Allow a few extra moments for contemplation. Tell participants to step away and imagine the position in their mind. 5. Tell participants to return to Position B and to notice where their body feels stretched and uncomfortable. Then have them move from B through C to A. Have them repeat the sequence B–C–A with awareness and then begin to experiment with different ways to move through the sequence (e.g., different tempos, styles of movement, “as if” you are an animal).

FIGURE 3.3 Move Through, positions A and C (Photo by Petro Janse van Vuuren).

Part 2: Add Language and Outside Perspective 6. Break participants into pairs or triads. Have each participant share his or her experiences with their partners, walking

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them through the sequence. Ask each participant to give the emergent story a title. Allow up to seven minutes for each participant. 7. Invite the participants to again move through the now familiar sequence B–C–A, but this time all members of the small group will move together, simultaneously. When they have set this new, combined group story, each group should stay still to signal they are done. 8. Position D: Have the participants move through their combined B–C–A sequence again, but this time they should not stop at Position A, and instead find the next logical place for their body to be. Instruct them to breathe three times to set the position. Ask participants to contemplate what they let go of as they moved. Have them think about what they are doing more of in getting to this new position. 9. Return to conversations within the same small groups for the capture portion of the exercise. Instruct participants to choose a new title to their combined story. Ask, “What did you let go of to make this true for you? What must you do more of?” Capture the experience with a photo, drawing, or object as a reminder. You can use SNE picture cards to help sum up participants’ stories, or they can find objects in the room or outside to capture the essence of their experience.

Debrief Participants have been reflecting as they worked in small groups. This debrief is about the large group, and it can be kept short. Close with one or two of the following: • What will you let go of and what you will be doing more of in your world of work thanks to today’s experience? • Tell us about your final picture or object that summarizes your story. • What is the title to your new story? • What did the movement teach you that no amount of talking could reveal?

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Suggestions • Allow between 30 and 90 minutes. • Make sure participants allow themselves to fully experience each position. When they leave a position, they must look back on it using their imagination, which helps with objectification and distancing. • In the group debrief, you can ask participants to write on two index cards (or pick two images representing) one action they will let go of and another they will put into practice. Have them place the first card in a box in the center of the circle; ask them to take a photo of the second to use as a “wallpaper” on their phone.

Online Delivery This exercise can be facilitated online by guiding participants through the process verbally, while they move themselves through the steps in their own space. The only real casualty of this adaptation is the loss of step 6: The group movement. Just let go of that step and see the process as an individual activity with verbal reflections in the collective. Before you begin, make sure all participants have enough space to move around in, no loud distractions, and sufficient volume output or wireless headphones so they can move without physical limitations. Connections: See also Augusto Boal’s Image Theatre techniques for physically exploring abstract concepts (e.g., issues, attitudes, emotions). In Image Theatre, a player creates a sculpture/tableau using other participants’ bodies as “clay” to create, for example, an image of their own oppression (e.g., unequal power dynamics at work or at home). A technique called “dynamisation” is used to transition the real image into an ideal image. Image Theatre is one of several powerful theatrical forms that comprise Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal 2002: 174–98).

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3.2 Tangible Concepts This SNE exercise is excellent for introducing the value of embodied work in a safe and focused way. Because participants use hands only, it requires less physical warming up and the group can get into it quickly. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • used bodily kinesthetic intelligence to explore intangible abstract concepts and to make them more concrete and easier to understand, • practiced paying attention to another and felt that same attention paid to them, • worked together toward collective understanding of work issues that influence their team as a group, and • used mindful action to begin working through real workrelated issues.

Running the Exercise 1. Give each participant several index cards or sturdy strips of paper. 2. Ask participants to close their eyes and think about an intangible concept they have faced at work. An intangible concept might be a big idea, a conceptual issue, a problem or challenge, or anything understandable in theory but difficult to make concrete or to physically and/or emotionally grasp. 3. After a minute or two, ask them to write one concept per strip and place the paper strips face-up on a table in a random order. 4. Ask participants to select one concept from the table that piques their curiosity. 5. Have participants form pairs and sit across from each other, placing their pieces of paper face-down on the floor without revealing their concept to their partner. 6. Instruct one participant (Participant A) to close their eyes and meditate on the concept. While doing so, invite them to move their hands to try to bring clarity to the concept through gesture.

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7. Ask Participant B to look at what their partner is doing and encourage them to notice what experiences arise for them as an observer (rather than try to guess or interpret what the gestures might mean). 8. After one or two minutes, ask Participant A to come to a single still image expressed by their hands. (Judge the proper endpoint by giving them just a bit more time than is comfortable, so they can stretch their movements and thinking but not so long that they become frustrated or bored.) 9. Instruct Participant B to verbally share their observations with their partner, not just what they saw but what it was like for them as they watched. For example, “I saw very fast fluttery movements that caused a sense of urgency and uncertainty to arise in me” or “It was like watching a butterfly that cannot decide which flower to rest on.” 10. After one or two minutes, have the pairs swap roles and repeat the exercise. 11. Provide about five minutes for pairs to share freely what their concepts were and what they learned from the experience.

Debrief • What was it like to pay this kind of attention as the one making the gestures? As the one observing? • What was it like receiving this kind of attention? • Did paying this sort of attention help you to understand the concept more clearly? • What implications might this have in your workplace? • What did you learn about your concept? • What actions can you take in the future based on this understanding?

Suggestions • You can use neuro-scientific ideas around the brain’s narrative circuitry and its direct experience circuitry to help explain the value of this exercise (Rock and Ringleb 2013).

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• The narrative circuitry is the one that wants to interpret everything and relate all information and experiences back to what it already knows of the world. • The direct experience circuitry is activated when you actively cease the need to interpret and work with what your senses can pick up here and now and the pictures that form in your mind as you watch, listen, and experience.

Online Delivery This exercise adapts easily to online facilitation. There are two points of adaptation: 1. Writing and choosing concepts. Use the whiteboard or chat box function. Participants list their concepts here, and each participant chooses the one they want to work with from the suggestions. They write down their choice on a piece of paper for reference. 2. Pair work. Here you have a few options: • If the group is small (eight participants or less), divide participants into pairs and ask each pair to concentrate on their partner and not get distracted by the others in the room. This way the facilitator can easily guide the activity. Add the debrief question: Was it difficult to concentrate only on your partner? • For larger groups, use the breakout room function and facilitate the process by sending messages to the rooms, for example, to indicate when the pair should switch roles. • You can also share the exercise instructions with timing directions with everyone before they go into breakout rooms or divide participants into groups of three, and give the role of timekeeper/observer to a member of the group.

Connections: This activity was designed by Janet Du Preez, an SNE facilitator from Engagement Dynamics. In Chapter 7, Gunter Lösel writes about the necessity of creating a cocoon for another person who might be creatively stifled or is having difficulty

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with a process. Being the cocoon means providing a supportive, nonjudgmental environment for another to create or innovate without fear of making mistakes. This exercise, essentially, is about one leader creating a cocoon for another leader to process a difficult concept and to help make the process meaningful by gently guiding the leader toward clarity.

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PART TWO

Developing the Youth We Need

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4 The Improv Project’s Detroit Yes, And Peter Felsman and Tiger Veenstra

Peter Felsman, PhD, LMSW, is a social scientist, educator, therapist, musical artist, and improviser. He currently serves as postdoctoral associate at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, where he has a joint appointment in the Social Competence and Treatment Lab. Dr. Felsman’s research has focused on methods and mechanisms of mental health intervention and creativity. Results from his three-year study of The Improv Project program were published in The Arts in Psychotherapy (Felsman et al. 2019: 111–17). Tiger Veenstra, PsyD, is an improviser, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner, mother, partner, and Clinical Psychologist in private practice in Newport Beach, California. Dr. Veenstra has researched the theory, principles, and practice of improvisation and has focused on applications of improvisation in psychotherapy. They have applied improvisation in work with doctoral psychology students and in group therapy with federal inmates and persons with schizophrenia. They also specialize in working with couples, transgender clients, and complex people and cases. Dr. Veenstra is a member of a national crisis response team responding to workplace tragedies, and serves on The Detroit Creativity Project’s board overseeing program evaluation and curriculum development.

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Power to the People Mover The Second City improv theatre in Detroit opened in 1993 with Power to the People Mover, a nod to the elevated light rail tram that encircles downtown Detroit. Detroit was The Second City’s third mainstage in North America, behind Toronto and Chicago. Unlike the Chicago and Toronto theatres, which benefited from a steady stream of tourists, Detroit depended solely on audiences from the surrounding area. Second City Detroit alumnus Marc Evan Jackson says that limitation became the cast’s greatest strength: Chicago could put up one show a year and still fill the house every night. In Detroit we’d run out of audience in a couple of months. That meant we had to be constantly creating and writing new material. The experience made all of us more collaborative, more nimble, and grittier. It taught us to look for inspiration everywhere and to never let go of the kernel of an idea.1 Several Second City Detroit cast members have gone on to build successful careers in the entertainment industry. They include Larry Joe Campbell, Keegan-Michael Key, Maribeth Monroe, Jerry Minor, Sam Richardson, and Tim Robinson. Many say those early years in Detroit shaped an improv mindset that helped them approach their lives as performers and people ever ready, resilient, and willing to say yes to something new and unknown. So when Detroit mayor Dave Bing made an appeal to expats in 2011 to invest their talents in the City’s flagging economy, several of these Second City Detroit alums based in Los Angeles took him seriously.2 Spearheaded by Jackson, they founded the nonprofit The Detroit Creativity Project and began working to bring art programs back to the public schools.

The Improv Project The following year, The Detroit Creativity Project (DCP) launched The Improv Project as a free, school-based improvisational theatre

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program for middle and high school students. The DCP founders focused on improv because they believed the same principles that helped them creatively overcome challenges would also benefit students far beyond onstage performance, by building their confidence and teaching them skills around listening and collaboration. Eight years later, the DCP’s founders say they could not have anticipated the breadth of positive outcomes from The Improv Project. On a recent school visit, eighth-grade students demonstrated an improv game they had created called “Mingle,” an on-your-feet version of musical chairs. The desks had been pushed aside, and students moved around the room until their teaching artist called out a number. Pure chaos erupted as they quickly moved into groups comprised of that number of people, while paradoxically also working to avoid anyone being left out. “Mingle” is without any doubt a fun, raucous application of improv to mathematical factoring, but even more remarkable is how the students worked together to anticipate and hide the “remainders” so everyone could stay in the game. The school principal later told Jackson the students enjoy improv so much

FIGURE 4.1  Eighth graders at Detroit Enterprise Academy create characters and adopt different points of view in two-person scenes (Photo by Kelly Rossi).

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that they ask to practice during free class time and between classes. One senior student described the impact of his improv experience to the DCP this way: “[Students] use their mind in creative ways they’re not used to during the school day. There’s no wrong answer and every idea is a useful one. Not everyone knows what they want to be when they grow up, and this is a positive outlet where students can not only find their voice but find themselves.”3

Improv Goes to School To get The Improv Project off the ground from their base in Los Angeles, the DCP founders teamed up with Second City Detroit alumna Margaret Edwartowski who was working at Y Arts Detroit. It was a natural partnership given their history collaborating on the Detroit mainstage in the 1990s. Edwartowski’s position as Y Art’s director of arts and her relationships with several improv teaching artists and classroom teachers also paved the way for the pilot program in 2012. DCP’s director, Beth Hagenlocker, now collaborates closely with Edwartowski to identify schools for expansion and develop new programs. Both agree that the improvisation mindset is a hallmark of their partnership and has contributed to The Improv Project’s success. The program began with 100 students in three schools and has grown steadily over the past eight years to serve more than 1,000 students annually. The Improv Project program has been offered at thirty-three schools in Detroit and neighboring cities, like Hamtramck, River Rouge, and Lincoln Park. The overwhelming majority of the students enrolled in The Improv Project live in underresourced communities, predominantly in Detroit. While originally intended to be a performing arts elective, few Detroit schools have performing arts programs. More frequently they offer The Improv Project in other areas of the curriculum, such as communications, English Language Arts, social studies, and career/college readiness. Most schools offer the course for the full school year and many students enroll in both semesters. Although the program is free, schools are required to participate in program evaluation, provide dedicated

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classroom space, and a school liaison. The school liaison is most often a classroom teacher who hosts The Improv Project’s teaching artists during regular class time. In many instances, the classroom teacher has been selected by the school principal and is new to improv. In addition to completing a course evaluation, these teachers advocate for the program and encourage student participation. Most of the teaching artists in the program are alumni of Second City Detroit or Planet Ant Theatre, a local improv theatre company co-founded by Second City Detroit alum Keegan-Michael Key. Many of them are connected through their performance careers to the DCP founders, Edwartowski, and each other, which has created a cohesive and collaborative teaching team. The teaching artists all have formal improv training and several years’ experience teaching improv to adolescents and young adults. They meet periodically throughout the year for training, to share best practices, and refine program delivery. Several teaching artists participate in the DCP’s artistic advisory group, which develops new curricula for The Improv Project. The group is guided by Nancy Hayden Edwards, a Second City Detroit alum and former teaching artist in The Improv Project. Edwards is also the artistic director at Second City Chicago. To ensure program quality and consistency across school sites, the teaching artists use a standardized syllabus that follows a progression of specific themes from week to week. The syllabus emphasizes both performing arts objectives and specific life skills. The performing arts targets are also designed to help students develop public speaking skills and literacy related to storytelling and story sequencing. The life skills targets include a range of social frameworks, such as status and point of view, to foster specific behaviors linked to social and emotional learning, or SEL.4 Studies suggest these social skills may positively impact academic outcomes, promote sharing and empathy, improve attitudes toward school, and reduce anxiety and depression (Farrington et al. 2012). The class meets once weekly for ten weeks over the semester. Classes are generally fifty minutes long and are usually led by two teaching artists to maintain a teacher to student ratio of 1:15. The Improv Project classes begin with a review of the prior week’s lesson, an introduction to the current week’s focus, and warm-up exercises and games; there is time built into each class to side-coach and debrief each exercise. During the last two weeks of the second

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FIGURE 4.2  The Improv Project students perform at Detroit’s Marlene Boll Theater for the 2019 student showcase (Photo by Him and Her Studio).

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semester, students prepare for an annual student showcase. This showcase is held at a downtown Detroit theatre and gives students the chance to perform on stage. In a city that has historically had an east side/west side socioeconomic and geographic divide, it also offers students a rare opportunity to meet and collaborate with their peers from other Detroit neighborhoods. The 180-seat theatre is often packed with students, parents, and local improvisers who come to support their new colleagues. There is always a standout performance or two, sometimes from a student who participated reluctantly during class. Now they suddenly jump enthusiastically into scenes at the showcase, demonstrating they have been absorbing the improv lessons all semester long. The support of the cast and the collective energy of the audience seem to embolden these students, inviting them to move beyond their fears, in the classroom setting, of being judged or making a mistake. Students gather after the curtain call, filled with adrenaline, for a debrief with their instructors and to receive a certificate of completion and pose for a cast picture. Students’ insights are often about their sense of accomplishment. One high school senior told us, “You’re not alone when you’re in a scene …. I have really bad stage fright, well, I used to. But now, when I started [improvising], it opened me up to feel confident in what I’m saying.” Another student who had returned to school two years after dropping out was inspired to see her name on the certificate. She told her teacher she would frame it to remind herself of the achievement.

Program Feedback The DCP’s evaluation of The Improv Project has focused on program quality and compliance with the Michigan Arts Education Instruction and Assessment (MAEIA) Performance Standards, which relate to state and national arts standards.5 Especially in the early years, much of the feedback about the program has come from anecdotal evidence. Administrators, classroom teachers, and teaching artists have pointed to the program’s strong, positive impact on students’ confidence, creativity, and their engagement in school. This feedback is meaningful given truancy and attrition are enormous problems in

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Detroit’s public schools. The rate of chronic absenteeism in Detroit was 63 percent at the end of the 2019 school year. Compare that to the state’s overall rate of 20 percent.6 At one high school, attendance for improv class was 98 percent compared to 60 percent school-wide. Although not ideal, students who had skipped school were caught sneaking in for improv class. One principal reported improv had become such a part of the school’s culture that it was seen by students as a “perk” of advancing to the eighth grade when the school offered improv. Classroom teachers also have reported that students participate more in class and are willing and able to work more collaboratively. The collaboration required of these young improvisers can be difficult, especially if they are accustomed to a traditional educational environment that focuses on individual achievement. One eighth grader told us one of the greatest challenges she overcame in improv class was learning to work with and accept another classmate’s idea, “even when I thought my idea was better.” Video taken at a high school in one of Detroit’s most economically distressed neighborhoods shows a dramatic transformation in the students over the course of the program. On week one, many of the eleventh and twelfth graders were sitting with hoodies up, heads down, arms folded, and in some cases with their backs to the front of the room. By the end of the semester, students were jumping up to volunteer for games and there were very few hooded faces in the room. It is not uncommon for teachers to describe reticent students now engaging. The English Language Arts teacher at one middle school explains: There are students getting up to perform who rarely speak in class. Even though not all of the students volunteer to play the games, they are all paying attention and participate in the discussions. Students have consistently shared how improv has helped them be more confident when they are speaking and not worry so much about making mistakes or being judged by their peers. One eleventh grader told his teaching artist and classroom teacher how improv had turned things around for him after a particularly troubled, hopeless time when he considered dropping out of school. He told

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them improv had provided a space where he could be himself, without judgment, and he now felt empowered to move ahead with what he wanted to do next in his life.

Studying the Impact on Teen Anxiety Among the many anecdotal stories shared by students and classroom teachers, perhaps the most compelling is one told by the classroom teacher who heads up the acting department at Arts Academy in the Woods (AAW). He described one student’s experience with improv this way: When I first met this student they could barely stand in front of an audience of the 30 or so students in my Introduction to Acting class. They would put a script in front of their face ….When they read the lines from the script you could see tears emerging on their cheeks [from an intense fear of speaking publicly] …. Once a week The Detroit Creativity Project’s teachers would come to teach us improvisation skills. This is where the student began to excel. This teacher went on to say this same student is now a senior at AAW and they are the head of the school’s improv troupe, a mentor to other students, and they had received an invitation to audition for The American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA). The DCP was particularly interested in the potential to add empirical evidence to the positive anecdotal feedback they had received from participants like the AAW teacher. In 2015 Dr. Peter Felsman, then a second-year University of Michigan (UM) doctoral student, approached the DCP about the possibility of collaborating to study the impacts of The Improv Project more formally.7 Early on in the UM partnership, the preliminary survey results narrowed the focus to social anxiety and the development of social skills, a key component of SEL. Over the past decade, studies have also shown that stress experienced by many economically disadvantaged youth can have significant negative effects on their academic success and overall development (Kim et al. 2013). The UM evaluation of The Improv Project has consistently found that

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a significant percentage (around 40 to 45 percent) of the students screen positive for social anxiety.8 Routine mental health screening has not historically been conducted by Detroit’s public school district (DPSCD), nor is there readily available data on student participation in therapy. Administrators tell us students have had limited access to more traditional therapy due in part to stigma, limited transportation, and restricted finances. The anticipated rollout of a UM program called TRAILS (Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students) could change this by offering mental health screening and resources to students and staff throughout DPSCD.

The Theory behind Using Improv to Overcome Social Anxiety The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines social anxiety as fear or aversion to social situations that involve the possibility of scrutiny by others. Onset of social anxiety most often occurs in adolescence and persists into adulthood (Knappe et al. 2015: 39–70). Social anxiety has been linked to higher levels of drug dependency and unemployment, and to lower socioeconomic class, household income, quality of life, and educational achievement (Patel et al. 2002: 221–33; Schneier et al. 2014; Asher et al. 2017: 1–12). Among the risk factors for psychological challenges like social anxiety is an individual’s intolerance of uncertainty (Carleton et al. 2012: 468–79; McEvoy and Erceg-Hurn 2016). Recent experimental work shows that even brief periods of improv experience can lead to greater tolerance of uncertainty (Felsman et al. 2020). A change in intolerance of uncertainty has been shown to predict change in social anxiety (Mahoney and McEvoy 2012). One of the best-known treatments for social anxiety is exposure therapy. This is used in therapeutic interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and often involves a series of graduated exercises that target an individual’s concerns about specific experiences (Hofmann et al. 2010: 701–10). There are two theories about how exposure in traditional therapy may effectively combat social anxiety. Either mechanism could explain how improv training can be a tool for overcoming social anxiety. One view is

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that it provides learned habituation, in essence the initial activation of fear followed by a reduction in fear. The second theory, called inhibitory learning, is that exposure reduces anxiety by creating a non-threatening association with an anxiety-provoking situation (Craske et al. 2008: 5–27). In the context of improvisational theatre, students are playfully exposed to social performance situations involving increasing amounts of uncertainty. One example of this is a beginning exercise like Tug of War (Workbook 4.1) where the group is divided into two and each side attempts to pull the other across an imaginary boundary using an imaginary rope. This exercise exposes students to uncertainty about a relatively limited set of variables: the height of the rope, following one another’s pulls to ensure the integrity of the rope, and determining a winner. A more advanced exercise like Elevator, which involves unscripted interactions among students in an imagined elevator, requires exposure to uncertainty about a greater number of variables with increasing personal responsibility: what character to play, how to use voice, physicality, and point of view, how to use the space, and whether and how to introduce objects. Improv offers the potential to form new associations with uncertainty such as curiosity, excitement, and a sense of possibility. These associations are non-threatening and often full of joy. Fundamental principles of improvisation are at play. Improvisation involves co-creation and connection with others. The improviser’s goal is to build on and support the ideas of their scene partners. These principles help build trust among the group and also encourage participants to take risks working together. Improvisers are repeatedly exposed to social interactions that are inherently uncertain and involve infinite possibilities for how any given situation will unfold. Improv principles such as Yes, And offer a supportive framework to use within social interactions, even in the face of uncertain and unpredictable outcomes.

The University of Michigan’s Study Results Starting in the fall of 2015, the UM team began evaluating The Improv Project using a pre-post survey design and video documentation. Surveys were usually administered on the first week

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of class, and then on the last week of the program. Video was also taken for qualitative assessment. The pre-test instrument included established psychological measures, a question about prior improv experience, and select questions to gauge students’ response to the class. The post-test survey added a measure of student engagement and questions intended to capture students’ beliefs about the relevance of improv outside of the class. By design, the UM results for the three-year period were compiled for each semester so these results could be used by the DCP to refine the program. The information was used to make improvements in the syllabus, address issues at individual school sites, and identify opportunities for teaching artist training. UM’s results compiled from the fall of 2016 were published in Arts in Psychotherapy in late 2018. They found 46 percent of students who completed both the pre and post surveys met criteria for social anxiety at the beginning of the program. Of those students, 43 percent no longer met criteria at the end of the program (Felsman et al. 2019: 111–17). In the most recently compiled results from the 2017 winter semester, a similar incidence of students screened positive for social anxiety. At the end of the ten-week course, 60 percent of these students no longer met these criteria. If the 2016 and 2017 results are extrapolated to the annual enrollment of 1000 students, we would expect roughly 460 students to screen positive for social anxiety before the program, and between 198 and 276 to no longer screen positive after ten weeks of improv training. The UM results are compelling. The magnitude of the effect is comparable to the pre-post treatment effects of evidence-based treatments such as CBT (Stewart and Chambless 2009: 595). Given adolescents’ access to more traditional evidenced-based mental health interventions may be limited by logistical, financial, and social barriers, considering alternative intervention approaches is critically important. A school-based improv program like The Improv Project circumvents many of the barriers to traditional mental health interventions discussed in the previous section of this chapter. The program takes place during regular class time rather than singling out individuals as being “in need of treatment,” removing the stigma associated with participation. It uses group activities to reward behaviors known to benefit psychological health related to interpersonal trust and peer support, rather than talking about

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mental health directly. The in-school program also employs teaching artists rather than professional psychologists or counselors (who adolescents have reported not trusting), and classes take place with the support of a classroom teacher, who many students describe as a mentor and advocate. The published UM work on The Improv Project found that reductions in students’ social anxiety correlated with an increased willingness to make mistakes, which has been linked to an ability to act in the face of uncertainty. Since willingness to make mistakes is positively related to people’s ability to act in the face of uncertainty (Buhr and Dugas 2006: 222–36), this suggests that improv training might predict improvements in students’ ability to tolerate uncertainty. This construct is also referred to in behavioral health as “intolerance of uncertainty.” A follow-up UM study, now under review for publication, tested for this. It provides the first empirical evidence that improv training can predict reductions in both uncertainty intolerance and social anxiety. These results could have broader implications for psychological health because intolerance of uncertainty has been associated with the development and maintenance of anxiety and depression (McEvoy and Mahoney 2012; Carleton et al. 2012: 468–79). The DCP and UM teams have also closely scrutinized the role of chronic absenteeism in Detroit’s public schools, and how this might impact the program’s effectiveness, in terms of both effects on social anxiety and students’ ability to learn key improv principles. The Detroit school district has one of the highest rates of truancy in the nation—in 2018, more than half of K-12 students missed 10 percent or more of the school year. Michigan’s Schools of Choice and charter school policies as well as DPSCD’s overall financial challenges have also resulted in high rates of student mobility within and between school years (Lenhoff et al. 2019).9 To test whether aversion to the program contributed negatively to student attendance, the UM team compared survey responses of students present for pre and post surveys to those who completed the first survey only. The analyses repeatedly revealed no differences, indicating that attendance was likely a reflection of student mobility and chronic absenteeism seen across DPSCD. One of UM’s key findings has been that higher levels of student engagement predict greater reductions in social anxiety. Research on cognitive dissonance and self-perception suggests we use our

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behavior to inform attitudes about ourselves (Harmon-Jones and Mills 2019: 3–24). Being engaged in improv class may help shift a student’s beliefs about social fears and anxiety because through repeated exposure it becomes incompatible with the idea that “social performance is among my worst fears.”

Best Practices Funding for arts programming in Detroit public schools continues to be limited, and The Improv Project is likely to remain free to participating schools for the foreseeable future. The DCP closely monitors each school enrolled in The Improv Project and has identified several factors that are essential to the program’s effectiveness. These range from more tangible things like classroom management and adequate space to more qualitative factors like the improv mindset of the classroom teacher, teaching artists, and administrators. As mentioned previously, one of UM’s key study findings has been the positive statistical connection between student engagement and program impact. It seems intuitive that the more a student participates, the more benefit they will receive. The bigger question is how does one make use of that knowledge, particularly in Detroit schools where chronic absenteeism affects students’ ability to engage with what they are learning? The DCP has worked to boost student engagement in several ways. The program actively enlists the help of the classroom teachers and teaching artists. In exchange for free tuition, schools are asked to assign a classroom teacher to be an advocate of the program. In the classroom, this means teachers join the teaching artists and students in some improv exercises, and encourage students who are not participating to join the group. Some classroom teachers have elected to give extra credit or base grades on students’ participation. The teaching artists have also been instrumental in boosting student engagement by encouraging more reticent students to participate, and by demonstrating exercises to show students their own vulnerability and willingness to take risks and “look silly.” The

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teaching artists’ feedback in regular team meetings and through the DCP’s artistic advisory group have resulted in changes to the syllabus to increase time for debriefing and emphasize the most popular exercises; both are often the entry point for students who want to participate but are reluctant to stand up and improvise. The DCP has also found that continuity in the teaching artist team and a commitment to learning and using students’ names build trust within the group and promote student engagement. Finally, to address the impact overcrowding can have on student engagement additional teaching artists are assigned to larger class sizes to provide a student-to-instructor ratio of at most 15:1. Over the years, the DCP has exited only a handful of schools. Those experiences have brought valuable lessons that have informed school recruitment and selection. We have found that the best school partners have been those where there are true advocates for the program, both in the school’s leadership and in the classroom. Many teachers and administrators have no prior experience with improvisation and they are open to saying yes before fully understanding the value of improv principles for their students. As part of their investment in the program, schools are also required to set aside a dedicated room for the class where students can have enough space to stand and move around without crowding one another. In addition to encouraging student participation, classroom teachers are asked to assist with classroom management and to establish rules about behavior such as cell phone use and leaving the room. The DCP also asks them to complete a survey at the end of each semester, giving feedback on the teaching artists as well as program impact related to improv, social skills, and literacy. The DCP’s partnership with Y Arts Detroit has played a key role in the growth of The Improv Project. Margaret Edwartowki’s existing relationship to the DCP’s founders through Second City Detroit, her position as head of the YMCA’s arts division, and her ongoing presence as a performer in the Detroit improv community have fostered program innovation and expansion. Edwartowski’s rapport with the schools and classroom teachers also paved the way for the UM team to conduct student surveys and videotape classes, and she has been instrumental in helping identify and train the teaching artists who are central to The Improv Project’s success.

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Future Directions for The Improv Project Where do we go from here? In 2019, Dr. Felsman accepted a postdoctoral position at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, opening a new chapter in the partnership with the DCP. Both partners have a continued commitment to study how improv training can be most effective as an intervention for adolescents experiencing social anxiety, as well as how it can help develop confidence and social skills more broadly. The DCP has identified several potential avenues that would build on this work: • We are interested in studying students’ progress across semesters and from year to year in order to assess the long-term effects of The Improv Project. It would also be valuable to evaluate the program using a control group to understand the outcomes of improv training relative to another activity. • There is an opportunity to more fully integrate improv principles like Yes, And into educators’ interactions with students through train-the-trainer workshops. At the end of each semester, the DCP asks classroom teachers if they’d be interested in applying improv to another class they teach; the majority of the time the answer is yes. In response, the DCP is now offering improv-integrated programs for English Language Arts. Our hope is also to develop a program specifically to foster an improv culture in the participating schools. This could be offered as part of the Detroit school district’s professional development and orientation meetings. • In 2018 DPSCD undertook an audit to evaluate the services they provide to students with exceptional learning needs and mental health issues. As part of that review, the District renewed its commitment to develop programs and outreach to serve these students. There would be an opportunity to more widely promote improv as an effective alternative or adjunct to traditional therapy at schools the DCP doesn’t currently serve.

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• In 2020 the DCP began developing an alumni database to help build that network of young improvisers who may benefit from additional improv training, either in their education, careers, or as ongoing support for social anxiety. This outreach would also help identify future teaching artists, and keep in touch with graduates who could apply their improv training in their careers. The Detroit Creativity Project is committed to bringing arts education to Detroit youth. Participation in the performing arts, and improv specifically, has an impact. We have collected countless stories and anecdotes over the years about The Improv Project’s effect on the people involved, including the DCP’s founders. Several founding members come back to Detroit each year to lead student workshops and perform in benefit shows and comedy festivals. Before one of these shows, the Detroit Institute of Arts opened a special photography exhibition so the cast and our students could tour the gallery together. Comedians Tim Meadows and KeeganMichael Key walked through the exhibit with a group of middle school students from Hutchinson, a neighborhood school in Southeast Detroit. After asking the students’ ages, they turned to each other and remarked, “Wow. We didn’t start improvising until we were in our twenties. You guys have a huge head start on us.”

Postscript When Michigan’s Governor Whitmer ordered all schools to suspend in-person classes in March 2020 due to Covid-19, The Detroit Creativity Project and partner Y Arts created a plan for remote learning, taking into account that 90 percent of Detroit students lacked adequate internet access and/or an appropriate device for online learning. They reached out to classroom teachers at partnering schools and the applied improv community for input. In spite of enthusiasm from classroom teachers, only five of the fourteen school sites participated in the sessions. An exception was the Hamtramck HS improv troupe, which met for two hours each week from March to July and performed an improv show streamed to YouTube. Funds pledged by several local corporations

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FIGURE 4.3  Students from Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit join teaching artists in a game of Eyewitness Story, and break news that moth people are invading Detroit’s Belle Isle (Photo recorded live on Zoom, edited by Darren Clark).

and foundations in May 2020 resulted in Connected Futures, an initiative to provide high-speed internet access and a laptop to every K-12 student in Detroit, allowing more students to access online improv classes in fall 2020. The DCP and its partners also created a postcard series mailed to all students enrolled in The Improv Project and to 600 families served by a Detroit literacy nonprofit. The series included postcards around key improv principles and creative writing prompts in response to the events unfolding around racial justice. To reach students who had internet access through their cell phones, the DCP launched a YouTube channel and enlisted the help of teaching artists, local improvisers, and television personalities to create a series of improv videos demonstrating improv skills and exercises. The DCP also brought on a contractor in April 2020 to help build on the organization’s community engagement efforts. The objectives have been to increase outreach to students, families, and program alumni, as well as to support continued remote learning in

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the 2020–21 school year. This has included a new webpage devoted to online learning, improv and listening sessions for the general public in Detroit, and new partnerships with Detroit nonprofits that engage young people in leadership and youth development programs. The DCP anticipates all of this progress will inform their work when The Improv Project returns to the classroom in 2021.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Beth Hagenlocker, Executive Director of The Detroit Creativity Project, and the participants of The Improv Project who contributed to creating and writing this story.

Notes 1 From conversation Marc had with The Detroit Creativity Project’s executive director Beth Hagenlocker on January 20, 2020. 2 In 2011 Detroit was on the precipice of what would become the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history and the public schools were similarly burdened by debt and under emergency management. Art and music programs were considered non-essential to the curriculum, and few survived deep budget cuts. 3 All quotes and observations made by students and classroom teachers come from survey responses and direct communication with either The Detroit Creativity Project’s executive director Beth Hagenlocker or The Improv Project’s program director Kelly Rossi. These comments and observations were collected during the 2015–19 program years. 4 The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has identified five key competencies as a framework for SEL. These are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. 5 The Michigan Arts Education Instruction and Assessment (MAEIA) connects to the 2011 Michigan Merit Curriculum Arts Education Content Standards and the 2014 National Core Arts Standards. 6 The rate for chronic absenteeism indicates the percentage of students who missed eighteen or more days during the school year. Data is reported by the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD).

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7 His advisors on the project included Dr. Joseph Himle at the School of Social Work and Dr. Colleen Seifert in the Department of Psychology. 8 The UM team used a self-assessment tool that is widely used in mental health settings, the abbreviated Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN), or the Mini-SPIN (see Connor et al. 2001: 137–40). When the evaluation has also included a screener for depression (the Patient Health Questionnaire-2), the majority of students, 65 percent, have screened positive for either social anxiety or depression (see Richardson et al. 2010: 1097–103). 9 Michigan’s Schools of Choice policy was introduced in 1996 as part of an initiative to provide parents with more enrollment options. Under the policy, a school district may opt to enroll students from anywhere within the district and from outside districts.

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WORKBOOK Many of the most popular impro exercises can be effective with participants who experience social anxiety. The following three exercises gradually introduce levels of uncertainty for participants who may be challenged by unpredictable social situations.

4.1 Tug-of-War Participants play tug-of-war using an imagined rope. The focus of the exercise is to develop a connection with the other players through a mimed object. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • practiced focusing completely on an imagined object and the space it occupies, • experienced connecting with others through shared focus on an object, • experienced competition that necessitates collaboration, and • committed physically to an action by responding to others in the group.

Running the Exercise 1. Divide the group in half. 2. Have each team of participants form a single-file line and face the other team, while all the participants hold onto an imagined rope. 3. Start the game of tug-of-war and coach the participants to move and react as other participants pull on the rope and lose ground as they would in a real game of tug-of-war. 4. The exercise ends when one side succumbs to the force of the other side.

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Debrief • How could you tell where the rope was in order to hold onto it? • How did you know when to pull on the rope? How could you tell if you were losing ground in the game? Were there sounds or movements that caused you to act or react in a specific way? • Was there a point when you felt like the rope was real? • Did you have a different attitude about playing the game at the beginning versus the end? • How did it feel to “win” or “lose” the game? Can you explain why you may have felt that way?

Suggestions Tug-of-war is always high on the list of favorite exercises or when they create the running order for a student showcase. Much of the success with reluctant improvisers has rested on their instructor’s ability to encourage them to participate and to set them up to experience success in circumstances that would normally be uncomfortable. Connections: Tug-of-War was presented by Viola Spolin in Improvisation for the Theater (1999) as part of what she described as Orientation to the process of theatre. Spolin saw this as an essential first step in introducing participants to concepts of group agreement and the individual’s responsibility and participation in group decision-making. Other physical, group agreement games by Spolin that have similar learning objectives are Object Moving Players, Part of a Whole, and Space Shaping (Ensemble). See SNAP! (Workbook 11.1) for another competition/collaboration imagination exercise.

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4.2 Dr. Know-It-All In this exercise, several participants join forces to become one multi-headed authority (each contributing one word at a time) while answering questions posed by the audience. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • gained experience performing in front of others, • practiced working as part of a team to achieve a common objective, • experienced the value of staying present rather than thinking ahead, and • practiced letting go of their own idea to, instead, build on their teammates’ ideas.

Running the Exercise 1. Have four to seven participants stand in a line in front of the room, either linking arms or standing close enough to signify that they are a single multi-headed person, Dr. Know-it-All. 2. Explain that, starting with the first participant in the line and moving from left to right, each participant will contribute one word at a time to construct the answer to the question. 3. As the host, pose an initial easy question to Dr. Know-It-All to demonstrate the exercise (e.g., what is the name of this high school?) 4. Any participant can initiate a bow to indicate the question has been answered. 5. Ask the audience to provide more questions, with the host being the ultimate arbiter of the questions posed to the doctor. Avoid having the same participant begin each answer—either move to the next participant in line or have the participant next to the one who last spoke begin.

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Debrief • What did it feel like when the doctor’s answer went in a different direction than you intended? Encourage participants to consider this in the context of working collaboratively on a project. • Did you ever find yourself losing track of the answer because you were thinking ahead instead of staying in the moment? Encourage participants to share similar experiences from school, work, or home.

Suggestions Dr. Know-It-All is a performance exercise, and it is valuable to end on success. If for some reason the group struggles with a question, take another so the exercise can end on a high note. The job of accepting/rejecting questions from the audience is key. If the audience asks a question that is in any way unpleasant and may not delight the performers, find a way to build on the offer from the audience member while moving to a new question by saying things like, “Dr. Know-It-All won’t have time to answer that question sufficiently, let’s get a new question from the other side of the room.” Connections: Dr. Know-It-All is a short-form improvisation exercise in the tradition of word-at-a-time exercises by Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone. It is a common Second City game and, in Theatresports, it is sometimes played as Word-at-a-Time Expert (Hall 2015: 90) and involves two or more improvisers playing the role of a multi-headed expert being interviewed on a talk show. Seasoned Theatresports improvisers will bring more of Johnstone’s (1979) original Experts game into the process, for example, by asking impossible questions (e.g., How do you get a cat to juggle?) that the “expert” must then answer without hedging.

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4.3 Conducted Story Building on the concepts of Dr. Know-It-All, this exercise requires each participant to take on a bigger piece of the story by providing sentences rather than a single word. It also requires participants be ready to contribute at any time, rather than speaking in a predictable sequence. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • gained experience performing in front of others, • practiced listening and working as part of a team to achieve a common objective, • taken increased responsibility and risk for a group effort, and • practiced letting go of their own idea to, instead, build on their teammates’ ideas.

Running the Exercise 1. Have four to seven participants stand in a row in front of the room. Kneel or sit in front of them. 2. Explain that you will serve as the story conductor, directing which participant will be telling the story at any given time. When the conductor points at a participant, that person will continue the story exactly where the last participant ended, even if it is in the middle of a word. 3. Begin by asking the audience for the title of a story that has never been told. 4. Point to the participant who will begin the story and continue moving from participant to participant, changing the pace as the story unfolds. 5. End the round once you feel the story has found an ending.

Debrief • How difficult was it to follow the story being told, rather than holding onto an idea you had about where the story

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should go? Encourage participants to consider how listening might play a role in the success of their storytelling. • Was there a time when a fellow participant picked up your idea and built on it? What did that feel like?

Suggestions • The conductor plays a key role in helping participants to be successful and supporting any who are struggling during their turn. • A layer of difficulty can be added to this exercise by assigning each participant a specific genre when telling their portion of the story. The objective of this version is to have participants consider different viewpoints and how that impacts their ability to maintain and follow a storyline. Connections: This is a short-form improvisation exercise adapted from Viola Spolin’s Building a Story (1999). The Theatresports version, Story-Story-Die, is used as a competitive elimination game in which the audience is encouraged to enthusiastically yell “Die!” when a storyteller pauses, repeats a word, or does not continue the previous sentence successfully. When that improviser is “killed” she proudly leaves the stage like a warrior who will return next time to vanquish the story! This Conducted Story is similar but has a completely different objective—to collaborate rather than to compete.

5 Spontaneity in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Valuing the “In-between” and “After” of Applied Improvisation Moriah Flagler

Moriah Flagler is a teacher, theatre maker, and improviser. Her work explores the intersections of identity, connection, belonging, story, and social justice. Moriah holds a Master of Fine Arts in Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre Education from the University of Arizona. She has taught in the United States and internationally; one of her favorite experiences was creating an improv troupe with teenagers in Quepos, Costa Rica. She would like to thank the community members she worked with in Quepos for always placing the relationship in front of the work and teaching her to do the same.

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There are countless ways schools communicate to young people that their languages and cultures are not of value in academic settings. We see this through how the federal “Indian schools” forcibly stripped young people of their native languages and cultures, replacing them with languages and practices viewed as superior. We see this through educational research of the 1960s and 1970s claiming that students from poor communities and specifically students of color entered school with a “culture of poverty,” not even recognizing the wealth of knowledges and skills they bring from their home spaces (Paris 2012).1 We see this through the English-only legislation, such as Arizona’s Proposition 203, and ESL programs with high stakes testing that students must pass in order to integrate into mainstream classrooms. Historically, US schooling has been a process of deficit-based assimilation to dominant identities, languages, and cultural practices (SuárezOrozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001; Olneck 2004; Paris 2012). Sadly, these processes of “subtractive schooling” are not new, are still very present, and greatly impact young immigrants’ and children of immigrants’ feelings of belonging and academic success (specifically with U.S.-Mexican youth, see Valenzuela 1999). With the aim of countering subtractive schooling, I crafted an applied improvisation (AI) residency focused on culturally sustaining pedagogy. Culturally sustaining pedagogy “supports young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence. [It seeks to] foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling” (Paris 2012: 95). In other words, I structured my residency with improvisation activities and games that focused on the assets students with marginalized identities brought with them from their home spaces. These assets make up the young people’s community cultural wealth and come in many forms, some of which include linguistic, familial, and social (Yosso 2005). My hope was that through improvisational games and activities, the students would make visible to themselves and each other their home-based knowledges and skills (Moll and González 2004), and that we could celebrate them while making art together, specifically digital media. As a White facilitator–improvisor–teacher, I went in to the residency mindful of how my own privilege and positionality could situate me as the outsider “mining for stories” that exoticized or

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retraumatized participants. I actively used that awareness to shape the way I presented material and how I responded to what the students shared. The residency I examine in this chapter took place at a Title I middle school in Austin, Texas, over three weeks in 2017 (for a total of nine sessions lasting between 50 and 90 minutes depending on the school day). I met the teacher, Señora Petunia, during a summer institute on drama-based pedagogy I was teaching through the University of Texas at Austin.2 Señora Petunia was excited about using improvisation, storytelling, and digital media in her classes, so for my MFA thesis project I co-created a residency with her sixth-grade Spanish for Heritage Speakers class. The goals of such a class, as stated in the school district’s yearly plan, include polishing grammar, engaging with Spanish-language literature, and exploring what it means to be bilingual and bicultural. A Spanish for Heritage Speakers class is usually for students whose families are of Spanish-speaking ancestors and may have grown up speaking the language at home. Señora Petunia’s class, however, was made up of seventeen Latinx heritage speakers and three White students who were placed in the group because they had been in a dual-language elementary school program leading up to middle school.3 This created an interesting range of skill sets. I intentionally chose to gear the activities toward the heritage speakers and imagined that the White students might become “strategic accomplices” in the work of equity and justice.4 After consulting with the classroom teacher, I planned the sessions so that the students would explore and engage with their own and each other’s stories through improvisation and then develop their own digital stories in small groups, building on the sentence stem, “Vengo de … ” (I come from … ). Señora Petunia and I co-facilitated the sessions in Spanish and my residency ended in a screening of the digital stories for friends and family. Digital stories, as defined by StoryCenter (n.d.), are two- to three-minute personal stories made up of a series of still/moving images, first person narration, and music/sound (Alrutz 2015b). I chose to use this form of digital story to showcase the young people’s work for several reasons. First and foremost, because I have seen the racialization and criminalization of Latinx bodies in the media, I wanted to create space for the young people in the project to disrupt narratives that mainstream media puts forward daily. Another reason was to provide the young people a platform of

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self-authorship. Through the use of drama-based pedagogy, theatre performance techniques, oral storytelling, and digital media, digital storytelling becomes an active, embodied, and collaborative process that supports young people as agentic artists (Alrutz 2015a). Because the digital stories are recorded instead of performed live, it allows the ephemeral nature of storytelling to be more permanent and able to be shared with friends and family who are not able to attend during the school day. Finally, using digital storytelling as the medium removed the risk and pressure of performing with the body, a pressure I have seen marginalized teens experience in previous work. To lessen this pressure, the digital stories combined first person narration with photographs the students took to show the feeling behind each line of text (bodies and faces excluded). This chapter focuses on the process of building the digital stories through improvisational games/exercises and illustrates how improvisation strengthened ensemble, supported building brave spaces, and created structures for storytelling to happen organically during unplanned moments.

Building Ensemble and Fostering a Brave Space through Improvisation It is a common practice for applied theatre practitioners to begin a project with ensemble building exercises where participants get to know one another. Kathryn Dawson and Bridget Lee contextualize theatre practices in an educational setting by defining ensemble as “a sense of belonging, community or relatedness among peers” (2018: 18). To build ensemble, each session I would begin with a “temperature” check; I would ask the class to hold up their thumbs in a position anywhere between a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down to show how they were feeling. Some days students would offer a word or phrase to go with their thumb status, other days they would just show their thumbs. After a temperature check, we played improvisation name games like Name and Motion, in which each person says their name and accompanies it with a physical gesture.5 The group affirms the name and gesture by echoing them back. This exercise helped me learn the students’ names while providing them with an opportunity to share a little of themselves

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with each other and to practice being momentarily the center of attention in a low-risk setting. We spent the first two sessions of the residency focused on getting to know each other while exploring what family/community meant to us and what we have learned from our families/communities. I introduced the improv activity A Truth About Me/Una Verdad Sobre Mi (Workbook 5.1) and both Señora Petunia and I played as members of the ensemble. In the game A Truth About Me, a person in the center of the circle offers their name and something that is true about them. The players in the circle listen and if the statement also rings true for them, they leave their spot and find a new spot in the circle. If there are no spots left, they become the new person in the middle that offers a truth. Señora Petunia started in the middle and the students quickly got a sense of the game. They listened closely, excitedly crossed the circle to find a new spot when a statement was true for them, and even offered vocabulary support to a student struggling to land on the words he wanted. After playing several rounds, we reflected on commonalities and what made members of our group unique. Una Verdad Sobre Mi allowed us to build ensemble, move our bodies, construct sentences in Spanish, and most importantly, be brave. Creating a brave space, as defined by Arao and Clemens (2013), differs from a “safe space.” They argue that as facilitators, we cannot ensure that everybody feels safe in a space. Safety is going to feel different for everyone based on their identity markers and prior experiences. What we can do, however, is encourage people to take risks and foster an environment of accountability, and take actions that support people as they take brave risks. By listening to what each person offered about themselves, accepting that offer, and making another offer by moving in agreement, we were contributing to our brave space in small but important ways. The next time we played A Truth About Me, I layered specific content on top of the game, for example, “Actividades que hago con mi familia o comunidad” (Activities I do with my family or community). My idea was that by applying the same game structure, we would share beyond what we liked or who we were as individuals and access home and community-based assets. I began in the center and shared, “Una actividad que hago con mi comunidad es compartir historias” (An activity that I do with my community is share stories). Just like when we played A Truth About Me, the players excitedly moved through the circle when a statement was

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also true for them. Some of the activities the students shared were going to the park or farmer’s market (la ferria), making carne asada, seeing a movie, going to the pool, playing outside with family, going camping, having a party and staying out until 5 a.m., going to a restaurant, and planting a garden. To reflect on the activity, I asked the group what they had in common (i.e., when many people moved to a new spot in the circle). They talked excitedly for several minutes about how many of them moved when someone said, “I stay out with my family until 5 a.m.” I was surprised by their enthusiasm around this commonality. I thought to myself, how is staying out late with their families representing community cultural wealth? Even as I write that question, here, I am reminded of how I place value on certain practices. If I widen my lens, I may see this as an offer of strong familial/communal bonds. Building positively on offers, especially when they are outside what we expect or anticipate is crucial to improvisation and to building culturally sustaining practices in our classrooms.

Spontaneous Vulnerability After playing A Truth About Me this second time, I told the students we were going to continue to explore what we learn from our families and communities. I read the introduction to a book, In My Family/En Mi Familia by Carmen Lomas Garza, a Mexican American author from Kingsville, Texas. In the introduction, Garza frames the book as a way to heal the soul wounds inflicted by the punishment she experienced growing up speaking Spanish. “Nos castigaban por ser quienes éramos y nos hacían sentir vergüenza por nuestra cultura / We were punished for being who we were, and we were made to feel ashamed of our culture” (2000). Garza also states her purpose for making art: “fomentar el orgullo en nuestra cultura méxico-americana / to bring about pride in our Mexican American Culture” (2000). I thought that examining the main character’s cultural wealth could help the students begin to explore their own. I asked the class if anybody had had an experience similar to Carmen’s—being embarrassed to speak Spanish or being punished for it. There was a long silence and nobody responded.

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Spontaneously, Señora Petunia asked if she could share a story. This surprised me because before I started my residency, she expressed tension around not being “Mexican enough.” Nonetheless, Señora Petunia told us that when her parents were young in El Paso, Texas, their teachers were only American (gringas) and spoke only English. She explained how her parents were punished, hit on the hand, if they spoke Spanish. In that moment, her parents decided they would not teach their children Spanish because it was something to be ashamed of. She explained that she had to study Spanish at the university, just to learn her own language from her culture. She shared how her lack of fluency in Spanish sometimes makes her feel castigada (punished) and exclaimed, “That’s how it is when you learn a second language as an adult […] I have this experience from my parents.” When she finished her story, the students applauded. I was captivated by Señora Petunia’s vulnerability. I had not structured an improvisation activity at that moment; I was debriefing the previous improv activity and setting up the next one. Señora Petunia was also surprised that she shared her story. I didn’t realize until afterwards, that a great deal of the work we did in A Truth About Me—taking risks in sharing and accepting offers through moving our bodies—began to create a brave space where Señora Petunia, too, felt she could express vulnerability to the students and connect across power differences, or as Johnstone explains, shifting the status in the classroom (1979). The deficits the teacher perceived in her own linguistic ability became assets in this classroom, that is, it elevated her student’s linguistic status. The dynamics of the room had just shifted in a significant way as a result of Señora Petunia’s vulnerability. The AI games that we had been playing contributed to the brave space that allowed her to take the risk to share personal stories with her students. I want to unpack that moment in more detail because it illustrates the impact that AI can have on the relationships among players, and in this case, on the power dynamics between students and teachers in a classroom. In an interview after the residency had ended, I asked a student about the moment when Señora Petunia told her story: Moriah (researcher): How did it feel for you to hear that from Señora Petunia? For her to share something that was personal to her life?

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Alisandra (student): It kind of felt bad because her parents didn’t even want to talk to her in Spanish because of that. And my parents have always talked to me in both languages. And so she is just now learning it. Like some of the other kids in our class. They are not advanced in Spanish … and kind of like Señora Petunia … she is still learning. Like the rest of us are. Like she is growing with us. Moriah: How does it feel to know that? Alisandra: Like if I get something wrong, she’ll help me and not like … the fluent Spanish teachers … because she doesn’t know everything. She won’t be like, No! Eres mal! (No! You’re bad!). It’s more humble. Moriah: Is that different than your perception before she shared that? Alisandra: I didn’t really know, but I kind of assumed that she didn’t fully know and that she was still learning. So now I understand why.6 Alisandra had suspected, from the beginning of the year, that her teacher was still learning the language. Because Señora Petunia shared where she came from and her struggles with Spanish, however, she opened space in the relational practice of her classroom for her students to connect with her more. Relational practice, as discussed by Rowe (2008), is a complex system that involves the navigation of power, identity, and belonging. Megan Alrutz (2015b) furthers Rowe’s discussion on relational practice to highlight, “Relational practices and building alliances require reflexivity and a willingness to be vulnerable with one another” (58). In other words, to work in relation with one another as a community of learners or as improvisers requires an element of vulnerability and trust, and a willingness to release power. As well as feeling more supported by her students, in our postproject interview, Señora Petunia reflected on how sharing her story contributed to her sense of belonging: “I think it definitely brought me closer with them and them closer to me, because of sharing my story.”7 While she elevated her students’ voices and identities by sharing her own, as Alisandra recognized, she also positioned herself more clearly as a part of the classroom

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community of Spanish learners. bell hooks argues this in Teaching to Transgress, stating that when teachers share their own narratives and choose to be vulnerable in a class, we are undoing the assumption that we are all-knowing beings and instead joining the community of the classroom to interrogate and learn together (1994). I see Señora Petunia’s choice to share her own story as an act of love that built alliances across “power lines” (Rowe 2008), or differences in power, that contributed to a sense of belonging between teacher and students who related to her learning process. Her act of sharing also disrupted subtractive schooling; from a place of vulnerability, a willing and “radical openness” (hooks 1994), she acknowledged and foregrounded the community cultural wealth, specifically linguistic abilities, of her students, which in turn strengthened the relational practice in her classroom.

Improv as a Story-Sharing Practice Improv helps us embody story, get a story on its feet and out of our heads. It is the practice of telling stories in relation to others— your scene partners and the audience. We played two improv games to specifically access our stories and generate the narrative for the digital stories: Tour of a Space and Story Circles.

Tour of a Space In Tour of a Space (Workbook 5.2), participants form pairs and take turns verbally and physically “leading” their partner on an imaginary tour of a space. This space can be specific like a place I feel I belong, a good gathering place, or even a space where I learned something important. A few days into the residency, we played a version of Tour of a Space in which the students led their partners on a tour of a time they learned something important from their families or communities. I began by guiding them through a visualization activity to help them step into their memories. I asked them what they saw, smelled, heard, and who was present. I wanted them to recall as many sensory pieces as possible so that they could have thorough tours. After the visualization ended, they

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FIGURE 5.1  Students drawing what they experienced during “Tour of a Space” (Photo by Moriah Flagler).

got up on their feet. The pairs took turns—one partner walking the other through their memory and narrating what they were experiencing. One student shared how she learned to read from her sister. Another, how she learned to write her name from her mom. Others performed learning to share, be positive/patient, make slime, and how to cook. While I was hoping the students would give indepth tours, recounting their sensory memories and acting out the spaces, as I walked around the room I saw timid movements and brief descriptions.8 The improvisation activity felt less successful as a performance or game in itself but did serve as a building block for the larger creative process. As you will see in a moment, their lines of text drew greatly on sensory details, which was a difficult task for this age group, especially in a language many of them were working to master.

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Story Circles The other activity we did to build their digital stories was a variation of a story circle (Workbook 5.3). We split up into small groups of four/five students and the students took turns completing the phrase, “vengo de … ” (I come from … ). I encouraged them to incorporate as many different senses as possible, like we had practiced in the previous activity, Tour of a Space. I gave some examples: “I come from the smell of the rain in the desert or the sound of a house full of laughter.” After the circle had gone around the group several times, the members helped each other select one of their lines to use in their group’s digital story script. I encouraged them to choose the line that was meaningful to them and felt important to share with others. These are some of the lines they generated through these small group story circles: • Vengo del cariño de mi mamá (I come from my mom’s love). • Vengo de mi mamá trabajadora (I come from my hardworking mom). • Vengo de los video juegos (I come from video games). • Vengo del sonido del Calliope ronroneando (I come from the sound of Calliope purring). • Vengo del baño (I come from the bathroom). • Vengo del olor de Fabuloso y perfume fuerte de mi casa tranquila en la parte segura de Austin, Texas (I come from the smell of Fabuloso and strong perfume of my calm house in the safe part of Austin, Texas). • Vengo de la tierra de Tijuana, México (I come from the earth of Tijuana, Mexico). • Vengo del sonido de washing machines (I come from the sound of washing machines). • Vengo del dulce olor de arroz con leche y flan (I come from the sweet smell of arroz con leche and flan). It’s important to note that I intentionally didn’t facilitate students sharing what was behind and within their lines. There is a certain amount of risk in sharing something personal with a group, especially for young people with marginalized identities. It is possible to

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FIGURE 5.2 “Vengo de la tierra seca de Tijuana, Mexico” (I come from the dry earth of Tijuana, Mexico) (Photo by a student in the residency).

re-surface past trauma. That in mind, representing a story with a single line and image without having to explain can be beautiful and provocative without exoticizing their experiences. This way, the young people are able to share at their own level of risk—we celebrate what they bring in, without demanding explanations or more details. Building on these story circles and other structured improv activities as a platform, the students began spontaneously sharing more of themselves and their experiences. They began more explicitly to bring their home-/community-based assets into the process, often more clearly and thoroughly than they did during the planned improv activities I described previously.

I Knew Spanish in My Mom’s Tummy It was nearing the end of the residency. The students were in the middle school courtyard working in small groups, recording their

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audio tracks for the digital stories using the lines they had written from the story circles. Each line of the groups’ stories began with “Vengo de … ” (I come from … ) and then went into something that each student wanted to share about their homes, families, or communities that has made them who they are. I walked up to one small group made up of two Latina heritage Spanish speakers (Em and Hi) and two White beginning Spanish speakers (Blake and Gustavo). When I approached the group to see how they were doing, they eagerly pressed play on the iPad and their vocal track played over the photos they had taken: “Vengo de … jugar béisbol con mi hermana en el campo de béisbol. Vengo de … la música de los mejores, Selena Quintanilla” (I come from … playing baseball with my sister on the baseball field. I come from … the music of the greatest, Selena Quintanilla). “De mucho música clásica de piano de mi mama … Vengo de futból” (From a lot of classical music from my mom’s piano. I come from soccer).9 The audio ended abruptly. “That’s all we’ve got,” Gustavo explained. I encouraged them and asked them what else they had planned. They began to argue about the grammar of their recording—whether an adjective describing friends was singular or plural—and the argument launched Em into a spontaneous story positioning her and Hi as experts in their languages and cultures: Em: It was my first language. Hi: [overlapping] Spanish is my first language! I knew it when I was in my mom’s tummy. Moriah (facilitator): You did?! Em: Spanish is my first language, I just don’t speak it much anymore because my abuela (grandmother) doesn’t live with us anymore. ‘Cause my abuela only knows Spanish. She practically raised me, but she had to move out to get medicine back in El Salvador. She moved there for a while, but now she’s living in Houston with my aunt. Moriah: Ahhh … so you don’t get to speak as much, huh? In response to my question, Em explained how her dad still speaks to them in Spanish and the terms of endearment he uses for his children, gorditos (little fatties). She laughed about how weird it sounded in English and then went on to share sayings her family

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has about healing and sang it for us: “Sana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana” (Heal, heal, tail of a frog. If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow). Em explained that this is a traditional Mexican rhyme parents sing to their young children to calm them when they get hurt. When the group argued over the grammar of Gustavo’s line, Hi and Em foregrounded their linguistic abilities and showed that they valued their home language. In our post-project interview, I showed Señora Petunia the transcript and asked her what stood out to her: Discussing the language and knowing that it does matter whether you say divertidos o divertido. It mattered because it was plural. So respect for their language and respect for their culture, their background, the memory of learning from the grandma. Señora Petunia reflected that Em and Hi’s critical corrections of Gustavo’s grammar was more than peer coaching. I hadn’t even thought about the pride they exhibited in the arguments about both the false cognate of football and the need for divertido to be plural. Even beyond pride, Señora Petunia pointed out the girls’ respect for their language and culture. Señora Petunia’s reflection helped me to see that while Em and Hi coached their peers, they also shared their respect for and pride in their families. While creating something together, Hi and Em had the agency and opportunity to foreground their community cultural wealth to their White peers. Examining the interactions this small group had while recording their audio tracks, it is clear how the improvisation activities that came before created a platform for these spontaneous stories focused on community cultural wealth to emerge.

Liminal Space and Time: The Value of the In-Between In the post-project interview with Señora Petunia, we also discussed the in-between space that the project created for the young people to share with each other. Before we began the residency, she had shared her desire to incorporate creativity in her classroom to counter the advice she had been given that rote learning is better

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suited for heritage speakers. She recounted, “I’ve been told, not here, but I have been told prior that you have to teach Hispanic students differently and don’t be giving them a lot of choices and just make them do things over and over, and I was like, oh my God, whoa!” Remembering our prior conversation, I expressed that I wondered when and if young people have the opportunity to share about themselves in specific ways during school time. Even in my initial observations of Señora Petunia’s classroom, they spent a large portion of the class time on worksheets and grammar exercises. I told her I thought they shared stories during my residency because they were outside of the traditional classroom space and given time to work together on a creative endeavor. I shared that authentic storytelling seemed to be happening in the in-between spaces and Señora Petunia agreed, bringing in Hi’s statement about knowing Spanish as a baby or “in [her] mom’s tummy” as an example. Señora Petunia stretched my perception of liminal space and time further by pointing to the idea of safety or not feeling like you’re on the spot. While making something together, each person has a purpose or activity that makes them belong and not feel threatened. Breaking the whole group improv activities into small group work for further exploration allowed the young people to continue to play with more autonomy and less structure than in the games I facilitated. In the flow of working together toward a common goal, their stories emerged in the in-between space, a space that was their own.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Means Checking-In In an AI process, it is essential to check-in about the group members’ experiences and even more so if the goal is to be culturally sustaining. For example, in the moment, I sometimes judged the students’ contributions during improv activities as “not going deep enough.” When students shared in their story circles, “I come from video games” or “I come from the bathroom” I thought they weren’t taking it seriously. However, it became evident, in my post-project interviews with the students, that even when I was concerned that the work the students generated was surface, the process of

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sharing with one another structured by the improv activities was important to the young people. Additionally, the act of generative play, an essential aspect of AI, was a rich catalyst for the in-between moments of storytelling. This tells me that as a facilitator I can’t judge how students are connecting or not connecting unless I am asking them and really listening. The students’ responses to questions about what they liked about the project highlighted the importance they placed on knowing each other in personal ways. Several of the Latinx students celebrated the diversity of their class, noting the different cultures and stories everyone in class comes from: “[Something that’s sticking with me is] all the different things that people come from … the variety in the class.” One White student, Wesley, excitedly explained that what he liked about the project was that everybody had a story to tell: “I liked how that when we were working together, everybody noticed that everybody else had a story to tell. Everybody did. Everybody had some sort of story and everybody had their own way to tell it.”

Teaching Improvisationally: Plan to Get out of the Way In this residency, facilitated improv activities started the process of sharing about community cultural wealth, but some of the richest storytelling in the project happened beyond the structures and activities I set in motion. Facilitators must first assume people are experts in their experiences (young people are often not taken seriously in this way); then second, create space for participants to work collaboratively without the intervention of the facilitator; the facilitator must also create times to “get out of the way.”10 I refer to what Señora Petunia said in our post-interview about sharing and space: “It’s a safe space because you’re doing something and I’m doing something. We’re just chatting, creating. It’s not like you’re on the spot, now speak! [It’s like] cooking or making tamales or Thanksgiving dinner.” As Señora Petunia points out, and as I illustrated with the small group and their digital story, creating comfort in storytelling is sometimes based on engagement around a mutual endeavor like cooking or eating.

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Structured improvisation activities can provide the tools to build ensemble and spark initial moments of connection much like these spaces of working together to make food. Even so, being put “on the spot” can be scary and place undue stress on someone. Perhaps expecting participants to share their community cultural wealth during structured activities, even in the form of improvisation, is not aligned with critical race theory especially for a White facilitator like myself. Again, there is the danger of the outsider “mining for stories” that exoticize or retraumatize participants. With this in mind, maybe the best way to foster community cultural wealth in the classroom is by setting up structures that create opportunities for power to shift and by providing space and time to engage in mutual endeavors where the stories people want to share can naturally bubble up.

The Culmination of the Residency It is December 2017 and I am back in the Bermúdez Middle School library in Austin, Texas, for a dual-language parents’ night, a month and a half after my three-week AI residency at the school ended. The students’ digital stories, the final products of our work together, are playing on computer stations that I set up around the room. As families slowly begin to enter the space, I welcome them and lead them to their child’s story. Fabian gives his mother and little sister a brief introduction and then they sit to watch his group’s video together.11 The mother sits in the chair, little sister on her lap, and Fabian close by their side. When the video ends, Fabian’s mother smiles and the three of them move to the next piece of work Fabian has on display. A moment later, Fabian’s little sister runs back to the computer, sits in the chair, and puts on the oversized headphones. She watches the story a second time. Then a third. I whisper to her that there are other stories on other computers if she is interested. She looks up at me with a smile, shakes her head no, and watches again. I can’t say what it was that caused Fabian’s little sister to run back and watch his digital story four times, but I can say that it seemed important to her. I imagine that she saw her family and pieces of her identity in his video, stories that are often missing from standardized curriculum in US

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FIGURE 5.3  Digital story screening in the school library (Photo by Vera Schöpe).

schooling. This vignette speaks to how important it is for young people to see themselves in the school space and for their stories to be front and center in the curriculum. Just a few weeks after my residency ended, a teacher at the same middle school told a student who was speaking Spanish in English class to “go back to Mexico.” This student was not even from Mexico but another country in Latin America. The students organized a walkout, making local news.12 While this teacher’s words are illustrative of our current US political climate, as I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, schooling as a form of non-power neutral assimilation is not new. Standardized testing, a lack of relevant or challenging curriculum, cultural course tracking, and a lack of relationships with caring adults are some of the many aspects of schooling that detract from young immigrants’ and USborn Mexican youth’s abilities to form critical social connections and to be successful in the school environment (Valenzuela 1999). What if, instead, schools valued and built upon the knowledges Latinx students and immigrant students bring to the classroom? What if Spanish-speaking students saw their community cultural

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wealth centered in an academic setting? Large-scale policy changes are needed to truly shift the current landscape of subtractive schooling on a macro level. That said, on a micro level, the AI residency and digital storytelling project engaged young Spanish speakers in a culturally relevant curriculum that centered their stories and experiences in an academic space, providing a window to what is possible if we build ensemble, foster brave spaces, and make space for spontaneous story.

Postscript During this time of working remotely, I am forming and facilitating a cohort of community grassroots leaders/activists in Columbus, Ohio, who are adapting AI activities to their own community contexts (through Zoom). Funded by the Ohio State University’s Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Themes, this project aims to foster, connect, and support community leaders in their current and future change-making practices.

Notes 1 I intentionally use “knowledges” to replace “knowledge” as a statement against a conception of knowledge as static or defined by one dominant group. 2 All names of participants in the residency, both teacher and students, are self-selected pseudonyms. 3 I use the term Latinx instead of Latina/o in honor of non-binary gender identities and realize that identities are highly complex and fluid. My intention is not to oversimplify or generalize according to a person’s place of birth or national identity. 4 I borrow this phrase from a workshop facilitated by Leah Harris, manager of Public Works Dallas. She uses the term, “strategic accomplice,” to signify a member of a dominant group who works to dismantle any form of oppression from which they receive the benefit. 5 The exercise Name and Motion can be found in Dudeck and McClure (2018: 110). 6 Post-project, I personally interviewed eleven of the twenty students (those who had parental consent and gave youth assent) about their

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experiences during the digital storytelling residency. These semistructured youth interviews took place outside of the classroom portable on October 31, 2017, and lasted no longer than ten minutes. Going forward, all quotes by students are from these interviews. The post-interview with Señora Petunia took place on November 3, 2017. I conducted three semi-structured interviews with Señora Petunia—pre, mid, and post study. These interviews explored the teacher’s prior knowledge of the students’ lives, experiences with participating youth, experiences throughout the workshop series, and her reflections on the final performance sharing. I wasn’t sure if the students’ timid movements and brief descriptions during Tour of a Space were due to their challenges with the Spanish language or because it was a new type of activity for them. I think that if I would have been able to give them more side-coaching or tried it again, they may have made larger performative choices. Grammatical errors are from the students’ own work. Much like an improviser who leaves the stage in a scene—the temptation, especially for less experienced improvisers, is to stay on the stage and keep playing no matter what. The best improvisers, however, have learned that “getting out of the way” often allows space for the remaining character(s) to reveal things to the audience that might not have been revealed otherwise. Fabian shared with me that he is Mexican and was born in the United States. He always speaks Spanish at home. I don’t provide the citation here, so that the school remains unidentifiable as specified in the IRB.

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WORKBOOK 5.1 A Truth About Me … /Una Verdad Sobre Mi … This exercise gets participants moving while learning one another’s names and begins to build ensemble. It supports participants in finding connections with others, while also celebrating how everyone is unique. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • shared their names and something related to their identities, • noticed similarities and unique qualities within the group, • connected with group members by accepting and affirming offers, and • practiced engaged and embodied listening by responding through movement.

Running the Exercise 1. Invite participants to make a standing circle, and give them each a piece of tape or a sticky note to place at their feet to signify their spot. 2. Explain that you will begin in the middle of the circle and say, “My name is ____, and a truth about me is_______.” If that statement is also true of others in the circle, their challenge is to leave their spot and find an open spot in the circle. Note that each person gets to decide what’s true for them, and nobody will call anyone out for choosing not to move. 3. For two or three model rounds, stay in the middle and share your name and another truth. 4. After the group gets the hang of it, try to take a spot, leaving a new person in the center to say something that is true for them. 5. Continue until all the participants have had a chance to share their names and truths with the group.

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Debrief • When did a lot of participants move? What do we have in common? • In what ways are we unique? What makes us special or different? • How did we practice listening and saying “yes” to our collaborators?

Suggestions • Playing with the rest of the group is an important element to building ensemble. The facilitator sets the tone for what kinds of things participants feel comfortable sharing. • It’s also essential to give the instruction that each person chooses what’s true for them. In this way, we are encouraging the group to be mindful of gender identity versus gender expression, among many other complex identities. • After using this exercise at the beginning of a process, and after participants are more comfortable, you can add on other layers of content. For example, instead of saying “A truth about me is … ” say “Activities I do with my family or community are … /Actividades que hago con mi familia o comunidad son … ” • Can be done seated with exactly enough chairs for everyone to sit, leaving one person standing in the center.

Online Delivery In a virtual classroom, change the title of exercise to “Show Yourself If … ” and instruct the group how to “hide non-video participants” under video options (if this feature is available). When all videos are turned off, each person should see a blank screen. Next, ask everyone to turn off their videos. Say that you will be offering statements, such as “Show yourself if you have a distraction in your space today …, ” and if the statement offered is true for you, turn on your video. Look around and see who else this is true for. Depending on the group size, you can invite folks to share verbally, naming out their responses or typing them

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in the chat. After a series of prompts offered by the facilitator, invite participants to offer prompts that are true for them. The competitive element of finding a new spot in the circle isn’t present, but this new adaptation is a great way to get to know each other and begin to build ensemble in a space that can feel distant. Connections: Moriah Flagler learned this activity and Tour of a Space (Workbook 5.2) while teaching at University of Texas at Austin’s Drama for Schools Summer Institute. This activity can also be found in Dawson and Lee (2018). See also Stats, in Chapter 10, for a rapid-fire virtual version. Other introduction exercises that can help build ensemble are: Introduce Yourself, Upside-Down Introductions, and Name and Motion (Dudeck and McClure 2018).

5.2 Tour of a Space Participants form pairs and take turns leading their partner on a tour of a remembered space, such as a place the speaker feels they belong, a good gathering place, or even a space where they learned something important. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • remembered a space or memory through a specific lens, • accessed sensory details they can use for later storytelling, and • practiced elements of embodied storytelling.

Running the Exercise 1. Based on the needs of the group, you may start with a brainstorm in which participants write or draw a list based on a prompt, such as “a time you learned something important” or “a place you felt like you belonged.” 2. Lead a guided imagery. Have participants close their eyes and think of a place where they learned something important. Encourage them to recall as many details about that place as they can—other people who were there, colors, sounds, textures, smells, how they were feeling at the time.

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3. Invite a participant to join you while you demonstrate guiding someone through your space. Give your partner the best sense you can of the environment—how it smells, the time of day, what you can hear, and so on. Move around the space to give a sense of its size and the placement of the various objects and people. 4. In pairs, have participants take turns giving each other tours of their spaces. Allow about 2 minutes for each participant.

Debrief • Who are the characters in our stories? • What are some of the sensory details that are sticking with you? • Do we have activities or things that we learned in common? That are unique?

Suggestions • Side-coaching is helpful in this exercise. You might say things like “remember to help your partner really feel like they’re there with you” or “remember to really use the space.” • If there is time, you can invite participants to write or draw their own spaces or the space they were guided through.

Online Delivery This activity can be adapted just by placing pairs in breakout rooms. You may find it works better as one player leading the other through their space through drawing or guided visualization, depending on how free participants are able to move in their spaces. Connections: This exercise is published in Rohd (1998). Similar to this exercise is Describe a Room, created by Impro Theatre, a Los Angeles-based theatre company known for their completely improvised, full-length plays in various styles. Describe a Room combines Color/Advance (Workbook 1.3) and Johnstone’s (1979) Verbal Chase to create environments and endow them, and the objects therein, with sensual history. In pairs, one player will start

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with a statement like, “This was my childhood home.” The other player (the “story coach”) will then ask questions like, “What does this room feel like or smell like?” and “What did that object mean to you?” It encourages a deep dive into the senses as part of story creation and discovery.

5.3 Story Circles Story Circles is a story-building and devising exercise that asks participants to engage as many of their senses as possible. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • improvised lines of text for later storytelling, without carefully planning or censoring, • given feedback about what has the most power/resonance as material to keep, and • chosen their own stories based on what others share.

Running the Exercise 1. In small groups or with a whole group, invite participants to sit in a circle. 2. Instruct participants to go around the circle, with each completing the phrase “I come from … /Vengo de … ” Encourage them to incorporate as many different senses as possible and to be as descriptive as possible. 3. After several times around with the same prompt, have the group help each participant select some lines with the most “heat,” those that make them feel like “Yes, I want to share that!” 4. Have each participant choose two lines that they want to keep and work with.

Debrief Each of you will read your lines to the rest of the group, and the others will report what they see in response. For example, if

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someone says, “I come from the smell of wet earth,” what do you visualize?

Suggestions • Other good prompts for this exercise are: • “When I was young in _____, I _____ … ” • “I remember __________ … ” • “A time I felt like I belonged [or didn’t belong] was when _______ … ” • “A time I stood up for something or someone [or someone stood up for me] was __________ … ”

• After completing this exercise, the group can use the generated text to devise further exercises, such as by incorporating movement.

Online Delivery Place small groups in breakout rooms. If the virtual platform does not allow participants to form a circle, pass the energy to another person in this way: reach your hand toward the camera and say the person’s name you are passing to; that person then holds their hand to the camera and receives the pass, continuing the story circle. In a small group, players should be able to track who has gone and even continue several rounds in the same established pattern—much like the improvisation game Patterns (Fotis and O’Hara 2016). Connections: For more about story circles, see “Roadside Theatre’s Story Circle Methodology” (Cohen-Cruz 2010). The specific prompt of “I come from” is published in Johnston and Brownrigg (2019) and in Alrutz (2015b).

6 “Of Course We Improvise!” What the Best Teachers Do (and How They Do It) Nick Sorensen

Nick Sorensen is founder of The Improvising School, a consultancy company developed to promote improvisation skills for musicians, teachers, and leaders. As a jazz saxophonist and writer he has been practicing and researching improvisation for over forty years and is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University, UK. He began his career as a drama and music teacher and for twentyfive years worked in secondary schools, which included six years as a headteacher. Nick is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.

Whenever I ask teachers if improvisation is important they tell me that their best lessons are the ones where they are brave enough to “throw the lesson plan out the window.” My research has shown that this is the defining characteristic of great teaching: having a mindset that understands and is open to improvisation, as well as the skills to know when, where, and how to improvise. The challenge is how to help future teachers adopt this impro mindset

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so they, too, can inject their work with the passion and creativity that comes with responding fully to their students in the moment. Despite this need, developing an impro mindset in teachers is not a straightforward enterprise. The world of education is increasingly defined by accountability agendas, seeking the “delivery” of prespecified educational intentions (learning objectives) that can be evidenced through measurable outcomes. So whilst most teachers might acknowledge to themselves that being able to improvise is important, they are less willing to talk about this with others, especially those who monitor and grade their performance in examination results or the grading of schools by Ofsted (the body charged with inspecting every school in England). Ofsted prescribes specific teaching practices on the basis that they are “known to be effective.” Within this context attending to the notion of an improvising teacher might seem like a diversion, or at worst a distraction, from meeting government imperatives. Another part of the problem is that there are contrasting and conflicting views as to what improvisation might mean to a teacher. For some, improvisation is the summit of expert practice whilst for others improvisation is associated with “making do,” a “bodged job.” This confusion just reinforces the need to have a clear understanding of what improvisational practice in the classroom actually is, how it is fundamental to expertise, and how it supports effective teaching and creates authentic and creative teachers. My work as an educational consultant is focused on helping teachers tackle this challenge of developing an impro mindset. This chapter describes my empirical research that involved interviewing and observing seven outstanding teachers who were working in a range of secondary schools in the UK. Their insights and their practice provide significant evidence of the importance of improvisation in the classroom and how this is a necessary aspect of teacher expertise. While the research looked at a small sample of secondary teachers in the UK, the findings have relevance for teachers in all phases of education.

Context Well before the formal research study, in 2007, I began to research the relationship between improvisation and the practice of

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outstanding teachers, bringing together work in two comparatively recent fields of scientific research. First, there is the research into expertise and expert performance. Over the past forty years, studies have surfaced in a number of discrete domains based on assumptions that some aspects of expertise are generalizable and an understanding of expertise in one context could provide insights into other domains. The premise behind this research is that there are sufficient similarities in both theoretical principles and research methods to make it possible to propose a general theory of expertise and expert performance (Ericsson et al. 2006: 9). A second, more recent field of research is critical studies in improvisation, an inter-disciplinary approach to researching social practices. This research is concerned with how improvisational performance practices in the arts can play a role in developing new socially responsive forms of community building across national, cultural, and artistic boundaries. Critical studies in improvisation seek to reveal the complex structures of improvisational practices (e.g., a shared responsibility for participation in community, an ability to negotiate differences, and a willingness to accept the challenges of risk and contingency) and to develop an enriched understanding of the social, political, and cultural functions those practices play. By applying perspectives from critical studies in improvisation to our understanding of expertise, I considered it would be possible to identify and articulate a fundamental relationship between teacher expertise and improvisation, which helps us to understand the impro mindset at a conceptual level.

About the Research: Methodology and Data Sources I initiated a small-scale empirical study that took place between November 2011 and January 2014. I used a case study approach to compare findings from seven experienced teachers working in secondary schools in the south west of England. As improvisation is an “enacted” experience that comes into being through doing and where knowledge in improvisation is expressed through action, I chose a qualitative methodology in order to explore the participants’ understanding and practice of improvisation. Whilst I cannot, and do not, claim that the conclusions of my research are

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generalizable, they do offer what is called exemplary knowledge (Thomas 2011) in which the knowledge—insights and theory derived from this research—can be viewed and understood from the reader’s perspective, that is, from within the context of their own knowledge and experience. The seven teachers who formed the case studies were acknowledged to be experts within their school setting and were identified during an interview with the headteacher (the principal) of each school. Having obtained their consent to participate in the research, each teacher was interviewed at the outset of the research and then observed teaching. Each lesson was followed by a postobservation interview to elicit their understanding of what had been observed.1 Constant comparative methods of analysis were used to draw out themes from the data and these contributed to the grounded theory model below. The research was driven by two main research questions: • In what ways is the expert practice of secondary school teachers improvisatory? • What does the improvisatory practice of teachers look like in the classroom?

Defining Improvisation Improvisation is a contested term both in the academy and the broader public understanding, partly because it carries a number of different, and often conflicting, meanings. Improvisation has been defined within artistic contexts yet it is also a feature of everyday life. For some people it is an important and significant mode of expression, for others it is considered an inferior response due to the fact that it appears to have no forethought or consideration. To create a working definition to inform my research and subsequent work with improvisation, I looked at a range of definitions and approaches to improvisation, ranging from Aristotle’s Poetics to Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art to post-structuralist perspectives. I then synthesized all the key concepts and practices into the definition below (with the significant defining characteristics in bold face).

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Improvisation is an intentional activity that occurs in a context, there is a need to have something to improvise on or with. As such it is a creative activity that occurs in “real time.” The final outcome of an improvisation will be unpredictable and consequently every improvisation will be unique. What happens in an improvisation is determined by intuition and interaction. Interaction might occur with other improvisers, with the material environment, or with an audience (if there is one). The context of an improvisation will define the boundaries within which improvisation occurs. There are two kinds of structures: those that are fixed and non-negotiable (these are called design structures), and those that permit adaptability and generative action (these are called emergent structures). Improvisation emerges from the dynamic interplay between the fixed and non-negotiable (design structures) and the adaptable (emergent structures) in real time. Given the pervasive nature of improvisation, present in all aspects of life, the conditions of improvisation are dependent on the permission that the improviser gives themselves, and/or is given by others, to act in this way.

The Research Findings 1: A Grounded Theory Model of Teacher Expertise Data from the interviews and lesson observations were analyzed using a constant comparative methodology in order to construct a theoretical framework of teacher expertise (Figure 6.1). This model supports the prototype model of expertise described by Sternberg and Horvath (1995) who consider that although there are no welldefined standards that all experts meet, they recognize that experts have family resemblances. Whilst my model identifies the different aspects of teacher expertise, the teachers I observed did not demonstrate all of the characteristics to the same extent. There were variations in the way each teacher displayed these “dimensions of teacher expertise” shown in Figure 6.1. This framework illustrates that teacher expertise is fundamentally improvisatory and socially constructed (Burr 2003) and grounded in dialogic teaching (Alexander 2008). In the next section I briefly describe each dimension before going on to explain how these concepts are put into practice.

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FIGURE 6.1  Theoretical framework showing the dimensions of teacher expertise (Graphic by Nick Sorensen).

Expertise as a Journey At the heart of the framework is the concept of expertise being a journey and not an end state, an idea that was articulated by all the teachers in one way or another. They did not claim to be, or did not want to be referred to as, experts. They saw expertise as an ongoing adaptive process informed by continually working toward improving their practice. Given that this was a central concern of all the teachers and that it influenced the other aspects of expertise, it

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seemed only appropriate that this concept was placed at the center of the theoretical model.

Self-Reflection Having acknowledged that expertise was an ongoing process, the teachers recognized the imperative of engaging in self-reflection, which took place in a number of ways. There was evidence of Schon’s model of the reflective practitioner (1983) reflecting in action and reflecting on action. Reflection was not just a solitary activity; learning from other teachers was seen as being very important. The development of practice was imbued with the spirit of cooperation and collaboration.

Focus on Outcomes Whilst some argue that the pressures of accountability that teachers faced could diminish the desire or confidence to improvise, my research offers a contrary view. The creativity that these teachers employed in their teaching was clearly focused on student outcomes as measured by test or exam results. As the teachers gained a detailed knowledge of the syllabus requirements of the various examination boards, they used this knowledge as a structure that they could engage with and improvise around. The important point is that improvisational teaching can be allied to the goal of meeting student outcomes.

Commitment to Teaching All of the teachers saw teaching as an important vocation in which they were committed to support learning, for themselves as much as their pupils. They consequently enjoyed what I describe as the “nuts and bolts” of teaching: lesson planning and preparation, exploring different approaches to teaching, and the process of assessment. There was also a strong commitment to the school that they were teaching in. Five out of the seven teachers had been at their school for over eight years, and there was a correlation between the values and beliefs of the teacher and the culture of the school. Spending a

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significant amount of time in one school also meant that the teacher built up a detailed understanding of the processes and practices that were characteristic of that school.

Being Yourself One of the goals for a jazz musician is to develop a personal sound that is instantly recognizable. The teachers I observed also developed a personal approach to teaching, finding appropriate ways to relate to their students as individuals and to personalize their relationships with them. They also found ways to personalize their classrooms: in the way that they organized the furniture (desks, chairs, noticeboards, etc.) and the procedures and practices they established (the way the pupils entered and left the classroom, were allowed to move about the classroom, procedures for answering questions or engaging in pair or group work). This aspect of teaching is not without its problems—professional boundaries and relationships need to be established and respected—yet for the teachers observed, “being yourself” was an important way by which they could establish a relationship with their pupils that was based on mutual trust.

Belief That All Can Achieve The values that underpin improvisational practice include a strong belief that all students can achieve. In practice this belief can be seen as a willingness to adapt and personalize the learning so that all students can make progress. It also contributes to an inclusive and democratic culture within the classroom; there is no reason for any individual to be excluded.

Dialogic Practice The dominant pedagogic practice in all the teachers I observed was based on dialogue. They actively sought opportunities to engage pupils in the learning through asking questions, seeking the pupils’ views and ideas, and responding to their suggestions. There was a dynamic interplay between teacher-directed activities, whole classwork, individual, pair, or group work.

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Teacher Expertise and Improvisation The theoretical framework (Figure 6.1) identifies the key dimensions of teacher expertise and shows how they are interrelated to each other. Most importantly it outlines the fundamental way in which expert practice is improvisational. Below I relate these dimensions to the defining characteristics of my working definition of improvisation above. When we consider expertise as a journey we recognize it as an emergent process, one in which the outcome will be unpredictable and unique for every individual. Expertise is formed through interaction and dialogue and corresponds to what has been described as a transformative teleology (Stacey et al. 2000). Teleology is the word we give to an end state or goal, and a transformative teleology is a movement toward a future that is under perpetual construction. There is no mature or final state but just the perpetual engagement with identity and difference, continuity, and transformation that happens in real time. This is at the heart of improvisational activity. Dialogic teaching is an intentional activity that is by definition improvisatory, requiring decisions to be made in real time in response to interactions with pupils and the environment. This is dependent on building relationships and the process of personalization, which contributes to the unique nature of improvisational activity. The commitment to the “nuts and bolts” of teaching provides the resources with which teachers are able to improvise, the context within which they can creatively adapt their approaches. These teachers give themselves permission to improvise because they know that this is the way in which learning becomes a dynamic activity that engages the pupils. Furthermore, within the culture of the school they are given permission to “be themselves” and this is seen to be an important expression of the aims and values of the school.

Research Findings 2: What Does the Improvisatory Practice of Expert Teachers Look Like in the Classroom? The theoretical framework (Figure 6.1) provides us with a conceptual map, showing how the dimensions of teacher expertise

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are fundamentally improvisatory and that there is a direct correlation between expertise and improvisation. This leads us to ask: What does the improvisational practice of expert teachers look like in the classroom? What makes the way they improvise different from a novice teacher, for example? My research shows that the practice of these expert teachers revolved around three intentional key behaviors, each expressions of the impro mindset. The first behavior is they give themselves permission (and are given permission) to develop an improvisational approach to teaching. Secondly, and as a consequence of the first behavior, they are continually adapting their practice. Adaptation takes two forms. One aspect of adaptation was seen in the way that the lesson plan was changed, or even abandoned, in response to a change in the direction of learning; this could be described as adaptation in action. Another form of adaptation was the adaptation of a subsequent activity or lesson that took place at a later point in time, which could be described as adaptation on action. The third behavior is concerned with personalization. These teachers personalized their approach to teaching and, where possible, the environment they were teaching in, in the same way

FIGURE 6.2 The four skills of improvisational teaching (Graphic by Nick Sorensen).

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that a jazz musician aims to develop a personal sound. This was seen in a personalization of the teacher–pupil relationships in class, achieved by getting to know the students as individuals and by the way in which the teacher presented himself or herself as an individual. A willingness to engage in improvisation, adaptation, and personalization are the characteristics of the impro mindset of expert teachers. So what are the skills that teachers need in order to develop their improvisational expertise? The research and my experience as a teacher educator tell me that there are four important skills that improvising teachers have and these are noticing, creating dialogue, making connections, and adapting. They are central to the impro mindset. By explicitly focusing on developing these skills, I believe that all teachers can begin the journey toward becoming experts in improvisational teaching.

Developing Expert Teachers Let us now look at how we can develop these skills. At the outset we need to ask, “What comes first: the skills or the improvisational mindset?” The answer is that there is a symbiotic relationship between skills and mindset. Having an impro mindset allows you to understand and develop the skills whilst simultaneously working on these skills leads to developing the impro mindset. The good thing to note is that these skills are the things that we do anyway and by consciously giving attention to each one we can all expand our improvisational ability. Below, I cover the following three aspects of each of the four skills: a discussion of its value in the classroom, one or two sample methods I employ to help others develop the skill, and examples collected from four of the teachers involved in the research (Anne, Helen, Barbara, and Richard).

1: Noticing One of the most important skills that improvisers have is the ability to notice things, to see everything as an offer. The more you notice the more you have to react and respond to. This is particularly true

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for the teacher in the classroom, and pupils love the experience of a teacher incorporating their ideas and suggestions. Robert Poynton (2013) points out that the reason we often don’t notice very much is because we are continuously bombarded with information; our way of coping is to screen much of the information out. We can develop the skill of noticing by being selective about what we pay attention to. Poynton suggests starting with sequentially focusing on four distinct levels: the wider world, the immediate environment, other people, and ourselves. This approach makes the act of noticing more manageable as it is very difficult to be able to take in all levels at once. I will often begin my workshops by asking teachers to find a space, stand with their eyes closed, and to pay attention to how they are feeling, whether their body is tense or relaxed. I get them to listen to the sounds within their own body, their breathing, and then to focus on the sounds of the people around them, then the sounds in the room, and finally the sounds in the outside environment. This is a very direct and simple way to engage with the four levels of noticing. The real challenge is to try and focus on all four levels simultaneously, requiring what Taoism describes as a “soft focus”: “a physical state in which we allow the eyes to soften and relax so that, rather then looking at things in sharp focus, they can take in many” (Bogart and Landau 2005: 31). Noticing allows us to develop our awareness of the pupils we are teaching and be aware of a full range of information about what is going on in the classroom, such as the students’ body language, energy level, what is not being said, as well as the tone of what is said. Anne, for example, made it quite clear from the outset that, in her opinion, the most important aspect of her expertise was the level of noticing that she gave to all of the pupils that she taught. She valued “knowing the backstory” of each student which, in many cases, involved having knowledge of their parents and families, other siblings that she had taught or who were also at the school. This was a pool of knowledge that had been built up over a considerable period of time (Anne had taught at the school for more than ten years). By drawing on this knowledge she was able to notice and interpret the moods of her pupils. She told me “[I] can read them [the students] like a book. That’s what we are talking about when we talk about experienced teachers.”

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Another example of how noticing informs teaching was provided by Helen, a modern language teacher. She showed me a plastic file box with cards inside to explain how she planned her lessons: “I now use a box of teaching and learning ideas so my lessons are not so structured [in advance]. Improvisation is the next stage for me, I don’t feel so constrained. Students are enjoying the lessons more and so am I.” Helen now spends more time noticing and responding to the emotional mood of the class. “I read the students more, looking for peaks and troughs and then I choose an activity [from her file box of teaching ideas] that responds to their mood and behaviour.” So, for example, if the energy level in the classroom is low, then she would select an activity that requires them to work in small groups. Alternatively if the class is noisy and excitable she will choose an activity that requires them to work individually.

2: Developing Dialogic Practice Every time we have a conversation we are entering into an improvisation because when we engage in dialogue we can never know where it is going; we have to wait for a response before we can decide what we are going to say next. Dialogue in the classroom is certainly improvisatory, you never know in advance what is going to be said next. Teachers with an impro mindset embrace this opportunity as they know that building conversation and dialogue around learning is an important way of involving the pupils. Engaging with pupils and incorporating their ideas is what Paulo Freire described as “actors in intercommunication” (1972). Dialogic teaching is derived from the theories of Bakhtin whose view of dialogism implies that there are (at least) two voices and that there is an underlying assumption of difference. Dialogic teaching can create a more equal relationship between teacher and pupils, where there is the possibility for the teacher to learn from their pupils. In bell hooks’s view, the dialogic classroom offers the possibility of an engaged pedagogy where the teacher “must genuinely value everyone’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources” (hooks 1994: 8). One of the headteachers I interviewed described this practice as “working with rather than on pupils.”

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There are many ways of developing skills in developing dialogue; one important aim is to try to get people away from controlling the direction of the conversation. Storytelling games are good for this: getting a group of people, standing or sitting in a circle, to tell a story one-word-at-a-time (initially) and then a short phrase at a time. An activity that can be worked on in pairs is to create a visual dialogue (no talking allowed!), each taking turns to draw what they are going to say. All the teachers I observed were committed to dialogic teaching. They were expert in asking questions and building conversations around learning that involved their pupils and engaged with their ideas. Anne, for example, had developed a broad repertoire of strategies to encourage and develop dialogue in her lessons. Her approach was reminiscent of the way that jazz musicians engage in

FIGURE 6.3 Participants creating a visual dialogue (Photo by Nick Sorensen).

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TABLE 6.1 The “Call and Response” strategies observed in Anne’s lessons Calls: Teacher Intervention Strategies

Responses: Teacher Reaction Strategies

Providing direction (identifying the end product) Asking questions Providing challenge Expanding and developing thinking Lesson content input (e.g., PowerPoint) Starting/developing dialogue Sharing ideas Giving tasks to individual students Managing/monitoring behavior Changing the mood (emotional climate) of the lesson

Listening Summarizing Clarifying Encouraging Explaining Making links Looking at details Positive reinforcement

the practice of “call and response.” The “calls” are the interventions she made to generate dialogue and the “responses” are the strategies she had to react to what pupils said. These are shown in Table 6.1. Anne first started teaching as a paralegal instructor in the United States: “I got bored of my own voice so I did things that were unconventional and nobody checked up on me.” She would stand at the door at the start of the lesson greeting the pupils as they came in, asking “How are you?” and “What have you done since the last lesson?” She builds on their responses to personalize her lessons. In her English lessons she would show PowerPoint slides with quotes and ask the pupils to interpret them. In response she would introduce the more complex language that is expected when answering exam questions, in order to expand their vocabulary. Anne teaches through the medium of dialogue and in doing so builds empathy with the students, extends their vocabulary, and gives them confidence to express and develop their own ideas.

3: Making Connections The classroom is a complex environment. As a teacher, you have a lesson that you have prepared. You begin by opening up a dialogue and that creates a plethora of questions that could take your lesson

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plan in a number of different directions. Some questions may be “on target,” some seem irrelevant, and some offer ideas that you had never thought of. What do you do? The improvising teacher is able to think on their feet, pick up ideas from the class, and incorporate them into their lesson. They are also adept at making the lesson relevant, connecting the content to the real world and the lives of their pupils. There are a number of simple exercises that I use to give teachers practice in making connections, for example, Funny You Should Say That! In this exercise, the participants sit in a circle and one person starts by making a statement such as “I flew in an aeroplane for the first time yesterday.” The next person says, “Funny you should say that, I was the pilot on that plane,” and so on until everybody is connected. Having established all the connections this can develop into a group improvisation. I witnessed a fascinating example of the power of making connections when undertaking my research. In this instance the teacher made connections between their lesson and an experience that the students had had outside of the lesson. Anne was teaching an A-level English class and had noticed that the previous day the sixth form (the most senior class) had attended a Police Road Safety Show. This was an event organized by the police to raise awareness of the perils that young drivers potentially face. The show makes explicit the often-fatal dangers associated with driving and contains graphic descriptions of road accidents. She chose to draw on their experience of this event by handing each pupil a Post-it note when they entered the classroom and asked them to write down their feelings about the previous day’s event. This produced some very emotional responses. She was then able to capitalize on the link between the pupils’ experience and the book they were studying, The Great Gatsby, where one of the key incidents in the book is a car crash.

4: Adaptation Adapting a lesson plan “in the moment” is the practice that most teachers think of when they talk about improvisational teaching: responding to or building on the ideas given by pupils, reacting to time constraints, dealing with unexpected interruptions, incorporating current topical issues or news events, accepting that the class “just don’t get” what you are teaching (the list is

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endless). The ability to be adaptable in order to engage with your pupils or to be able to clarify misunderstandings in a new way is a fundamental skill. An effective way of giving teachers the confidence to adapt what they are doing in the moment is by playing Swedish Story (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 34). There are a number of variations of this game. I like to play it by putting the participants into small groups of between four and seven people. One of the participants tells a story and, in turn, the other players shout out a word to incorporate into the story. It is fascinating to witness the ways in which new words are woven in. Trainee teachers immediately recognize how this reflects their classroom experiences and how it helps them to acknowledge and cope with the curveballs that pupils throw at them. The ability to adapt the lesson as it is happening is dependent on having a broad repertoire of responses available. Over a period of time teachers gain the experience that enables them to change their lesson plan and generate a suitable alternative. This becomes second nature when teachers are able to draw upon their tacit knowledge of “what works” and “what could work.” As Barbara pointed out, it is about having the confidence to take risks: “With experience there is less fear that things will go wrong and that it is okay to chuck an idea out into the open and run with it.” Barbara had the ability to take risks in her teaching because she had developed a broad repertoire of teaching strategies and a good relationship with her pupils. Experience has given her the confidence to try anything, knowing that if a strategy doesn’t work she can try something else. The ability to be adaptable draws on the other improvisational skills: noticing what is going on in the classroom, “reading” the pupils, engaging in dialogue, and making connections. Richard was very good at listening to the quality of classroom talk and became very attuned to the tone of discussions in his drama classes, not just the words they said. He would say to the students: “I can tell from the sounds you are making that the work is not going in the direction that I want it to go in.” When I later asked him to unpack this he said, “It’s changing direction, I suppose, but it’s reacting isn’t it … teachers who are less confident will let it run because that is what the plan is.” In other words, inexperienced or unsure teachers will not give themselves permission to let go of the lesson plan and improvise, thereby missing opportunities to respond to the actual needs of the students in the moment.

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Engaging in self-reflection also contributes to the continual adaptation of practice. Barbara explained this when she gave her view of expertise: It’s a tall order [being an expert]; it’s someone who is learning the whole time, already thinking about the next lesson to ensure the progress of all children … I don’t think there is a tick list of what makes an expert teacher in terms of solid proof but there is a more reflective approach. A real expert teacher is a selfreflective teacher … they put changes into planning and teaching immediately rather than wait.

Conclusion My research clearly reveals that the expert practice of the secondary school teachers I observed is fundamentally improvisatory, and this knowledge provides us with guidelines for identifying and developing expert improvisational practice in the classroom. The impro mindset is concerned with giving and having permission to improvise, being adaptable, and personalizing our practice. With this mindset we can develop our skills as an improviser through noticing, creating dialogue, making connections, and adaptation. We can also see that there is a symbiotic relationship between the mindset and the practice; each in turn develops the other. I also want to emphasize the importance of the climate that schools need to develop in order to encourage improvisatory teaching. The teachers in my research valued collaboration and collegiality, and these approaches are crucial to creating a climate that fosters an applied impro mindset. Their efficacy allowed them the autonomy to be creative. I called them “sanctioned mavericks.” Allowing greater autonomy is an aspect of a school climate that places a high value on relationships (between students, between students and teachers, between teachers and school leaders). The kind of school climate that I am talking about has been described by Keith Sawyer as “(a) culture of collaborative organization … based on flexibility, connection and conversation” (2017: 156). The challenge of developing an applied impro mindset in education is that it is as much a collective enterprise as an individual goal.

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Postscript The urgency of this work cannot be understated. This is a global challenge as “the world’s best performing school systems make great teaching their ‘north star’” (Auguste et al. 2010). The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the vital importance of having an impro mindset. The improvisatory resourcefulness of the teaching profession has become a global phenomenon as teachers have created new conditions in which learning can take place in response to lockdown restrictions. Face-to-face teaching has been replaced by virtual classrooms, courses and teaching materials have been adapted to suit online tuition. One UK university transformed itself into a virtual university in a week! But it goes further than that, teachers have improvised innovative responses to tackling the social inequalities that have arisen, organizing food banks to support students in need. We have become very aware of the relational and interactive nature of teaching. One teacher in the United States writes: “This crisis helped me to see that I do a lot of teaching ‘on the fly’ in a face-to-face classroom—meaning that I change my approach in any particular class session based on how I read the room” (Whitaker 2020). We are forcefully reminded that the direct interaction between teacher and student is crucially important, in whatever form it takes. The improvising teacher, skilled in connecting, adapting, and building relationships, is even more necessary at a time when direct agential contact between teachers and students is not possible.

Note 1 The research was carried out with full ethical approval from Bath Spa University and in line with guidance provided by the British Educational Research Association. All of the participants signed a letter of informed consent, which assured them that any data they provided would be reported anonymously (pseudonyms have been used). They were also informed that the data would be disseminated in a doctoral thesis and that some aspects of the research findings may be published in conference papers, journal articles, or similar.

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WORKBOOK 6.1 The Pineapple Improvisers practice being “in the moment” and drawing on all the details that they notice. This exercise is a simple and practical way to introduce the four levels of noticing: ourselves, other people, the immediate environment, and the wider world. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • practiced the four levels of noticing, • responded to the things that others notice, and • learned that noticing is vital to developing an improvisation mindset.

Preparation for the Exercise (Optional) If there is time, run this short warm-up exercise to encourage participants to experience being in the moment. 1. Have participants stand with their eyes closed. Ask them to notice any points of tension in their body and their breathing. 2. Guide participants to attend to the four levels of noticing by listening to: • the sounds within their body, • the sounds of the other participants nearby, • the sounds within the immediate environment, and • the sounds in the wider world.

Have them focus on each level for about twenty seconds.

Running the Exercise 1. Instruct participants to form groups of six or seven and sit in a circle. 2. Place an object in the middle of each circle. Interesting and visually complex objects work well, such as a pineapple (hence the title of the exercise).

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3. In turn, ask each participant to tell the group something they notice about the object. 4. After two or three turns, suggest that participants engage the four levels of noticing. Using the pineapple as an example, share that they might say: • “I notice I would like to eat that pineapple” (ourselves), • “I notice that the pineapple is leaning toward Jane” (other people), • “I notice that the color of the leaves contrasts with the red of the carpet” (immediate environment), and • “I notice that the pineapple would not grow on the trees outside” (wider world).

Debrief • What did you notice? • How did you respond to the things that other members of the group noticed? • How easy was it to switch from one level of noticing to another? • What are the challenges of noticing in a busy environment? • What do we tend to notice? What should we be noticing? • What advantages are there in taking time to notice what is going on at all four levels?

Online Delivery If you are running this activity online, the group leader should hold up the object and show it to the participants. In turn ask each of the participants to state what they noted about the object. Remind them about the four levels of noticing and discuss the way in which the fourth level (the wider world) includes the experience of being connected virtually. Connections: Nick developed this exercise as a way to start the sessions he facilitates with teachers. For more exercises that encourage attunement to the present, try Spolin’s (1999) Sensory

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Awareness exercises or some of the mindfulness practices described in Chapter 3.

6.2 Drawing the Line This exercise is designed to get participants to reflect on the nature of dialogue and to articulate the kind of dialogues that they would like to create in their work environment. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • created a visual dialogue, • communicated nonverbally with others, and • reflected on the nature and importance of dialogue.

Running the Exercise The materials required for this exercise are colored felt-tip or highlighter pens (one for each participant) and large sheets of paper. 1. Have the participants form pairs. 2. Give each pair a piece of paper and two pens of different colors. 3. Inform the group that this exercise is to be undertaken in silence. 4. Ask each pair to draw a visual dialogue, taking turns. The dialogue should only contain the following elements: • dots (small or large) • horizontal lines (straight, wavy, or jagged) • triangles 5. Stop the exercise when each pair has completed ten to twelve visual statements. Ask each pair to share their visual dialogue with the rest of the group.

Debrief Begin the debrief by discussing the following: • What was it like to draw dialogue?

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• What emotions can be seen in the drawings? What kind of dialogue do they suggest: reasonable, conversational, argumentative, angry? • What do these images tell us about dialogue? • What are the similarities and differences between the different drawings? • What makes a good dialogue, and what factors contribute to this? Next, have pairs join together to create groups of four. Instruct each group to devise five principles for encouraging dialogue. Ask each group to share their ideas. You can write them on a flip chart, noting ideas that come up more than once.

Suggestions • Each pair can put words to their dialogue, or pairs could swap dialogues and put words to them. • Depending on the group’s confidence level, the visual dialogues could be interpreted by nonverbal sounds or even expressive dance!

Online Delivery This activity can be run virtually, either by having two people together in a physical room, or by using a white board feature in a virtual breakout room. The visual dialogues can then be shared and discussed online with the other participants. Connections: For another fun, collaborative drawing exercise, try Quick Draw (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 144), originally titled The Eyes (Johnstone 1999: 112).

6.3 The Lawyer This exercise is a great way to jolt participants out of their familiar habits, fostering skills for responding to unexpected situations and developing adaptability.

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By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • become more aware of their willingness or resistance to change, • practiced adapting to new stimuli, • practiced failing with good nature, and • shared an opportunity to sharpen their wits.

Running the Exercise 1. Place chairs in a circle, and have each participant stand in front of a chair. 2. Stand in the middle of the circle and explain the rules of the exercise. Say, “I am the Lawyer. Starting now, you must not answer when I speak to you. The person on your left must answer for you. You must not nod, smile, or respond to me in any way. Do you understand?” 3. Some members of the group at this point will invariably answer out loud. Tell them they are out of this round of the exercise and must sit down on their chairs. 4. The Lawyer starts again, asking each participant a question (e.g., What did you have for breakfast? Why do you hate cats?) and calling that person out if they answer. The Lawyer can move at random around the circle. Make it difficult for them! The intention is to playfully challenge their habitual responses. 5. When everyone is out (i.e., seated), ask them to stand again by saying, “As the Lawyer, I was not satisfied with your responses. Please all rise and we will commence again.”

6. As the exercise progresses, add the new rule that no one can answer “yes” or “no.” 7. Once the group understands the exercise, have a participant take on the role of the Lawyer. New rules may be added as the exercise progresses.

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Debrief • What did you notice about your own willingness or resistance to following the rules? • How did it feel to have to “think on your feet”? • What skills were developed through this exercise? • How did doing this exercise develop your adaptability?

Suggestions When assuming the role of the Lawyer, adopt a very highstatus stance to heighten the sense of mock punishment when a participant errs. This will also unify the participants.

Online Delivery This activity works best with a small number of participants (up to ten). To prepare for this online activity each participant is given the name of another person, they will answer for this person if they are asked a question. Connections: This exercise is published in Brandes and Phillips (1979) along with other valuable exercises for teachers and group leaders. There are many improvisation exercises that ask participants to see new possibilities in what is familiar, challenge habitual responses, and/or practice “split-attention” (see Dudeck 2013: 11). Favorite exercises include Johnstone’s exercise of asking students to shout out the wrong name for everything they see as they move around the room (1979), Changing Real Objects (Johnstone 1999), What Are You Doing? (Fotis and O’Hara 2016), and Matrix Madness/You (Appendix B).

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PART THREE

Developing the Communities We Need

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7 Trips to No-Mistakes-Land: Improvisation as a Meta-Skill for Doctoral Students Gunter Lösel

Gunter Lösel is an actor, trainer, and author, holding a diploma in psychology and a doctorate in theatre studies. He has a deep distrust in intentions. He loves chance and unforeseen options. Since 2014 Lösel has been heading the Research Focus Performative Practice at the Zurich University of the Arts.

Writing my doctoral thesis was a rough experience. I felt like a lonesome cowboy, trying to find my way through a desert of information and thoughts. My text grew and sprawled inside my computer, in my drawers, and in memos posted all over my working room, like a monster waiting for the moment to attack. There was no one I could talk to, either they did not know enough about my field of study or they were insiders who I imagined might steal my ideas. I could not identify the right moment for exposing my work to peers; it was either too early or too late for feedback. Eventually I realized that my thinking had become repetitious, I was going in

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circles, and losing time. Then another fear set in: someone would publish on my theme before I could! I started to rush, but a new fear grew that my higher speed would lead to more mistakes. What had started as an enthusiastic journey into the unknown became an agonizing trek. While the story ended well (I eventually got my PhD), in hindsight, I really wish somebody could have given me a way to face my fears without fear, an environment to take this unique and personal journey—one that spans several years without the aid of a map, a compass, or much knowledge of where I might end up— with courage and support. So in 2017, when my partner Nicole Erichsen and I were asked to give an impro course for doctoral students at the University of Zurich (UZH) as part of the curriculum of the Graduate Campus, I welcomed the opportunity to reflect on this arduous process and find ways to facilitate it with the help of improvisational practices. We already had many years of experience applying improvisation within companies and organizations. Now we could focus that same attention on a project that felt more personally rewarding for us. We titled our course, “Don’t be Square, Be There—Improvisation Skills for Researchers,” and every year since 2017, we have facilitated this course twice per school year. “Don’t Be Square” takes place on two consecutive days, eight hours each, and is capped at fourteen participants. The course is embedded in the Graduate Campus, which offers qualification courses to all doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers from sciences and humanities. UZH students can take the course at any point during their doctorate. Our initial design focus was to help students with their research. We started with the idea of “Walking into the unknown,” because both impro and the process of research are journeys of discovery where you have to step over the threshold from known to unknown. Our initial advertised course objectives aimed to help students approach their work with more spontaneity, to trust the present moment, to co-create with others, to bypass (at times) their “inner judge,” and to deal with stage fright and curveballs when giving presentations. After the first iteration of the course, we realized that our students were primarily interested in how impro could help them become better presenters at conferences, especially the Q&A sections that caught them off-guard. They also wanted to be more effective in their networking and optimize their performance in face-to-face

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FIGURE 7.1 Gunter Lösel and Nicole Erichsen (Photo by Bernd Hentschel).

interactions. They were far from thinking that the research process itself could somehow profit from impro. Eventually we went for a compromise between what students expected and what we wanted to convey, knowing that the vital work of helping them engage with each other through play would satisfy both goals. More importantly, Nicole and I also realized that the “elephant” in the academic room is a universal sense of fear that cannot be talked about. We decided a key part of our job as external teachers was to address and name the fears of this specific context to help the students reframe their hidden dread and unlock their locked potential. Throughout the course, we explicitly focus on the theme of mistakes, because the way our students approach mistakes—their mindset—affects everything they do within the academic context. By helping our students become aware of their mindset, they can intentionally choose how they want to approach their work. In what follows, I describe four primary academic fears, how we help the students visualize the difference between their current mindset and an impro mindset by referring to it as a heroic journey to/from No-Mistakes-Land, and finally a high-level description of the course design.

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The Landscape of Academic Fears Before we could invite our students to embrace an impro mindset, we first needed to understand their current mindset. We talked to them and identified the following four basic fears. We explicitly name and play with all four fears throughout the two-day program described later in the chapter.

Fear #1: The Fear of Making Mistakes Academic research continuously tries to eliminate, minimize, or at least quantify mistakes. This general attitude afflicts the mindset of doctoral students so that they have a deeply rooted, unspoken fear of publicly making mistakes. This fear is reinforced throughout their academic environment. It takes quite some time to move from this mindset into the mindset of an improviser, where mistakes are things with which to build rather than a source of shame. To start the process of helping them shift their mindset, we approach the topic academically as well as experientially, to give them the lived experience of our two days together along with academic arguments for them to ponder going forward. At every phase of the course, we question the concept of mistakes and try to uncover its preconditions. We often refer to a very old meaning of “improvviso” as the (mis-)behavior of someone in church, who does not know the ritual. Historically, this behavior was seen as negative, but by the end of the Middle Ages, its connotation had changed: Now improvisation was the foundation of artistic practices in music and theatre and it was seen as a positive quality. So “improvised” started as a mistake but led to new forms of expression and production. What initially seems to be a mistake might appear as something valuable in a different light, when circumstances change. Reframing mistakes in this way causes the students to consciously question their own assumptions about mistakes. They begin to see that this mindset could be limiting. Yet they won’t be convinced until they put this theory into embodied practice.

Fear #2: Horror Vacui—The Fear of Going Blank While everyone experiences the fear of going blank at some point, in an academic context it really creates nightmares, because you are

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supposed to be an expert in your field. Not having an answer or even completely lacking words is considered to be the worst thing that can happen to you. Experts are expected to always have access to some additional facts, detail, arguments, or references. This fear is especially strong in persons who have experienced “going blank” in exams. I experienced it once as a teenager and the memory can still tense up my whole body.

Fear #3: The Fear of Stolen Words and Concepts In science, concepts function something like currency. We even use the verb “to coin” a new concept because to do so means having more of this currency. As Candace Pert once stated, scientists would “rather share their toothbrush than their vocabulary” (2015). In the humanities, too, the results of research often consist of new concepts, new words, or even a whole set of new vocabulary. This fear is very disturbing to academics because words and concepts are so easy to copy. Often people don’t even notice from where they borrow their vocabulary. In order to prevent this, researchers believe they must stay closemouthed about their concepts until they are published, drastically limiting their ability to gain new perspectives on their work. This is the only way to secure authorship. Of course in most cases, concepts are not “stolen” in a direct, conscious way, but the mere possibility hinders open communication between researchers.

Fear #4: The Fear of Being Scooped In researcher’s language, to be scooped means that another researcher who is working in the same field publishes his or her results before you do. In extreme cases this can mean that many years of work lose their importance and your career might be seriously damaged. Uri Alon argues that it is fear of being scooped that isolates researchers and makes them afraid to talk to each other before they have published their results (2014). Unfortunately, this fear isolates the researcher from exactly those peers who are ideal partners for feedback and support—the ones that are working in the same field. One of our students reported that she stopped talking to persons inside the academic field and rather turned to trusted friends, even if they had a hard time understanding what she was talking about.

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Imagining the Worst After naming the four academic fears, we talk about how the imagination exacerbates them. Usually behind the fears students vividly imagine what other people might think and do, what might happen in the case of the expected risk, and how one’s life and career will be shattered. Small experiences of failure grow into horror scenarios. Even when they have not yet been scooped or gone blank in front of an audience, imagination will create a story to substitute for this lack of experience. This, we explain, is exactly where theatre and impro come in: as a means to deal with imagination. We find that an improvisational mindset can create a path to another landscape. Instead of getting stuck in fears, why not imagine and practice taking a walk in a more pleasant environment for a while? And find intelligent, intentional ways to come back?

A Different Culture: The Hero’s Journey to No-Mistakes-Land Impro is not just a bundle of rules or a set of premises. Simply knowing a number of impro tenets does not result in approaching the world with an impro mindset. For those who wish to pursue it as such, impro is a discipline. To fully embrace tenets like Dare to Be Dull (see Be Obvious in Appendix A) takes time, support, practice being too dull or not dull enough, and the conscious reflection on the culture one was raised with (e.g., being brilliant is good and being dull is bad). Ultimately there is the conscious adoption of a new culture, where being dull can be seen as generous to those around you (allowing others to shine) and can show up as being obvious and clear rather than verbose and obfuscating. This pursuit of the discipline of impro creates a mindset in a holistic sense. The basic question for me as I create applied improvisation (AI) programs is not “how do we transfer single elements of impro to other fields?” but “how do we enable people to move back and forth between their own culture and the culture of impro in a meaningful way?” For this we use our metaphor of “No-Mistakes-Land” and a three-part solution to get there: No-Mistakes-Land, No Void, and More Cocoons.

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No-Mistakes-Land Improvisation has quite a history of dealing with the concept of mistakes, famously put into a quote by Miles Davis, “Don’t worry about mistakes. There aren’t any” (Nachmanovich 1990: 116). Del Close rephrased this as, “There is no such thing as a mistake” (Halpern et al. 1994: 79), and Keith Johnstone teaches his students to alter their negative attitude about failure. The general idea is to reevaluate mistakes as something positive that will lead you into something new. Some impro teachers today even suggest to “love your mistakes” or to “embrace mistakes.” Our doctoral students immediately questioned this and, as they were doctoral students, they did this in a very intelligent and convincing way. Why in the world should they learn to “love their mistakes” when everybody around them is only waiting for them to screw up and take advantage of this? We had to question our beliefs and come up with a concept of learning that is not based on impro ideology, admitting that “embracing your mistakes” does not fit for all kinds of learning and specifying the kinds for which it seems useful. As improvisers we must be aware that we are from a counterculture. We usually have spent a couple years learning impro and slowly overcoming the fear of judging our actions as either right or wrong. We could have done this only in a safe environment. What we often forget is that this safe environment is not just there by chance—it has to be created. There is no way of convincing a student of, let’s say, engineering that there are “no” mistakes. But you can create an experience that reminds him or her of something they already know from their learning biography. Everybody knows No-Mistakes-Land from early childhood, when the processes of learning are very different from later phases of life. A young child is trying to stand and walk. It fails and fails and fails. As teachers, we could, of course, try to make the child aware of his or her “mistakes,” but obviously this is not what happens. Instead, grown-ups will help the child to try again and again, they will cheer when he or she crawls, stands, and finally takes a step for the first time. The learning curve in No-Mistakes-Land is not linear. When we observe the child, we might easily come to the conclusion that it

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will never be able to walk—until suddenly it walks. It seems like a miracle. We don’t have to criticize the child, we don’t have to explain, we don’t have to be teachers at all. The new ability emerges in No-Mistakes-Land. Learning to walk is just one example of nonlinear learning and in the course we draw attention to the fact that this is actually the most common form of learning when it comes to complex behaviors like language, social skills, artistic skills, and cognitive skills. The smaller components of these complex behaviors evolve separately and almost unnoticeably, until, rather suddenly, they can be combined in a new way, which leads to a leap in the learning curve. The sudden appearance of a complex behavior can seem miraculous and overwhelming, but it is in accord with the stage model of developmental psychology (Piaget 1977). This model proposes that even when it seems the learning person is repeating the same thing over and over again, upon closer examination, you will detect small variations at play. The concept (or “schema” in Piaget’s terms) is being “assimilated,” which means it is applied to as many situations as possible. In the whole process of assimilation and accommodation there are no mistakes, there is just a continuum of experimentation going on and on. We share Piaget’s theories with our students to convey learning is not a continuous linear buildup of content, nor is research. It involves phases of agony and not knowing where to go. To be aware of this can change a student’s mindset from a linear to an organic understanding of the research process. The teacher’s task in these forms of learning is simple (at first gaze): Reinforce the motivation to play. And indeed this is what all grown-ups will intuitively do in the example given above—they will cheer and clap every time the child stands up. It is this kind of learning that is essential for improvisation. Rules about “How to improvise” will never do. Instead great teachers like Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone created pedagogies based on the assumption that there are fields of learning where right and wrong just lose their meaning, and the mode of playing is sufficient to teach all lessons that the exercise or game has to offer. “The game teaches,” says Keith Johnstone. I propose that when we are teaching improvisation we are dealing with exactly this kind of learning that unfolds “by itself,” when given the right preconditions, especially the precondition of acting without fear. Fear distorts and stops all processes.

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So No-Mistakes-Land is not an ideology but a very common human experience, and we remind the participants that they already know this mindset from childhood, that learning is not something that only starts in school.

There Is No Void Impro has a lot to offer here, as it can “prove” that the void does not exist. The brain is simply unable to stop working as long as we are alive. Even if you start with something random and meaningless, given the opportunity, your brain will turn it into something meaningful. We frequently use exercises derived from Jacques Copeau’s concept of neutrality. Copeau, a theatre-maker at the beginning of the twentieth century, criticized a tendency in acting he called “cabotinage”: when the actor feels basically insecure on stage, he or she flees into action and/or a stage routine. He understood cabotinage as protection against stage fright, so he created exercises that allow the actor to free himself or herself from all infertile, stilted, imposed conventions and become more and more relaxed and truthful on the stage. This becomes the starting point of the actor training. Copeau said: The departure point of expressivity: the state of rest, of calm, of relaxation, of silence, or of simplicity. […] An actor must know how to be silent, to listen, to respond, to stay still, to begin an action, to develop it, and to return to silence and immobility. (Frost and Yarrow 2007: 28–9) For Copeau, the art of acting did not consist in rehearsed stage actions but in the ability to be present, to experience the stage situation. The actor should bid farewell to all traditional ideas of acting in order to open himself up for the real encounter with the audience. The same is true for our students. For most of them the idea of “doing nothing” is scary and when they do it, they feel guilty, or they have a feeling that they are about to disappear or fall into the void. Copeau and his successors have created various exercises on neutrality that are very useful for AI. In our course we use one very simple but powerful exercise called Learn to Be Looked At

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(Workbook 7.1). The key message is: you don’t have to be afraid that there “is nothing” because there is always your body, your outer appearance, your basic way of performing. You don’t have to do anything to make an impression. You don’t have to act. Don’t waste too much time thinking about what other people think of you. Your outer appearance is an offer—let the other person build on it. We all want to be perceived as “intelligent,” “funny,” “original,” “socially competent,” and so on; but if we try to enforce this impression on the audience, we are in a fight we cannot win. Often our students feel uncomfortable at the beginning because they would like to control what others think of them. In the exercise they can discover that letting go of this attempt to control sets free many resources. This exercise produces relaxation and calmness, and it reduces the tendency to overact.

Don’t Walk Alone: Creating a Cocoon You cannot go to No-Mistakes-Land alone. It takes at least two persons. One of them has to be the cocoon for the other one, that is, a secure environment for development and learning. Improvisation in large part is about generating a supportive environment for your partners, by accepting their offers and adding to them. This has to be done in a nonjudgmental and enthusiastic way. Crucial to this is the experience that there really are no bad ideas and everything is an offer. It is not the task of the sender to be clever and original—instead it is the task of the recipient to make the message meaningful. In this way the partner or the whole group will provide an environment where “mistakes” will be turned into something wonderful. We offer exercises that build up co-trust, like leader-and-follower exercises, mirroring and follow-the-follower exercises. Through this, an experience is created that leads to fearlessness and self-confidence, a state that many of us—especially doctoral students—have not encountered for years. It is as if gravity suddenly turned off and we are floating in the air, losing orientation but also going into an emotional state of bliss. It is the improviser’s job to trigger the fantasy of their partner. How do we create cocoons? Again the knowledge is already there: Parents do it for their children, therapists and consultants do it for their clients, teachers do it for their students. All the time. The

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according rules and attitudes have been studied and elaborated for decades, starting with humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers’s clientcentered approach up to consultant and teacher Nancy Kline’s concept of the Thinking Environment (Kline 1999). It is not only a matter of thinking but a process of mutual trust and entrainment. Creating a cocoon means that our communication is so close and attentive that the outside world disappears and we enter a light trance. We usually compare this to the act of falling asleep, when dreaming sets in. You need a safe place to get into this state—but other than that there is no strain necessary at all. In the course, we let every participant have the experience of being inside the cocoon, setting free the stream of associations and imagery, and enabling them to create a cocoon for somebody else. The students start with exercises that build up trust, like leading their partner who has their eyes closed. This requires two roles: One (A) who takes responsibility with eyes open and one (B) with eyes closed who lets A lead them around the space. When mutual trust is established, B starts to explore their inner life: images, ideas, thoughts streaming through the head. B tries to keep focused on their experience while contact with A is varied, using language or occasionally opening the eyes. The objective is to create an experience for B where the inner stream of consciousness meets the outer world without collapsing. It is also an experience for A to be part of the process of protecting B’s experience, essentially becoming the responsible link to the outer world. Both roles—being inside (B) and being a cocoon (A)—are necessary to get to No-Mistakes-Land. We think creating a cocoon is one of the human abilities that are really worth fostering. Humans have a very long childhood and a lot of cocoons have to be created by a lot of grown-ups to ensure the multiple processes of learning. Unfortunately, the academic environment is not very conducive to creating cocoons, and from my perspective has even turned worse in the last decades, in part due to justified critical debate about dependencies between supervisors and doctoral students. Some supervisors of doctoral students can create a cocoon, some cannot. How much would academic research gain if groups of doctoral students could fill the void by creating safe spaces or cocoons for each other? We sow the idea that everybody can become the cocoon for somebody else and that this can lead to a new culture of learning with less suspicion, less fear, less effort, less control.

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Overview of the Course “Don’t be Square, Be There—Improvisation Skills for Researchers” is divided into the following six sections: Walking into the Unknown (Part I), Everything Is an Offer, No-Mistakes-Land, Status, Scientific Storytelling, and Walking into the Unknown (Part II). In “Walking into the Unknown (Part I)” we do basic impro warm-ups, establish an attitude of playfulness, and touch the topics of collaboration and fun. We play association games and introduce Keith Johnstone’s basic exercise Word at a Time (Johnstone 1979: 130).1 In this phase the students usually don’t raise questions but are very open, so we can do whatever we think will serve as a useful base. The games teach that it is neither possible nor necessary to plan ahead. In “Everything Is an Offer” we explain the idea that it is impossible to “have no idea” and that whenever someone says that he or she has no idea, they usually mean “I am not content with my idea” and “I am looking for a better idea.” The inner judge is at work. We discuss the concept of inner censorship, which for many students is a new way of seeing how some of their best ideas get stopped by their inner judge, even in the early research and idea generation of their writing. Reframing everything as an offer (or gift) silences the inner judge: Who would criticize a gift? In this phase we introduce the exercise Learn to Be Looked At. After lunch, we enter into “No-Mistakes-Land” which challenges the students’ concept of mistakes by establishing an environment where the idea of mistakes loses its meaning altogether. For example, we do Lists in a circle (Johnstone 1979: 119) where each player says a word that they “associate” with the word that came just before, and we discuss how an association could be “wrong.” How can a word that appears in your head be wrong? Can one part of your brain tell the other part of your brain that an idea is worthless and on what grounds? The students soon understand the absurdity of judging spontaneous impulses as wrong. We challenge them to let go of categories of “right” and “wrong” for the duration of the class. As facilitators, we share with them when we notice that they have fallen back into an old habit of judging their spontaneous impulses. The section on “Status” introduces the students to Johnstone’s concept of status with an emphasis on our nonverbal and

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unconscious status behaviors (Johnstone 1979). This module was introduced to meet the students’ wish to become better presenters and better networkers. We use status to make the students aware of body language, especially how important it is when they are engaging in social interactions. Usually they are surprised when they realize how precisely they understand these nonverbal status signals. We invite the students to play around with different degrees of status in order to become more flexible and to help them break their initial assumption that high status is good and low status is bad (Workbook 7.2). We make explicit that the most successful people (professors, researchers, etc.) are status masters, being able to adjust their status to fit each situation. As the academic field is very hierarchical they usually have a couple of “aha” moments. For example, they have all experienced having a professor talk and talk without seeming to add anything new to a lecture or conversation. Now as they look at those moments through the lens of status, they see that the professor’s intention may have been less concerned with imparting knowledge and more motivated by the need to protect his or her status. The “Status” topic takes quite some time and ends the first day. By this time, the students are usually in a good mood, more connected, and have shown they are willing to play with each other in this very different way, even if they cannot yet put into words the benefit or value of the work. For many of them, spending a day interacting with their fellow students in such a “non-academic” way is completely new. We keep the debrief to a minimum as we want them to sit with the embodied experience for a while rather than rationalize too early. We just ask how they are feeling at this moment and informally check in on their level of engagement and commitment to come back tomorrow. The second day starts with “Scientific Storytelling,” a concept we borrowed from Rafael Luna (2013). Luna’s concept basically states that scientific results are in most cases told in the form of stories, even in the “hard sciences,” Luna’s field. We present the IMRaD (Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion) Model as a canonical way of presenting a scientific project and we parallel it to traditional structures used in storytelling and dramaturgy. When the similarities are understood, we proceed to some storytelling exercises. We build on Johnstone’s (1979) chapter “Narrative Skills” and let them work in pairs, one being the “storyteller,” while

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the other throws in suggestions. In our exercise Story Walk they go for a walk and the storyteller leaves “blanks” in the story that spontaneously get filled by the listener. This way they learn to be in the story together and let it develop from beginning to end. The section culminates in an exercise in which the students explain their research projects as a Five-Sentence Story, a narrative structure similar to Kenn Adams’s (2007) Story Spine.2 The last section “Walking into the Unknown (Part II)” is concerned with what we originally thought would be the main focus of the course: the critical point in the research process where you step into the unknown and all your concepts might (and often should) lose their validity. We learned how valuable it was to put this topic at the final point in the program: because we had already gained their trust and willingness to try new things, the students were receptive and supported each other to openly explore what would otherwise be an unpleasant topic. We show a video of Uri Alon’s TED Talk, “Why Science Demands a Leap Into the Unknown” (2014), and discuss it with the students. Alon offers the concept of “being in the cloud” as a metaphor for being lost in the research process. For example, when experiments don’t work, the original research question gets out of focus. He suggests that this is not an exceptional state but a normal and even necessary phase of the research process. There is no need for the researcher to feel inadequate, guilty, or stupid. We embrace the idea that a point of confusion is an essential part of the research process, just as the crisis and catharsis are in the hero’s journey (Campbell 2008). Adding to Alon’s concept of the cloud, we propose the action of Meeting the Monster (Appendix A), counterintuitively going where the fear is the biggest, also connotating this as bravery, as a hero’s journey. The course ends with several rounds of sharing and reflecting in small groups as the participants discuss their thoughts and ideas for transfer to their own work and life.

What Value Does the Concept of No-Mistakes-Land Provide? Going to No-Mistakes-Land as an academic involves a paradox: in many academic situations, mistakes are something you should

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avoid when pursuing a career; it is also true that you need to learn to embrace your mistakes or real learning and discovery cannot take place. We need a concept that makes clear that both truths exist in parallel universes. They don’t exclude each other. Thinking of the mindset of improvisation as a place where you can go, spend some time, and come back takes away the conflict of which of the two cultures is right or wrong. They both exist in their own right and to know how to travel back and forth is a valuable resource. NoMistakes-Land is not a wellness concept. We strongly believe that it has value beyond relaxation and self-care. If everybody knows how to get to No-Mistakes-Land, we can use it in the process of research and in scientific encounters. While writing a doctoral thesis one inevitably loses the spirit of playfulness at exactly the point where it is most needed. We can see it in the faces of our participants when they enter the room. The concept of serious work is predominant and our students are limited by the idea that learning and research are linear processes. This is why we have to challenge them in the first place. The tenets of improvisation guide them to value nonlinear learning and collaboration. How then does this apply to the reality of an academic culture? Why should it be of any use for researchers? The course is gently shifting the mindset of the participants. They develop a concept of getting somewhere that includes phases of not knowing where you are and what you will do. It teaches them that being stuck is not their private failure but an inevitable part of stepping into the unknown. We suggest that it is a good idea to seek support and approach Alon’s “cloud” in a playful way, even when things seem very serious. When a student gets stuck and fear sets in, it is most important to find someone to walk into the unknown with and take a trip to NoMistakes-Land. If you don’t freeze and don’t overreact, something will emerge. For doctorate students our training leads to awareness about nonlinear processes that are in large part unpredictable and subvert the plans of their conscious, isolated self. One precondition is not to judge your inner life but to get into a state where ideas and perceptions can emerge spontaneously. Another precondition is to not isolate your inner life but to find ways to connect it to others. A third precondition is the creation of a cocoon that will take you to No-Mistakes-Land whenever you need to go.

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How do we know that our course works? The truth is, we can’t be sure. In each workshop during final rounds of sharing and reflecting, we often hear that the students are less worried about being lost and confused and can stay open to support the ideas of others longer, instead of closing up. Also they share that they haven’t laughed and used their bodies for a long time. These reflections, over time, have helped us fine-tune the course in a way that better addresses the fears our graduate students encounter. Also, after observing the class and reviewing data from the general UZH course evaluation students complete, the Head of Graduate Campus Eric Alms said: The participants find themselves in an unpredictable but enjoyable environment throughout this workshop—and this facilitates spontaneous learning and fosters valuable creative skills for the future, both for the research setting and beyond. From the positive evaluations of the workshop it is evident that doctoral researchers not only appreciate working “outside the box” but also recognize the “take home” value of the course. By the end of the course, Nicole and I observe more subtle effects, too: more expressivity, more connection between the participants, brighter eyes, more life, and more playfulness. These effects often disappear at the very moment you ask the students how they profited from the course—a methodological problem that we admit needs attention. We are currently looking into better ways of assessing student’s experiences including potentially cross-referencing observational research data with participant responses as well as conducting both pre- and post-workshop surveys. Meanwhile, we will consider this student’s observation as evidence we just might be on the right path: “What you are teaching is to look at yourself as someone who is travelling, instead of as someone who just wants to get somewhere.”

Notes 1 Association games encourage improvisers to accept and trust the connections that spontaneously emerge in their brains after a given

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input like a word, a gesture, a picture, and so on. Word-at-a-time, where improvisers create a story or write letters taking turns adding only one word each, was created by Johnstone to prevent improvisers from thinking ahead. These exercises can be found in Johnstone’s book Impro (1979). 2 The five-act model is a simplified version of Gustav Freytag’s “Technik des Dramas” (Freytag 1863). Similar to Adam’s Story Spine (2007), we use five narrative prompts in Story Walk (Every day; But this time; This was important because; Without hesitation; And the moral is…), and we encourage students to articulate the most important elements of their academic research, which can highlight gaps as well as lead to more engaging presentations.

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WORKBOOK 7.1 Learn to Be Looked At This exercise is designed to give participants an awareness of their performative baseline: the imaginations, feelings, and thoughts people might have just by looking at them. By sitting still, letting themselves be looked at, participants learn to let go of what they can and cannot control. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • examined their feelings about being the center of attention, • recognized their reaction to being the center of attention, like the impulse to freeze or overact, • discovered that their outer appearance is an offer that others will build on, and • learned to be more relaxed and able to give spectators the freedom to project their imaginings without trying to control what cannot be controlled.

Running the Exercise 1. Have a participant sit on a chair in a stage-like setting and “do nothing,” while you and the others look on. Inform the participant that he or she can end the exercise at any time by standing up and leaving the stage. 2. After about 30 seconds, ask the audience to start to imagine attributes of the participant on the stage, then say them out loud. Model statements such as “He seems shy” or “She is intelligent” (always taking into consideration the participant’s preferred gender pronouns). 3. Encourage the audience to enhance the spectrum of associations by throwing in more fictional suggestions like “She is a tennis star” or “They are the queen of a northern country.”

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4. If the group is in a cooperative state, go further and encourage some bold, colorful statements like “He secretly keeps rats in his room” or “She dreams of winning a song contest.” 5. When the participant leaves the stage, debrief with the group before repeating exercise with other participants.

Debrief After being watched, ask participant: • What were you feeling while being looked at and commented on? • Which comments upset, pleased, or surprised you? • How can you let go of control?

Suggestions • The facilitator should always be an active member of the audience, in order to model where the group is going. • Encourage the audience members to say whatever spontaneously comes to their minds, even if it seems absurd or inadequate. • If audience comments get too negative, gently steer them into a more positive direction. • In the debrief, there are usually mixed emotions. The participant being watched will reject some of the suggestions and accept some of them. Avoid discussing the perceptions. This exercise is not about how others see you but about how to let go of control.

Online Delivery Ask everyone but the participant being watched to turn off their videos. Individuals can then offer statements (voice only), as before, but make sure everyone allows for more time between statements since overlapping offers might not be heard and/or there could be a time delay due to internet connection issues.

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Connections: When developing his pioneering work on “Status,” Keith Johnstone discovered early on, “there was no way to be neutral …. The messages are modified by the receivers” (1979: 37). In other words, no matter how hard you try to signal through behavior, others will inevitably interpret your behavior through their personal lens and endow you with qualities you may or may not have. Try Johnstone’s (1999) Party Endowments for a fun way to explore this concept further.

7.2 Status Party This exercise builds awareness about status behavior and status perception. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • experienced status as a key driver of nonverbal communication, • gained an awareness of how precise status perception is, • seen how precisely they can modulate their own status behavior, and • become more aware of their own habitual status behavior.

Running the Exercise In preparation for the exercise, introduce some instructions about how to play very high and very low status. 1. Divide the group so there are three participants who will serve as observers and the rest as players. 2. Have each player draw a card from a deck of cards, specifying ten degrees of status (Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5). Instruct them to keep their status secret. 3. Tell the players that they are at a company party and their goal is to make clear to everybody what status they are. Have the observers decide what kind of company this is. 4. Start the party with a little speech, for example, “Here is a buffet. Here is the bar. Have fun!” Then tell all the players to start

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chatting and having party conversations, greeting, walking, and forming groups. 5. End the improvised party after 5 to 7 minutes. 6. Instruct the observers to work together to place the players in line, going from lowest to highest status. (Note that there can be players with the same status, because there are more than one of each value in the deck.) 7. Have all of the players reveal their true status.

Debrief • How were the high-status players carrying themselves? What did you notice about the way they walked and talked? • How were the low-status players carrying themselves? • Did the high-status and low-status groups mingle, or did they form separate groups? • What gendered behavior did you notice was performed to show status, high or low? • Instead of using “masculine” or “feminine” or gendered language, can you describe behavior in other ways (e.g., assertive, grounded, emphatic, owning the space)? • If the group is working specifically on gender issues, ask how does this status exercise demonstrate the ways in which we perform gender? Connections: Go to Kat Koppett’s chapter for two additional status exercises, Status Picnic and Status Pass (pp. 30, 34). For more on Johnstone’s status exercises and theories, read the “Status” chapter in Impro (1979). For more on status work applied to critical pedagogy and conflict resolution, see chapters by Barbara Tint and Annalisa Dias (Dudeck and McClure 2018).

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8 Transforming the Culture of Communications in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School Raquell Holmes and Mia Anderson

Raquell Holmes is a computational cell biologist by training. Her improvscience programs help scientists build inclusive work environments, communicate with others, and realize their potential. Today, improvscience is an integral part of the Harvard Medical School Systems Biology Communicating Science course. She received her PhD from Tufts University. Mia Anderson is an actress, writer, and director. She has performed at theatres in New York, in regional theatres (National Black Theatre, Savannah Repertory, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, etc.), and nationally with Radio Disney and VStar Productions. Mia was a director’s fellow with New Perspectives Theatre Company and alum of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. Mia’s most recent play was part of Little Red Theatre Company’s Tiny Plays from Quarantine festival. Since 2012, she has been working alongside Dr. Holmes as Performance Director with improvscience.

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A significant shift happens for many science students when they enter graduate school. Up to this point in their education, they have been rewarded for applying the right method to the right problem to get a correct solution. They were taught how to get results by applying rules that do not require their personal opinions or draw on their subjective history. They learned to work individually, comparatively, and competitively. They were rarely encouraged to risk being wrong or to share their ideas and opinions before they were complete, vetted, and known. For them, the work speaks for itself. Suddenly, in graduate school, science students are no longer expected to solve known problems with known solutions. Now they must work in areas where the answers are uncharted. At a university like Harvard, they are asked to create their own questions and to define problems themselves. To be successful, they need to embrace a completely different mindset, one that values sharing thoughts, bouncing unfinished ideas off each other, where curiosity about each other’s work is invited, and where they support each other to venture into the unknown. But how can they be confident about sharing their theories and ideas when they have never been encouraged to do this before and when the risk of being wrong is so great? How can they work with colleagues as partners if they can’t talk to them about their ideas and are not well versed in the practices of collaboration? This chapter explores how a four-hour applied improvisation and presentation workshop, first presented in 2012, has become the thunderclap that changed the mindset of both faculty and graduate students of Harvard’s Systems Biology program, supporting them to more openly communicate and collaborate.1

Communicating Science SB212 To support their students to develop this new mindset, two visionary faculty, Galit Lahav and Angela DePace at Harvard Medical School, created the first course ever to be required in the Systems Biology program, Communicating Science SB212. They structured the semester-long curriculum to emphasize interpersonal/relational aspects of effective communication, including how to be playful and

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build inclusive conversations. They saw the importance of building a supportive cohort, an ensemble of the entering class that could rely on each other intellectually, logistically, and emotionally, not just in graduate school but beyond. The overall goal was to create an environment in which students could bring their whole selves to science while supporting each other’s growth. Since this kind of class was novel in scientific research departments, Lahav enlisted the help of Raquell Holmes, a fellow scientist who had a passion for building community and the same kind of hopes for scientists’ growth and development. Holmes was applying the principles of improvisation to her new enterprise, improvscience.2 Along with the help of theatre-maker, actor, and teacher Mia Anderson, improvscience created the Professional Presentations workshop that launched with the first Communicating Science SB212 course in 2012 and is seen as a pivotal part of the curriculum.

The Birth of improvscience Professional Presentations Holmes did her graduate work at Tufts Sackler School of Biomedicine. She loves science and did well academically, but she remembers the sting of asking a question only to have others respond dismissively as if she should already know the answer. It was not clear what she was supposed to figure out on her own versus what was okay to ask others, nor how to get help. In the biomedical sciences, students typically spend their first year taking classes and rotating through labs. Lab rotations are part of a matchmaking process in which faculty and students choose whom they will work with for the next four to five years. Once in a lab, the unwritten culture dictates that, to advance professionally, students need to work on their own, be productive, and know the results of their experiments before they talk to their faculty, inferring that if they discuss their findings with fellow students, they will sabotage themselves and their future academic success. This leaves students feeling quite isolated. What’s more, the demographics of graduate research programs skew toward upper class, Western, straight, White, and male. Holmes was the only Black student in the program. She had attended predominantly White institutions before, so this was not an uncommon experience, but it did heighten her awareness

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of these communications challenges. She completed her degree, but many students who do not feel they belong or who get labeled as outsiders often leave their institutions (Institute of Medicine 2011; Harackiewicz et al. 2015). Fortunately, Holmes discovered a group-based therapeutic practice that saw people as performers and creators of their lives— social therapeutics.3 The approach is improvisational in that it sees what people do as building scenes together using various emotions and tactics. This approach sustained her throughout graduate school. She was able to see her colleagues and faculty as scene partners (Salit 2016). Even when they acted in biased, unconstructive ways—what improvisers call bad offers—she was able to use what they offered as source material to effectively engage in the unfolding professional “scenario.” Holmes began volunteering with the All Stars Talent Show Network, producing talent shows with young people in poor Boston neighborhoods using this same approach. Here she witnessed how the combination of social therapeutics and improvisational theatre practices changed the lives of the program participants. Young performers from different groups created improvised skits, using their hopes for their communities as source material. This cocreative act built relationships among them, the larger program, and volunteers from a range of different backgrounds. Holmes wanted scientists to have the same opportunity to grow in their lives as she had experienced in social therapeutics and the All Stars. She created improvscience to engage scientists in a whole new way—a relational, improvisational way. To help bring the Professional Presentation workshop to life at Harvard, she needed another kind of expertise. Holmes reached out to Mia Anderson because of her ability to coach people from diverse backgrounds who had little or no performance experience. Holmes had seen the award-winning cabaret show Anderson created, directed, and produced in Boston called Drag Kings, Sluts & Goddesses. The show brought together performers who were queer women of color who came from a variety of backgrounds including Harvard undergrads, nurses, lawyers, women in recovery, and pole dancers. Some women arrived with shame around body issues or expressing their sexuality. Through Anderson’s rehearsal process, they transformed into skilled performers. This theatrical event attracted audiences of 400-plus each year for eleven years.

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Anderson rooted the performance work in the philosophy that each person has a way to express themselves that needs developing, and that developing is a group process. This philosophy synchronized with the work Holmes was creating for improvscience.

Professional Presentations Workshop The four-hour Professional Presentations Workshop takes place at the beginning of the third section of Communicating Science SB212. There are typically ten to fourteen students in each cohort.4 The first portion of the workshop introduces the cohort to the principles of improv and lays the foundation for their work together. Most of the remaining time is dedicated to individual presentation skill coaching. Before the workshop, students are expected to prepare a sixtyto ninety-second presentation around a scientific topic they care about and can present on one slide: Anderson primes them for the workshop with questions such as, “If you could wave a magic wand, how would your audience feel after your presentation?” The questions are designed to unearth what students think and feel about themselves as scientists, about interacting with non-scientists, and about their aspirations. The answers help Holmes and Anderson determine areas to focus on during the workshop such as emotional awareness, connection, and presentation skills. Shortly before each workshop, Holmes and Anderson also check in with the Systems Biology program faculty to understand how the students have engaged with each other up to this point in the semester.

The Workshop Begins Holmes, Anderson, and Lahav are leader-participants in the workshop. Holmes and Anderson have found that leaders need to work alongside their participants. When students experience a scientist like Lahav, the chair of their department, playfully embracing new challenges with them, this challenges their view of the culture and changes the relationships between Lahav and the students. Anderson is the performance director and presentation coach, so from the minute students walk through the door, she pays attention to how they move and interact in the space. Later, when

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she is coaching, she refers back to how the students “performed” when they walked through the door and during improvisational exercises. As two American Black women, Holmes and Anderson are always aware of the experience that people have of being different and fearing that they do not fit in. So it is important for them to share analogies and situations from their own lives in the workshops and to challenge the notion that science students or anyone working in the scientific community must fit into a given mold. After introductions, Lahav shares the importance of the workshop and defines this experience as “a real treat,” subjective language not usually used in scientific settings. She lends additional credibility to the workshop by sharing how improvscience has been helping scientists beyond Harvard. Finally, she invites the students “to do new things,” to embrace the play of improvisation, and the immediate feedback they will receive during coaching. Next, Holmes introduces the primary goal of the workshop—to help participants give honest, engaging presentations in their own voice and to support one another to grow—and begins to build a trusting work relationship with the students. She speaks to their hopes and desires as human beings. They hear another person say, often for the first time, what they have been thinking: they want to contribute to and be part of something that is bigger than themselves; they want to be part of a vibrant science community. She acknowledges that the relational skills that build community are not usually part of graduate training and that the often-solitary process of research weakens their social muscles. Here they are invited to collaboratively create an environment in which everyone learns, grows, and excels together. She introduces the tenets of improvisation that will guide their time together: make each other look good; there are no mistakes; we will use everything to build our work together. To illustrate that these tenets are more than words and to make explicit that she will not ask them to be vulnerable without doing so herself, Holmes takes an obvious risk. She performs being awkward or uncertain with the group. For example, she might say, “If I were asked to do a tap dance and my tap dance looks like this” (she tap dances awkwardly), “how do we respond if we want to follow these tenets?” Together, they applaud! She points out the relationship between appreciation and learning, something most of them have

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not considered: appreciation is critical to learning, not so much the receiving of appreciation but the ability to give it (Gildin 2014).

Improvisational Gymnasium Standing in a circle, participants begin with the Bag Exercise. Anderson asks them to think about what they believe is keeping them from being mentally present in the room. As Anderson walks around with an invisible bag, each participant throws their concern into the bag. Concerns can be anything from thinking about a paper to being hungry. Anderson closes up the bag and dramatically throws it out of the room. This opening exercise invites them to separate whatever concerns they brought into the workshop from the new experience they are creating together, bringing awareness into the here and now. It also serves to set the tone for the rest of the workshop—in this space, the imagination is respected. Next, Holmes leads an exercise that creates a large group performance from small individual gestures like creating a wave, synchronized clapping, Fruit (Boynton 2019), or gesture/name games. Holmes and Anderson choose the specific exercises based on the students’ responses to Anderson’s priming questions. Holmes often facilitates a group mirroring exercise that blends her experience with soccer/rugby warm-ups with the well-known Mirror games of Viola Spolin (1999). Group Mirror gets participants less “in their heads” and paying more attention to their bodies. In Group Mirror one person leads the movement and everyone else in the circle mirrors the movement. This exercise quickly gets participants to understand that in order to make the group look good, attuning to the group’s needs is essential. Holmes will side-coach mirror leaders to “do gestures others can mirror successfully,” forcing them to focus intently on their colleagues in the circle and how their choices affect them. Side-coaching to “make each other look good” often prompts leaders to adjust their movement to be inclusive of everyone. The final exercise before presentation coaching supports students to perform as “other than who they are.” We Can Sell Anything (Workbook 8.1) asks students to develop an imaginary scene, create a storyline, and sing a song about a new product or concept synthesized from two unrelated things. The students must work

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together to do the seemingly impossible. How do you bring together sodas and solar systems in a new product? The time constraints of the exercise require students to quickly commit to and accept each other’s offers. After each exercise, Holmes asks the students how they felt, what it was like to do the exercise, how they strategized to be successful, and what was surprising to them. She pays attention to the way that they speak in front of one another, gently reminding them to express their feelings and to share discoveries made about themselves and/ or about the group. We Can Sell Anything almost always generates emphatic responses. Students marvel at each other’s ingenuity and their ability to work creatively and efficiently with each other. Some responses have been, “I didn’t know I/we were so creative,” and “We didn’t know exactly what we would do, so we just followed

FIGURE 8.1 Harvard Professional Presentations Workshop (Photo credit improvscience).

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each other.” Lahav has been participating the whole time, too, sharing her own experiences during each debrief.

Presentation Performance Coaching The remainder of the workshop is spent alternating between Anderson coaching students on their presentations and improvisational activities led by Holmes to keep energy up and relational muscles limber. During the presentations, all students perform, either as the presenter or as an audience member. Anderson makes clear that as audience members they are not passively watching a presentation—they are essential to building the sense of ensemble and actively supporting the presenter. Each student typically receives ten to fifteen minutes of coaching: they start with their prepared sixty- to ninety-second presentation, which is usually followed by a discussion with Anderson, some observations from the audience, and finally a “redirected” second presentation by the student. After the student completes their initial prepared presentation, Anderson almost always begins the conversation with, “How are you feeling?” The student usually states what they are thinking, not feeling, so Anderson gently asks the question again. Often the response is “OK.” A one-word answer doesn’t provide much detail but it’s a great place to start. This will lead to a series of open-ended questions that will hopefully give Anderson a deeper understanding of the student and what motivates them, so she can customize how she coaches and redirects them. The fact that Anderson isn’t a scientist and often won’t understand the terms and theories used in the presentation is advantageous, allowing her to focus primarily on how the student moves and speaks. She actively listens to the way each student responds, not just to the words they use. Often when students present, they think about how they look or sound, what they forgot on the slide, what people are thinking about them. Lahav will affirm that to be inwardly focused during a presentation is common. Another key goal of the workshop is for students to leave with an understanding that they create the experience. Anderson helps them to think less about “me” and the audience as separate, and to focus instead on the collective experience. During the coaching session, presenters discover ways

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to create a communication partnership with their audience, to not just deliver their research but to share it with their community. After one student, Bernard, presented, Anderson asked what he thought about the audience while presenting.5 He replied, “I didn’t think about the audience.” It was an honest teaching moment. In redirecting him, Anderson referred to the Zip Zap Zop game previously played during one of the breaks. To play that game successfully, participants must be present and fully focus on the other players. Bernard did his presentation again, treating his statements like Zips, Zaps, and Zops, making sure each one connected with a different member of the audience. Directly correlating the game with the redirection was an accessible and practical way to apply these exercises and experiences to his own work. When Anderson solicits feedback from the audience, she prompts them to be as specific as possible. Offering feedback is a way for the audience to be generous with the presenter and show they care about what the presenter just offered them. She helps them see that their feedback is another way to say Yes, And. Anderson might ask: How did the presenter say they wanted to grow? What do they want to know about their audience’s experience? How are we/they feeling? Feedback might be: “I noticed you looked at me when you did this”; “I noticed your eyes were down at this part”; or “You seemed excited when you shared this.” The goal is to create a place of constructive feedback that will support what was being shared and illuminate how the audience experienced it. If the feedback becomes too vague or superficial, Holmes will redirect or refocus responses by modeling feedback that supports the goal of the workshop and Anderson’s direction. She might say: “I felt seen by the presenter”; “I experienced … ”; “You came across as shy, scared, uncertain, confident, calm to me.” As mentioned earlier, Lahav and DePace aim to create environments where students can bring their whole selves to science. During the coaching session, Anderson devises unique ways to encourage this. In one class, Laila, a doctoral student, was concerned with being “too cute” and not being taken seriously. As a result, her presentation felt stilted and disconnected from her audience. Anderson redirected her to give the presentation again, and this time to go to the extreme and be as “girly” as possible. Ironically, this performance garnered a very positive response from her colleagues. Laila dared to present herself as the thing she had

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been suppressing and, as a result, came across as more genuine and energized. The message is not for Laila to always show up as “girly” but for all of them, as colleagues, to learn to support each other to show up as their authentic selves. At a recent workshop, Anderson had a hunch about a student, Tristen. She sensed that his family and friends at home were probably not in the academic field. So during Tristen’s coaching, Anderson asked him a series of open-ended questions, and her hunch was confirmed. When Anderson requested feedback from the audience on his presentation, one of Tristen’s classmates offered, “You sometimes make us laugh or downplay what you know. You’re smart. We like that about you. This is one place where it’s ok to be smart.” This is just one example of how the audience is as important as the presenter in creating the conditions for change, for a new performance. Lahav, Holmes, and Anderson cannot create this environment for honest dialogue by themselves—the interplay between presenter and audience is responsible for creating a context in which everyone can grow. This group of students is learning that the stereotypical performance of what it is to be “serious” or “academic” is too narrow. It is up to them to enlarge that paradigm. Throughout the workshop, Anderson shows up as calm, playful, and attentive. The students don’t know that she is always nervous before each coaching session. The work makes her feel incredibly vulnerable, a necessary state of being because she is inviting the same vulnerability from them. She will be asking strangers to stretch their artistic muscles, to plunge into the unknown, and some of them will test and challenge the process. These moments can be liberating and frustrating, but Anderson credits her faith as a practicing Christian for giving her strength and her experience in improvisational interactive theatre for preparing her to work intuitively with whatever the student offers.

Conclusion Lahav and DePace were ambitious in their aims—not just creating the environment for their students to thrive but to transform the culture of Systems Biology. Culture change is not achieved in a

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single grand gesture but by how people speak and interact with one another on a daily basis. In the introduction, Dudeck and McClure write about Seth Godin’s theory on the importance of both the “thunderclap” and the “drip by drip” to bring about change. These four hours palpably change these students, and the changes reverberate throughout the department. The workshop—a thunderclap moment—sets a new rhythm of forward motion that alters how students build connections daily, drip by drip. It could be as simple as a student acknowledging another student passing in the hall or as huge as asking a question without fear of being judged. Student evaluations reflect the transformations: “I think it was really good for me to be up there and really not caring about being embarrassed or anxious or anything.” “I really value the opportunity to become comfortable with my classmates. This was the theme of SB212 but it was really achieved during this workshop.” Some students have described the work as “life-changing.” A few reported they personally felt little or no impact, but still saw the value for others in their cohort. Finally, one student summarized it well: “Things that free us are never easy, but they are always worth it. And I think being able to communicate not only ‘effectively’ but I would say ‘beautifully,’ whatever that means for every individual, is freeing.” Since its inception, Lahav and DePace have witnessed changes within the Department of Systems Biology that they attribute to the relational work done in the improvscience workshop. DePace has personally said to other directors of NIH training grant programs that the improvisation work led by Holmes and Anderson is central to setting the tone of creativity and collaboration. Research programs often advise students to take initiative and to do science outreach but don’t create structures to support this. Lahav and DePace say they now see more students asking for and creating what they need and want as they pursue their degrees. Systems Biology, through their unique programming and leadership, has created an environment where all students are supported emotionally, collaboratively, and financially to share their science with others. For instance, women in the program asked the faculty-administration for financial support to participate in an outreach activity, the Cambridge Science Festival. Other students have chosen to further shift the culture to engage and

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advance diversity. With the open support of their faculty, students created and continue to deliver a workshop entitled “Identity and Empowerment: Diversity and Inclusion,” topics not typically addressed in the program. The outcomes at Harvard University Medical School in the Systems Biology program have come about over years of daily acts, conversations, and experimentation with improvisation, community building, and performance. Through successes and failures, Holmes and Anderson have learned that the workshop curriculum must always be based on the culture and goals of the institution. At one point they tried to implement the workshop in the same way they do at Harvard at another university. The result was uncomfortable and challenging. The class fell flat with little participation from the students. While difficult, the experience solidified the foundation of their work. Holmes and Anderson are not there only to facilitate and coach presentations. They are there to create the community and conditions that can create space for change—an experience that shifts the conversation and climate in the room. The relational performance training is rooted in their overarching goal to bring humanity, creativity, and camaraderie to scientific workplaces. From these three things emerge communication, collaboration, and diversity.

Notes 1 See Seth Godin’s definition of thunderclap in Introduction. 2 Lahav participated in the first improv workshop that Holmes led for scientists at the Harvard Systems Biology Program. She later brought Holmes to lead workshops at the conferences she organized at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At these community-focused workshops of improvisational play, Lahav experienced, firsthand, participants becoming genuinely interested in each other and their science. DePace had attended one of those workshops and began to see improvisational theatre as part of her own professional toolkit. 3 Social therapeutics is discussed in greater detail on pp. 247–9. 4 Holmes and Anderson find that the experience is the richest with ten students in a four-hour workshop. 5 All names are made-up.

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WORKBOOK 8.1 We Can Sell Anything This exercise helps participants break out of their usual ways of saying and doing things. It forces teams to spontaneously create something new together, accept offers from one another, and celebrate their imaginations. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • collaboratively created something new, • performed in front of an audience, • experienced the thrill of successfully doing something seemingly impossible, and • practiced presenting with confidence, even without time to perfect the presentation.

Running the Exercises 1. Ask the entire group to generate pairs of unrelated words, either by having one participant provide the pair or two participants each provide one word. Make a list of the word pairs on a flipchart or whiteboard. 2. Ask participants to form groups of three to five and choose a word pair. If two groups want to use the same word pair, that is okay. Discovering how the same prompt can lead to very different outcomes is a valuable lesson in creative collaboration (e.g., The paired words “jazz” and “bread” might lead to one commercial about Big Band musicians making bread [slang for “money”] and another about a crazy biscuit that plays music when you bake it). 3. Instruct the groups to create a commercial to sell a new product or concept that synthesizes the two unrelated words. Together, every member of their group will perform this commercial for the others and must include:

a. a song or jingle, b. a celebrity spokesperson,

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c. a reason people want to buy the new product, and d. a name or tagline for their product. 4. Using a word pair not assigned to any group, demonstrate the sort of commercial the groups should aim to produce. 5. Allow no more than 3–5 minutes for the groups to come together and create their commercial—the time limit keeps their focus on collaboration rather than perfection. As you check in with each group, remind them to use the Yes, And mindset to build on one another’s suggestions. 6. When time is up, have each group perform their commercial for the other participants. Encourage the audience to applaud each group enthusiastically when they are introduced and at the end of their performance.

Debrief • What happened? • What did you learn about yourself? About how you collaborate with others? • What did you appreciate about how the others in your group collaborated? • What surprised or delighted you about the other groups’ commercials? • How can you apply what you discovered to other collaborative processes?

Suggestions For the presentation part of the exercise, you can create a show title that celebrates the participants and their work together, such as “The World’s Best Commercials.”

Online Delivery This exercise can easily be adapted to a virtual classroom by sending groups into breakout rooms to create and practice their commercial. After everyone returns to the main virtual classroom, have everyone turn off their videos except for the group performing.

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Connections: This exercise was adapted and adopted from Lobman and Lundquist (2007). Del Close’s Ad Game (Halpern et al. 1994) is another great exercise for practicing group agreement. Basically, groups of six to eight people turn an everyday household item into a brand new product and then “pitch” the new product to an audience of “investors” using both a slogan and a jingle. And this all happens as part of the improvised performance! No pre-planning allowed—they are given the name of the product only once upon the stage. The group must collaboratively create and pitch in front of the audience, in real time, which requires an enthusiastic AI mindset.

9 Playing Around with Changing the World Carrie Lobman and Marian Rich

Carrie Lobman, EdD, is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Learning and Teaching at Rutgers University, the leader of education and research at the East Side Institute, and a member of the All Stars Project Board of Directors. Her research examines the relationship between play, performance, learning, and development for people of all ages, and the importance of outside-of-school programs for providing young people with developmental experiences. She is a core faculty member in the East Side Institute’s international training programs. Marian Rich is an actress, comedic improviser, and theatrical director who has spent almost two decades leading playful workshops and programs in which people come together to grow and develop. Her playful and philosophical sessions during the East Side Institute’s International Class residencies have impacted activists, educators, and scholars from around the world who are looking for ways to infuse their work with the power of performance. She is a co-founder of the Global Play Brigade, an Artistic Associate of New York’s Castillo Theatre, and a thirty-sixyear-builder of the All Stars Project, Inc.

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With deepening social, environmental, and political crises worldwide, many who want to make a difference in the world are finding that they need new tools in their efforts to make social change. Whether alarmed by the increasing political polarization and lack of productive dialogue across difference or responding to the influx of refugees to places in the world already stressed by economic and political changes, people are frustrated by the ineffectiveness of traditional ideologically driven approaches to social change such as demonstrations, identity politics, or electoral efforts. Increasingly, many are turning to play and performance as a way to revitalize their practice as activists. In his seminal book Homo Ludens, the cultural historian Johan Huizinga concluded that civilization “arises in and as play, and never leaves it” (1949: 173). Play and performance are activities where human beings bring into existence the cultures that can often come to define us, and paradoxically play is also where we “break out of constricted social roles, fossilized ideas and crippling emotions” (Friedman 2018). We are, after all, a creative species capable of more than reproduction of, or even adaptation to, the current conditions. Through imaginative, creative, playful, and improvisational activity, we are adept at making something new out of what currently exists. In the past two decades, a movement called Performance Activism has emerged from people who engage in play and performance to address social and political issues, build community, and generate possibility. Friedman writes, “[Performance Activism] posits no solutions; instead, it organizes environments that allow us, and those we’re working with, to creatively experiment and innovate.” Through play and performing, “what-is can emerge into what-it’sbecoming” (Friedman 2018: 3–4). While Performance Activism is taking place all over the world, the East Side Institute (the Institute) is identified as one of its homes. The Institute is a thirty-year-old not-for-profit that has been a catalyst in the emergence of performance activism and which now serves as a hub for the support and development of performance activists from around the world. Over the past two decades the Institute has created community building activities that are simultaneously products of the growth of performance activism and serve as tools for further growth. These include classes, workshops, webinars, and public forums online and in person for people all over the world.

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The flagship program is the year-long International Class (IC) that the Institute has been offering each year since 2004 to support the development of emerging movement leaders. We (Marian and Carrie) are on the faculty of the Institute and are core instructors in the IC. In this chapter we bring our shared history, as well as our individual lenses, to describe how the tools of improvisation support the goals of the IC and how Marian, in collaboration with Carrie and Lois Holzman, the Institute’s director, has adapted traditional improv activities to meet the needs of each class. We explore the ways in which improv has helped the participants in the IC to embrace the following: (1) that activism and social change can be playful; (2) that a radical focus on relationship and the ensemble supports that playfulness; and (3) that being playful helps people and communities work with challenging “offers” and break out of personal and ideological stalemates. As one IC alum expressed, “[The improv] provided an opportunity to make my work playful, spontaneous, creative, real, genuine” and she now recognizes that “improv can build groups where no group existed before and that it is a great equalizer—in that playful space difference takes a back seat to our common humanity.”1

The East Side Institute and Social Therapeutics The Institute was founded in 1985 by Dr. Fred Newman, a philosopher, community organizer, playwright/theatrical director, and therapist, and Dr. Lois Holzman, a developmental psychologist, linguist, and radical educator. Over the past thirty years, the Institute has developed the practice of social therapeutics as an approach to human development and social change. Social therapeutics initially emerged as social therapy, one of the many radical therapies of the 1960s and 1970s that aimed to challenge psychotherapy’s White, male, heterosexual assumptions of what is normal and healthy. Social therapy shifted the focus away from adaptation to the world as it is (e.g., racist, sexist, homophobic) to developing people as social creators of their lives and transformers of the world. Over time, the practice became performatory, with three main influences: first, Newman’s work in the theatre; second, a synthesis of the work

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of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978), who championed the role of play in development, with that of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958), who emphasized the importance of language games; and third, Holzman and Newman’s collective experience as community organizers. Social therapeutics capitalizes on the relationship between play and performance (being who you are and who you are not) and development (creating environments for being who you are and who you are becoming). While much has been written about social therapeutics elsewhere, in this chapter we focus primarily on the improvisational aspects/nature of the methodology and how the process unfolds in the IC.2 We live our lives as social beings; it is by virtue of our connectedness and the collaborative nature of human activity that people grow and things get done. This does not deny individuality but recognizes that who we are as individuals is continuously created socially. We often use the term “relational” as a shorthand way to describe this focus on sociality. Relationality puts groups/ensembles front and center with the understanding that the group is an entity unto itself, not just a collection of individuals. Groups exist because people create them, and the activity of creating the group transforms the individuals. One of the first principles of social therapeutics is that it is the job of the members to build a group, which is supportive of everyone’s (including the group’s) development. A second principle of social therapeutics is that the human ability to perform is vital to our individual and collective development. In his exploration of children’s development, Vygotsky discovered that children at play are not constrained by what they are currently able to do. In play children perform “above their average age, in play it is as if they are a head taller” (Vygotksy 1978: 102). And children do not just do this when they are playing. They perform beyond themselves, so to speak, all the time. For example, children “perform” walking, talking, cooking, and many other activities long before they know fully how to do those things. In the many groups or ensembles they are a part of (e.g., family, daycare, multiage friend groups) children are constantly who they are and who they are becoming. Human beings continue to be who they are and who they are becoming throughout their lives. However, as people grow older and play is less a part of their daily routine, they typically are not supported by environments that nurture “becomingness.”

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Performance, however, is an activity that adults and older children do that closely resembles the play of early childhood. When young children and actors (or improvisers) perform they are not required to be “true” to themselves (i.e., “authentic”), instead they are supported and appreciated for their ability to be both who they are and who they are not. Actors and improvisers often talk about how much they grow personally by being freed up to be someone else. In many different activities, from youth development to working with people with dementia to social activism, social therapeutics has supported environments where the ability to perform is not limited to the stage. Learning to see oneself and others as performers is extremely valuable, and creating environments where we are supported to consciously perform is developmental. A corollary to “people are performers” is that people are improvisers, but they often experience life as “scripted”—meaning they follow along a path that appears determined by the way things have always been. We, along with many others in the applied improvisation (AI) field, have found that improvisational performance is particularly valuable for breaking out of these scripted ways of being. Social therapeutics uses the tools of theatrical improvisation to help people perform improvisationally, that is, to work creatively with everyone and everything available in all the scenes of their lives. By learning to improvise it is possible to see and make use of everything as an offer. Building with all offers (even those we think are “bad”) is valuable for human and community development. Providing spaces for people to improvisationally perform their development makes it possible to create and re-create the world.

The International Class In 2004 the Institute added the International Class to its offerings and, as the performance activism movement has grown, it has become the flagship program. We have graduated a cohort of eight to fourteen people each year from over twenty-five countries. The backgrounds of IC participants are quite varied. They come from psychology, education, social work, theatre, dance, music, creative arts therapies, counseling, medicine, humanitarian aid,

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and community organizing. Some have explored the use of play, improvisation, performance, theatre, or other creative arts and storytelling in their work; others have not. All are committed to empowering individuals and communities, whether they are involved with refugees, marginalized populations, homeless and poor youth, or therapeutic, rehabilitation, or educational institutions. Graduates of the program credit the hands-on experience of the IC in helping give new direction to their academic research, community programs, and social activist organizing. The IC operates as a ten-month cohort immersion program that takes place in three week-long residencies in New York City and online via Google groups and teleconference calls. Participants study the intellectual traditions of social therapeutics and are introduced to and participate in many of the community-based practices it has inspired. Central to this is an introduction to the playful-practical activity of philosophizing—asking big questions about little things. Philosophizing is “an activity that allows us to experience our lives not only in the immediacy of the here and now but at the same time as part of the continuum of human history” (Mendez 2003). Residencies include workshops and seminars with Lois and core faculty including Carrie, observations and participation in social therapy groups, as well as the improv classes with Marian. Also included are site visits to cultural, educational, and political change organizations that the Institute works with closely.3 During the nonresidential periods, the cohort continues its exploration of social therapeutics through reading, writing, and bi-weekly teleconference meetings with the core faculty. A critical component of the work is the development of each cohort as a performance ensemble that can support the growth of everyone in the group, including the faculty. This is a function of the first principle of social therapeutics, described earlier, making explicit that individuals learn and develop by participating in the creation of the groups that can support them. Therefore, the intentional and explicit creation of each IC cohort as an ensemble is how participants learn social therapeutics. In all of the workshops and seminars, the group is overtly charged with co-creating an environment where everyone can grow. Some concrete strategies for co-creation include using Yes, And in a discussion, inviting participants to introduce their own exercises, and having participants create scenes where they play and perform “the faculty.”

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Improv with the IC Doing improv together is one of the most important tools used in the IC to develop the ensemble. One alum said, “[The improv workshops] radically changed how we worked as a group throughout the class.” In the beginning, Marian led one session per residency, but because the workshops were deemed so valuable, she now meets with each class for two 90- to 120-minute sessions during each of the three residencies, for a total of six workshops per cohort. While the curriculum is emergent, we have identified broad goals that are in sync with the overall purpose of the IC. These include: (1) to develop the participants’ capacity to be playful (i.e., to be who they are and who they are not); (2) to support participants in becoming an ensemble and give them tools for seeing and creating ensembles everywhere; and (3) to use this newfound playfulness and relationality to tackle challenging offers presented in their IC ensemble and in their lives. These goals are addressed throughout the year with increasing complexity as the IC ensemble develops. In the first residency the focus of the workshops tends to be on seemingly pointless play, getting to know each other, and an introduction to the important improv tenet Yes, And (Appendix A). In the second residency, additional emphasis is placed on listening, scene work with sidecoaching, and on building with “what’s in the room.” The focus of the final residency often emerges out of the needs of the particular cohort but with a move toward more in-depth, improvised scene work, allowing participants to further develop their performance of curiosity and radical relationality. The planning for each IC improv session happens organically. Since the improvisation is embedded in the overall IC experience, Lois and Marian have developed an emergent way of planning. The day before a workshop Marian calls Lois or one of the other faculty and gets filled in on what has been happening in the class and if they have something they would like to focus on. These conversations range from a general description of what activities the class has been doing (e.g., they visited a youth program and met with a group of teenagers) to much more specific requests about a topic (e.g., the group wants to work on their subjective responses to telling people they want to change the world), concepts (e.g., identity), or

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challenges that the group is grappling with (e.g., the group has been blocking too many offers in discussions). Below we share two stories from specific residencies but using feedback from a collection of cohorts that we believe shed light on the ways the improv work of the IC supports participants at different stages of their development. We have chosen these stories because they provide examples of how the broad goals of the IC improv work intersect with the needs of the emerging ensemble.

Warming Up: Clown 12345 Our first story takes place during the second workshop of a first residency, meaning this IC cohort had only been working together for three days and was still very new to each other. They had only spent one session with Marian playing some introductory games and learning the basics of Yes, And. While some people come into the IC already comfortable with play, performance, and improv, others come from backgrounds where this is foreign to them. Marian will often start by asking group members to volunteer to teach a children’s game from their country/culture. One participant found these early improv sessions to be a way to “normalize silliness and making mistakes, as a reminder of the ‘informal, nonrules’ environment that we want to create throughout our work.” Another student said that through improv she “gained a palpable sense of the group doing the creating and of the creativity of the group.” These responses demonstrate that early in the IC process participants become more playful and experience themselves as a performing ensemble. Embedded in this commitment to play is also a commitment to embrace mistakes. This focus is critical and is something that many participants say is a key takeaway. So much of social change and activism is about being right or having the correct position or methods. Being playful creates an environment where we can challenge assumptions about mistakes. So throughout the workshops Marian looks for moments where she and the group can celebrate and embrace making mistakes—particularly her own! The Clown 12345 warm up, an exercise that Marian learned from the clown/improviser Jason Jedrusiak, got everyone on their feet, ready to work. Participants were directed to get into pairs and

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asked to count aloud at the same time, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5.” The exercise is supposed to continue with person A of the pair replacing the number “1” with a movement and sound; then the pair practices the new movement and sound; next they do the movement/sound together followed by speaking “2, 3, 4, 5.” At this point Person B replaces the number 2 with a brand new movement and sound, and the pair practices the new movement/sound. Then they do the two sound/movements they’ve created followed by “3, 4, 5.” This continues until they no longer say the numbers but instead perform their five sound/movements.4 Once the pairs have established their movements, the director brings half of the pairs to the stage area to perform for the other half, first face-to-face in their pairs, then facing out and performing their five sound/movements to the audience presentationally. The director side-coaches—go slower/faster or do your sound/movements as if you were feeling joyous, silly, sad, or sexy! Sometimes participants who are watching offer additional prompts. That is how the exercise is “supposed” to go. But in this workshop, Marian was facilitating this particular exercise for the first time, which of course led to some emergent discoveries (a.k.a. mistakes)! In the midst of going over the rules, she soon realized that she was giving the wrong instructions. For example, she gave the instructions to have A and B create the sound/movements together (vs. alternating between the individual partners). And there were many more mistakes made; but Marian greeted each discovery of a mistake with a very large failure bow and a ridiculously grandiose, joyful declaration of: “Yay, I made a mistake!”5 She then went on to adapt the game to include the mistakes into the activity. The making of mistakes and incorporating them into the activity became a fun, additional “game,” as well as a way to model the creation of an environment that includes playing at facilitating and doing so with confidence, even in potentially embarrassing moments of “not knowing.” The room was full of laughter, discovery, and people performing confidently even when confused. Rather than create a divide between her (the subject matter expert on AI) and them (the participants), each embraced mistake included everyone in the creation of a shared solution. This also situated Marian as someone who “shares her expertise” rather than as an expert. Marian conveyed, verbally and nonverbally, that there is joy in the discovery of the mistake and that the so-called mistake is often

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where creativity lives in her experience as an improviser. Carmela, a participant from Mexico and a community organizer and nonprofit leader, had been one of the most reluctant to be silly. After this experience, however, she said, “I am feeling what it was like to be a child again … I learned that just being present is enough, to value the process of improv, to be silly, and to enjoy it.” In the conversation that followed, people began to recognize that what Marian was modeling represented a concrete way to embrace the maxim, “You can’t learn anything without making mistakes.” Lydia, an activist and facilitator from Serbia, said: You hear this sentence all the time, “You can only succeed if you fail.” And yet the conditions for failing are never ever organized. In Marian’s workshops we can practice failing because we can try anything. You stop judging yourself from having an impulse or question or curiosity. And if the group is willing to do it with you, then you say ok let’s do it. This rethinking of mistakes was a revelation for many of the IC participants. Marti, a participant from Greece and a drama therapist and community organizer, realized after doing this exercise that it is not only important to celebrate mistakes but to see them as being “where innovation starts; wherein what can be considered the wrong thing can also be the beginning of something new.”

Playing Around with Triggers/Conflict: Radical Relationality The second story took place in the first session of the third and final residency of an IC cohort. Lois and Marian had talked the day before and created a plan based on some of the concepts that had been discussed in recent class discussions. However, when Marian arrived five to ten minutes before the session began, Lois pulled her aside and shared that a participant had “triggered” another participant during a difficult conversation.6 So Lois asked Marian, “Can they play with this in some way? Could they turn a ‘trigger’ into an offer to build with?” With this request, Lois emphasized another aspect of social therapeutics: to use what we know about each other to build the ensemble. Marian, of course, accepted Lois’s offer and quickly revised the plan.

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Our understanding of the concept of being “triggered” is more than just having a reaction or disagreeing with someone. Triggering implies that what was said or done by one person brought up a painful experience for another. While we are experienced with supporting groups to build with emotional and even political offers, our concern with the concept of “triggering” is that it tended to separate people and/or immediately stop the conversation from unfolding. Therefore, with this cohort, Marian wanted to explore how to build with the “trigger” itself in a way that would create stronger human connections as well as action steps for moving forward. To be explicit, Marian’s goal was not to eliminate the conflict or to come up with a “better” conversation but to give people the experience of what happens to the “trigger” when you actively listen and focus on the relationship and try not to make a point or win an argument. This is a fine line—one we have frequently walked on at the Institute. Often theatre for social change or social justice can be experienced as corrective or moralistic, attempting to uncover oppression or micro-aggressions. The goal in empowering people, in these cases, is to help them see the transgression. What Marian was hoping to unearth were the ways people can be creative and relational even in the face of disagreement, reactiveness, or triggers. Marian began the session by clearly stating she knew that two participants had had a very difficult conversation. After a brief warm-up, the group improvised scenes structured to “play around” with “triggering” experiences, an exercise later dubbed by Marian as Radical Relationality (Workbook 9.2).7 Janna, an American educator and artist, and Marko, an applied theatre activist from Serbia, volunteered to go first. Marian suggested they start an improvised scene with a physical activity (e.g., washing dishes after a dinner party) to establish a shared reality and to get players to connect nonverbally. And she gave the direction for one player, about thirty seconds into the scene, to make a strong, potentially offensive statement about one of the guests at the party and for the other player to have a big reaction. Janna stated that one of the guests was rude to her and she was hurt. Marko reacted. As soon as Marian felt they were about to begin arguing, she stopped the scene and asked the cohort if they also felt an argument was about to erupt. Everyone said yes. The players were directed to continue but with the added rule, “you cannot fight, keep your focus on the relationship.”

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The players continued, still struggling to move beyond argument. At some point Janna repeated what Marko said back to him. Marko stated, “I thought you liked Bob” and Janna replied, “You thought I liked Bob? He’s your friend not mine.” Marian side-coached Janna to try making feeling statements, rather than being so rational. Janna said, “Bob upsets me, he’s not a nice person, and he makes me nervous.” Marko took a deep breath and responded, “Oh wow, I had no idea, that’s upsetting to hear. I guess he’s different with me.” The scene quickly became more about their relationship and more intimate. During the short debrief, Janna revealed that because she often processes situations logically, “It felt good, it felt liberating to go with feelings.” Both players expressed that, after the adjustment, it was like they were meeting for the first time and intentionally trying to find ways to connect. Scene two was performed by Marcía, an educator from Costa Rica, and Anika, an occupational therapist from South Africa. They performed as sisters in the gym talking about their mother’s depression. Marian, once again, emphasized that the players keep making new physical offers rather than just sitting and talking. The scene began. One sister was focused on being her mother’s caretaker, the other was clearly still angry at their mother for various reasons. As before, Marian stopped the scene right at the moment they began to fight and encouraged them to make new choices such as “make eye contact” and “allow for moments of silence.” A silent moment was followed by the angry sister expressing deep pain. Both then shared how they cared for each other, rather than judging the other on their relationships with their mom. During another brief reflection, Lois shared that these two scenes demonstrated how to take a different road. Other participants witnessed more relationality, that is, performers developing their relationship with their partner. Some observed a performer “becoming present” and another performer “giving up their agenda.” An overall shift from “me” and “you” to something emerging between two people was seen. They also witnessed vulnerability and how hard it is to take off those protective masks people wear. Finally, Lois quoting Newman, said: “A character is a vehicle to be who you’re becoming.” Then Lucía, who creates theatre with people incarcerated in Italy, said, “But this is not happening in life,” meaning that it is hard to

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perform these ways in the moments we are “triggered.” Lois replied, “If you can perform on stage, you can perform in life.”8 Marian and Lois continued, saying that the improv workshops with the IC have a family resemblance to going to the gym. We build our muscles in the gym, not because we are going to do those exact same activities other places in our lives but because those muscles will be there when we need them. People build their improv and relational muscles in the improv workshops—meaning they discover that they are able to create and re-create their relationships even when they are reactive or “triggered.” People may still choose to react but, following the tenets of improvisation, everything becomes an offer and there are myriad ways to respond. Amelia said that the scenes had given her the experience of “creating with and being with the other,” and she discovered that “relationality not only brings us together, it is also a great way to open up and go away from our single, isolating, and alienating narrative. It feels right and creates hope.” Anika asked about Marian’s interventions, including how does Marian know when and what to do? Marian responded:

FIGURE 9.1  The joy of ensemble (Photo by Marian Rich).

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While I go with my gut, I also have learned to look through a social therapeutic lens, allowing for discovery without overdetermining what happens. I have learned to trust the power of giving performance direction that is more ensemble (theatre) oriented than individual (psychology) oriented. Marian’s focus, in other words, is always on relationality.

Conclusion Playfulness is not an obvious partner for activism, which has historically been associated with anger, critique, and a commitment to being right. Indeed, many performance activists would tell you they are deeply angered and reactive to what they see as the deteriorating state of the world, and that being playful in the face of that anger is not easy and requires the development of new conceptual and practical tools. For over a decade the International Class has provided support and training for these activists, and Marian’s use of applied improvisation has emerged as a key part of that work. Writing this chapter gave us an opportunity to discover how the improv workshops concretely instantiate some of the key tenets of performance activism that underpin the IC program. The participants were exploring how activism can be made playful; they were discovering that some of this playfulness comes from a radical focus on building relationships; and, finally, they found that an acceptance of radical relationality allowed them to see and build with new offers previously unseen. Universally, the participants shared that learning to improvise was a valuable part of their experience, in large part because of how much fun it was. They also shared that it is not always easy to take the playfulness of improv into their organizing work: “What is difficult is to really perform Yes, And,” shared a participant. “To really believe what I am saying. To not say ‘Yes, And’ and then go on to do the complete opposite.” She laughed and then continued, “To not just use the words but to do the activity of really being Yes, And is often hard I think. And at the same time, if the environment is there, or we are creating the environment that is Yes, And-ing, then it can also be completely natural.”

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Postscript The International Class The Covid-19 pandemic forced the Institute to cancel the June residency for the 2019–20 IC class. This made us all sad. The in-person residencies are a centerpiece of the program, and they have been the primary location of the improv work with Marian. However, the pandemic and the worldwide movement for racial justice also gave us the opportunity to use and further develop the key improv and activism skills of being playful, building the ensemble, and creating with challenging offers as we (the participants and the faculty) have recreated the IC online. The IC participants chose to self-organize into working/playing groups to focus on various aspects of social therapeutics and then created a public performance of their learning for over sixty people from all over the world via Zoom. The 2020–21 IC (one of our largest ever) began their virtual residency, including Marian’s improv work, in October 2020.

Creating Connection and Building Community through Play In late January 2020, Marian led an improvisational play session with twenty people who were in lockdown due to the coronavirus in China at the request of Cheng Zeng. Cheng and Marian met at the Applied Improvisation Network annual conference in Stony Brook in the summer of 2019. Cheng thought to bring people together to play, connect, build community, and alleviate anxiety. This activity inspired the East Side Institute to offer a series of free play sessions in March and April curated by Marian and co-led by graduates of the International Class. These sessions were attended by hundreds of people from twenty-six countries all around the globe.

Notes 1 All quotes from participants in this chapter are extracted from notes taken during the improv workshops or from post-workshop feedback gathered between July and October 2019.

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2 For more on Social Therapeutics see Lois Holzman’s Vygotsky at Work and Play (2016). 3 Some of the organizations the IC visits are All Stars Project, Inc., and Independent Voting. Also, they visit with social therapists in private practices. 4 While this exercise is similar to Snap, Clap, Stomp, Cheer! (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 133), it serves a different purpose; the former is used to jolt participants out of fixed ways of behaving and to get comfortable with mistakes; Clown 12345 is used to co-create a performance. 5 See exercise Whoosh Bang Pow and Failure Bow (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 90). 6 This class of IC students used the term “triggered” often and, while neither Lois nor Marian use it in their work, they try to adapt their language when possible to speak each class’s chosen way of speaking. 7 This was the third and final residency for this cohort. The group had built a good sense of playfulness and trust that allowed them to take some risks together. 8 “If you can perform on stage, you can perform in life” is often stated when supporting inner-city young people to try out new performances with the All Stars Project, Inc.

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WORKBOOK 9.1 Hype (Wo)Man This exercise gives participants an opportunity to celebrate each other and build their ensemble. It can also be very liberating, as participants have a chance to perform as big as they can and as silly as they want. This exercise produces a lot of laughter. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • learned about each other, • made their partners look good, • generated a lot of good will in the room, and • performed together.

Running the Exercise 1. Have participants stand in groups of three. 2. Explain that there will be three rounds of the exercise. They will rotate through three roles during each: the Reporter, Front Man (Woman), or Hype (Wo)Man. The Reporter asks the Front Man, “What’s something you appreciate about yourself?” The job of the Hype (Wo)Man is to exaggerate the energy of the Front Man’s response, just as a hype man does in hip hop. Emphasize that the point is to celebrate each other and to go as big as you can when you play the Hype (Wo)Man. 3. To invite them to “go big,” do a demonstration. For example, if the Front Man says, “I really like how I sing.” The Hype (Wo)Man might actually sing, “I love my voice!” using big operatic gestures. Or the Hype (Wo)Man might be like a Greek chorus underscoring and heightening the offer in various ways. 4. After the first round, instruct the players to rotate until everyone has played all three roles.

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Debrief • What happened? What did you notice? • How did it feel to have someone “hype” your offer? • Which role did you prefer and why? • Describe the mood of the room now, as compared to before the exercise. • How can we model this type of behavior in our lives?

Online Delivery This exercise can be played online as a large group exercise with one participant playing the Reporter and another playing the Front Man. Allow anyone in the group to “hype” the offer, while rotating the roles of Reporter and Front Man among the participants.

Suggestions Remind them that when they are in the role of Hype (Wo)Man, anything the Front Man says is the most amazing thing ever. If you have an odd number of participants, create a group of four with two Hype (Wo)Men for the first two rounds. In round 3, divide them into pairs—one Front Man and the partner who will play both the Reporter and Hype (Wo)Man. Connections: Marian Rich learned this exercise from Matt Weinstein at the 2018 Applied Improvisation Network conference in Paris. Caitlin McClure also learned this from Matt and used it for many years to start the third day of a three-day corporate leadership development program—by that time the participants had gained each other’s trust and were very playful, even in a corporate context. Two adjustments she made for that setting: First, she demonstrated that the Hype (Wo)Man does not need to gesticulate broadly or speak loudly—they can perform in any way that feels authentic as long as it successfully exaggerates and hypes whatever the Front Man says (e.g., they can speak in dramatic, hushed tones to provide extreme reverence to the Front Man). Second, the reporter is instructed to ask simple, open-ended

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questions (such as “What did you have for breakfast? What is your favorite pet?”) rather than “What is something you appreciate about yourself?”

9.2 Radical Relationality This exercise was created to help participants play with difficult conversations and conflict, using deep listening, radical acceptance of offers, and Yes, And responses to move closer, turn resistance to curiosity, and strengthen their compassion for others. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • strengthened their relational muscles, • practiced using disagreements to get closer, • experienced the power of giving up one’s side of an argument, • practiced sharing and building with vulnerability, and • moved from individualized “me” and “you” to co-creating together.

Running the Exercise 1. Ask for two volunteers. 2. Give them a scene setup that will lead to an argument (e.g., two family members, each feels the other must take responsibility for taking their grumpy parent on vacation or two close colleagues who are vying for the same promotion). 3. Encourage the participants to create an environment, using objects in the space, rather than standing or sitting and talking. 4. When the scene begins to develop into an argument, stop the scene and ask the entire group if they agree an argument is about to begin. If not, continue the scene. If so, instruct the players that they are not allowed to argue as they move the scene forward. 5. For the rest of the scene, side-coach the players to focus on their relationship, for example, by encouraging eye contact, listening to offers, and expressing feelings in a nonconfrontational way. 6. Repeat the exercise for a few more rounds.

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Debrief • What did you notice in these scenes? • How was it to play in these scenes? • What happened when players were instructed not to argue? • What was challenging?

Suggestions The exercise is meant for a group that has been working together and has established a sense of trust. We suggest that facilitators ensure that they have created the conditions and environment for people to be open to playing with challenging emotional circumstances and be open to the side-coaching. Connections: This is an original exercise created by Marian Rich during a session of the International Class of the East Side Institute.

10 The Joy of Dementia Mary Fridley and Susan Massad

Mary Fridley practiced social therapy for twelve years and continues to use the social therapeutic approach as a teacher and workshop leader with the East Side Institute in New York City. Mary is also a playwright and theatre director and works as a nonprofit fundraising consultant. Susan Massad, MD, is a retired physician who practiced and taught internal medicine for fifty-one years. A member of the East Side Institute faculty, she leads ongoing conversations on health, wellness, and growing older. Susan is co-author of “Creating an Ensemble for Performing Health” that will appear in Harnessing Humanness in Healthcare—Appreciative and Relational Practices from the Taos Institute.

Most of us will deal with dementia during our lifetime.1 On top of the economic costs to the family, community, and healthcare system, anyone who has experienced being a caregiver knows the staggering emotional toll. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, approximately 30–40 percent of family caregivers of people with dementia suffer from depression, and a report issued by Stanford University found that 40 percent of family caregivers for Alzheimer’s patients, whose responsibility can last ten to fifteen years, die from stress-related disorders before the person in their care does.

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Caregivers describe profound grief, a sense of perplexing loss for the person who is physically present but no longer the “same,” and constant exhaustion from round-the-clock support. Nonetheless, there is shockingly little investment in care rather than cure. The National Institutes of Health is expected to spend $2.3 billion on dementia research in 2019 despite the fact that a growing number of medical professionals and scientists are questioning the wisdom of “trying to science our way out of the problem of dementia,” as psychiatrist and bioethicist Dr. Tia Powell puts it (2019).2 Both of us have been caregivers and know first-hand this extreme grief, loss, and exhaustion. We are also grassroots organizers, developmentalists, and community and culture changers, and felt called to address the need for more compassionate and empowering approaches to dementia care and policy. As faculty members of the East Side Institute (Institute), we were well versed in the Institute’s approach to human development and the use of applied improvisation (AI) as a methodology. We do not view dementia as something “inside” an individual—to do so positions them as a “problem” to be taken care of—but as a complex social phenomenon that impacts how we all view aging and cognitive decline. We believe that a biologically based, problem-centered, and individualistic understanding of distress and illness is profoundly flawed, and often inhumane, when it comes to treating something as varied, uncertain, and unpredictable as dementia (Reed et al. 2017). So leveraging our backgrounds as a therapist (Mary) and as a primary care physician (Susan), we launched the first Joy of Dementia (You’ve Gotta Be Kidding!)© workshop in November 2017. When people ask us, “How can I possibly do improv with my grandmother with Alzheimer’s?” Our sincere response is, “She may be way ahead of you!” This chapter provides an overview of the workshop, responses from participants, and a challenge to the narrative of tragedy that surrounds dementia.

Overview of the Joy of Dementia Workshops We are usually brought in to do one-time workshops, which run anywhere from one to three hours. The workshops are hosted

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by senior care organizations, as well as a variety of nonprofit, community, and faith organizations. We offer them at little or no cost to communities of color, which have the highest rate of dementia and little access to quality dementia information or innovative approaches to dementia treatment and care. While each workshop is designed for the specific host organization and audience, all share the same overarching goal: creating a group—what we call the “dementia ensemble”—in which participants can learn how to live more improvisationally, to create a more playful relationship to/performance of dementia, and to share the full emotionality of their dementia experience. The workshops are playful, practically philosophical, and improvisational in form as well as in content; while we always come in with a program outline that reflects the group with which we are working, what ultimately gets created has everything to do with the responses of those involved. We prefer to work with heterogeneous groups and ask workshop hosts to extend as broad an invitation as possible. Our favored audience is a room filled with those living with dementia, caregivers (family and professional), other family members, the “worried well” (young and old), and medical and social service professionals—people who share so many of the same challenges and whose actions affect each other but rarely come together in one place and time. Unless someone self-identifies, we don’t know which participants are living with dementia, nor do we ask. We do, of course, make accommodations for those who can’t stand, who have trouble hearing or being heard, and so on. We state up front that the workshop is flexible and that anyone can wander in and out or stay the whole time.

A Typical Workshop After introductions that include our personal and professional relationship to dementia, we show a PowerPoint presentation about the social therapeutic approach to development: as seen through this development lens, human beings are no longer isolated individuals but relational beings and part of something larger than ourselves.3 We believe that all human beings can develop throughout their lives, regardless of age, life circumstance, or physical/cognitive abilities. We see the human ability to play (with improvisation

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as a form of play) and perform as key to this lifetime growth— emotionally, socially, and intellectually. Human beings are infinitely more complex and creative than we are generally led to believe. In short, we are not our brains or any other specific part of the body. We, and the world in which we live, are continuously emergent, complex, and rarely predictable. Indeed, it is the relationality and the collaborative nature of what humans do that allows us to grow with—rather than fear—the unknown. We self-consciously and explicitly use the language of theatre because it effectively captures this sense of social connectedness. We share with participants that social therapeutics envisions life as a series of stages upon which ensembles (families, teams, groups of any kind) create the millions of scenes of their lives, some scripted, some improvised. Social therapeutics emphasizes the ensemble activity of creating the performance. It taps into our capacity to work and play, learn from and teach, and create well with others. Some of the participants nod in agreement, others appear to “go along” whether they agree with this approach or not. Our objective at this early stage is not to convince or teach but to let participants know who we are and provide some context for creating the conversation. To get participants playing and performing, we open with a slow-motion ice breaker exercise in which they look each other in the eye, make funny sounds, and create absurd faces. In addition to getting people up on their feet and playing, this exercise serves as a diagnostic tool to reveal how the group responds to doing something “weird” and outside their habitual behaviors. We often follow this activity with some type of group introduction game.4

FIGURE 10.1  The Joy of Dementia workshop with hospice workers in New Hampshire (Photo by Jenna Dion).

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We then use a variety of improvisational exercises and games including Yes And/Yes But, an adapted version of Pass the Clap, and gibberish games.5 Throughout, we continually relate to participants as members of a performance ensemble—a community of performers and conversationalists who are working together to create the kind of environment in which everyone can candidly share their fears, joys, conflicts, and anything else they want to express. To introduce them to the idea of “performing-in-life,” we direct the group on its “audience performance” (Workbook 10.1). We ask them to perform as if they are bored, excited, or outraged—all of which they do remarkably well! Not only do they experience themselves as performers (in the most ordinary sense of that word), they begin to see that, as performers-in-life, they can choose how to respond in any given situation. They also have the experience of creating an environment in which everyone can take risks, practice doing things that are unfamiliar, and support each other regardless of whether they look foolish or not. We also introduce participants to the idea of “performed conversations,” which puts the focus on the flow of the exchange (not just the content) and on how we philosophically play with the assumption that we “know what we’re talking about.” At any time in the workshop, participants are invited to share whatever they are thinking and feeling. By treating these comments as performed conversations, we support others in the group to listen in the way improvisers listen and to create a conversation with each other rather than simply express their opinion or talk at each other. We’ve found that while people are very playful during the games and exercises, they tend to revert to talking “about” the experience rather than continuing to perform together in conversation. By explicitly framing an exchange as a performed conversation, everyone— including those whose memory is limited—performs as a member of the ensemble and offers whatever they can to the conversation in their multiple roles as talkers, listeners, conversation creators, and philosophizers. We try never to assume that playing and performing is easy, and we take seriously our responsibility to lead using behavior that may seem “ridiculous” to others. As Augusto Boal, founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, stated: “There must be no fear of the ridiculous, the grotesque, or the strange. If everybody is ridiculous, no one is” (2002: 92). This can mean being the most enthusiastically silly

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participant in an exercise and it can mean being the most willing to be open, curious, and sometimes to “say the unsayable.” We also talk about the emotions we’ve felt while caring for loved ones living with dementia in the hope that this will help participants feel more comfortable sharing theirs. Mary’s relationship to dementia took a personal turn when her mother began showing symptoms after a fall and eventually died of complications of late stage dementia in 2017. Here is what Mary shared with participants in a 2019 workshop: I don’t always have the words to express what it was like to be with and care for my mom during this time, but what I can say is that it was one of the most painful and one of the most joyous times of my life. I can also say that it helped me re-appreciate the power of improvisational play. In the last few months of her life, my mom began losing her power to “speak.” It wasn’t always easy to see but, in working to accept what was there, I soon became mesmerized by this woman, who rarely spoke unless spoken to, as she babbled with exquisite animation to whoever was around. I realized these were her “offers” and I worked to accept them as best I could. Though Susan was very familiar with dementia as a doctor, she has rediscovered the value of improvisation in helping her deal with some of the ordinary, and often-contentious, problems that she and her family members currently face when providing care for her sister living with dementia. This is what Susan often shares in the workshops: When my sister was diagnosed, I became her primary family care partner. I did so with the assumption that other family members and my sister’s friends would step up in the same way I had. When they didn’t, I was angry and resentful, which wasn’t helping anyone. As I began relating to the situation as an organizer and improviser, however, I was able to reimagine what was possible and what “good care” even meant. This allowed me to work with family and friends to create an ensemble in which everyone was supported to give what they could. The process is ongoing, and still has its bumps, but my sister and I are both getting the support we need.

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Many participants have expressed gratitude for the opportunity to speak openly about their relationship to dementia/memory loss, including fears of losing control and becoming dependent on others. An older Latina woman spoke about how her children were trying to take more control of parts of her life, her checkbook, her living situation, and how angry she was about having to give up control. Almost everyone mentioned their fear of “becoming a burden” and the embarrassment associated with cognitive decline. Others talked about how badly the people they know with dementia are treated by family members and/or the health system. None of these responses is surprising, but they are usually shared as complaints rather than given as “offers” that a group can build with. This workshop creates an environment in which our participants can say these things out loud (often for the first time) and demonstrates that it is possible and, contrary to popular belief, often easier to “say the unsayable” in a social setting. We can’t think of a more powerful way to address the silence, shame, and isolation surrounding dementia that, arguably, do more harm than the condition itself. For some, our workshops have provided an opportunity to share ways they could be more creative while taking care of loved ones. One workshop participant told us, “I was always improvising. When my mother said something weird, not factual or true, I would go with it. I stopped feeling like I had to challenge her sense of reality.” We presented the workshop at a conference for The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) where a female care partner said, “I discovered that playing and having fun with my mother was how I

FIGURE 10.2  The Joy of Dementia participants in Boston (Photo by Jill Klowden).

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could relate to her as her cognitive abilities declined even as I was worried about having memory problems myself.”6 We have also heard about the conflicts some people have about “lying” to loved ones (especially parents) living with dementia. In one workshop, this topic ignited a conversation about the limitations of looking at everything through the lens of “truth” or “lying.” We played a Yes And/Yes But exercise that allowed them to explore other ways of responding, such as with curiosity. If your mother says, “My sister Louise came to visit and we had a great time,” the more negative response, “That’s not possible. Louise has been dead for ten years,” can be replaced with, “Tell me more about Louise. She sounds fun.” One woman at a senior living community in Pennsylvania said, “This workshop has made me realize that when my husband was diagnosed with dementia, I kept trying to fix everything. But I eventually realized that I couldn’t fix anything. There wasn’t anything I could do for him. I felt inadequate.” We do not come from a background of improv, but we have learned to embrace the power of performance and to say Yes, And to the offers from our participants. We have learned to trust the ensemble and each other’s instincts and support everyone to take risks. This woman’s offer presented us with an opportunity to accept it and build with it. We responded by asking everyone to stand (if they could) and to shout out with as much enthusiasm as they could muster, “We are all inadequate!” We knew this was risky. Participants might think we were making light of the story the woman had just painfully shared. On the other hand, her offer was a provocation to playfully acknowledge that we all feel, at times, inadequate and yet we continue to relate to inadequacy (and a million other things) as a shameful secret rather than a shared and social experience. When we all shouted, “We are all inadequate!” to the rooftop, we encouraged others to share similar experiences, which they did. Ultimately, the group suggested hosting a regular “inadequacy day” for everyone in their community.

Challenging the Tragedy Narrative with Improvisational Play and Performance Fortunately, we are not alone in challenging the de-humanizing “tragedy narrative” that distorts the way dementia is treated. What

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we have discovered since first launching The Joy of Dementia is a real opening for creativity and radical humanism and an increased comfort with the word “joy” in this context. We are honored to have inspired a February 2019 Washington Post front page article, “Changing ‘the Tragedy Narrative’: Why a Growing Camp Is Promoting a More Relational Joyful Approach to Alzheimer’s” (Bahrampour). We are excited to be part of a growing national and international movement of people who are using the arts and creativity-infused approaches to positively transform the culture of dementia and advocate for more positive and life-affirming humanistic practices and policies.7 Still, we haven’t seen a substantial amount of dementia research funding re-allocated to this type of holistic, humanistic care. As mentioned earlier, finding a cure seems to be the priority. But what if the “care” was seen as part of the “cure”? Mike Belleville, who retired at age fifty-four after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, asked a similar question in one of our workshops, “Why isn’t improvisation part of every treatment plan?” Mike, who also serves on the Dementia Action Alliance Advisory Board, is quite knowledgeable of the large amount of research being done on, for example, meditation and the brain. “So why,” he continued, “are they not doing research on the impact of performance and improv? Being creative does something to the brain. When I began painting, I felt incredible … it was at that moment I realized I can still contribute to society.” Perhaps the lack of attention stems from the lack of understanding. We have encountered conflicted and sometimes angry responses to our work, some reflected in the sharply divided responses to the Washington Post article. These responses included everything from “This is one of the most positive and helpful articles I have ever read … ” to “What irks me [about this article] is … the implication [that we should] just laugh about it all. Yes let’s laugh that my mom … almost set the house on fire … Let’s not forget teehee that she doesn’t know her great grandchild … yeah let’s slap our knees and guffaw.” We recognize that anger and how stressful and seemingly impossible dementia care can sometimes seem, but our work has little to do with laughing, much less guffawing. Though improvisation is often viewed (mistakenly, in our opinion) as synonymous with being funny or making people laugh, laughter need not be involved at all. For us, improvisational play means working with others to

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create something new with what exists, including the unwanted parts of our lives. This feels especially necessary given the times in which we now live. Improvisational play is how we can most creatively go from “how things should be” to “how we can create something new.” We can work with those living with dementia to create a shared journey. Improvisational play gives us the most humanizing shot at relating to the strangeness, the fluidity, and the uncertainty of dementia in ways that promote intimacy and growth rather than frustration and humiliation. As people living with dementia become less able to participate in the hyper-cognitive culture in which we all live, they are far less bound to the traditional rules of language and knowing than those of us who consider ourselves “cognitively adjusted.” Nurse and author Sallie Tisdale (2018) writes: “Dementia gives us an opportunity to question how time and language and perception work.” In The Joy of Dementia workshops, we create an environment in which everyone can play with how we use words, silences, gestures, and much more in order to be more giving to, and intimate with, everyone in their lives, including those living with dementia. Karen Stobbe, one of the pioneers of using improvisation in this way, has written, “Flexibility, adaptability, courage, spontaneity, listening, generosity, acceptance … are characteristics of an excellent caregiver. They are also qualities of an excellent improvisational performer” (2016). We would add, characteristics of an excellent human being. Finally, we agree with Jennifer Carson, director of the Dementia Engagement, Education, and Research program at the University of Nevada at Reno. In the Washington Post article she says, “Alzheimer’s can be a liberating event, an opportunity to fly—so why not learn to take full advantage of that opportunity?” (Bahrampour 2019). At a Bay Area workshop, we were joined by about sixty people, a number of whom are living with dementia. One of them, a former college professor whose diagnosis was still recent, began sharing the experiences and emotions she was going through. She ended with, “What can I say, it’s just weird.” She’s right. With dementia, life becomes more and more off-kilter, which can leave everyone feeling upset, afraid, and uncertain. Performing a more improvisational life cannot ensure a “happy ending,” but having the capacity to choose how one wants to respond in any given situation—and beginning to

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see oneself as a choice creator—can make a huge difference in the quality of all our lives.

Postscript When Covid-19 hit, we moved the Joy of Dementia workshops to the virtual space, which allowed us to create dementia ensembles with people from across the United States and globally. We also helped found Reimagining Dementia: A Creative Coalition for Justice with an international group of dementia activists and allies who share a diverse and humanizing vision of care and support that promotes inclusion, relationality, creativity, joy, and the possibility of growth for everyone living with, and impacted by, dementia. As we write in Reimagining Dementia’s “Call to Action”: It is our contention that we can and must do better. We can and must seize this moment to come together in new and more powerful ways. We can, and must, find ways to leverage our collective resources, expertise and passion to organize and mobilize a grassroots force that can move the conversation about aging and dementia in a positive, creative, inclusive, just and lifeaffirming direction. (Reimagining Dementia 2020)

Notes 1 According to 2019 statistics from the Alzheimer’s Association, 5.8 million Americans are living with dementia—a figure expected to triple by 2050. Parents and caregivers are getting older, our families are less connected, and related conditions (diabetes, obesity, hypertension, etc.) are increasingly prevalent. One half of people living to age eighty-five will experience some form of dementia, the care for which is estimated to cost $290 billion a year—the 2050 figure will exceed $1 trillion. Of course, these already hefty figures would be even greater if family caregivers, close to 70 percent of whom are women, were compensated for the estimated $500 billion

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in unpaid services they provide (see 2013 blog by Kathleen J. Mullen “Dementia’s Growing Cost to Caregivers.” www.rand.org). The National Institutes of Health budget for Alzheimer’s research quoted here is only the small estimate of dollars being allocated to dementia research. The pharmaceuticals spend vastly more each year on discovering a pharmaceutical cure for dementia. Social therapeutics is discussed in greater detail on p. 247. Our preferred exercise is Upside-Down Introductions (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 73). All three of these exercises can be found in Dudeck and McClure (2018). This quote came out of a workshop at the 2019 TASP conference in Winchester, Virginia. In addition to colleagues interviewed by the Post, we want to recognize a few others who have inspired us: Heather Hill, a dance movement therapist in Australia; Susanna Howard, the founder of Living Words in the UK; Dr. Richard Coaten, a dancer and dance therapist, also in the UK; Pia Kontos, a senior scientist with the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute-University Health Network and producer of Cracked: New Light on Dementia (2018), a film and educational program; Dr. Peter Whitehouse, author of The Myth of Alzheimer’s (2008), and Anne Basting Davis, author of Forget Memory (2009).

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WORKBOOK 10.1 Performance of an Audience This exercise demonstrates the “performance in everyday life” and works well to get participants warmed up and ready for theatrical and emotional work. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • allowed themselves to be silly and expressive, • viewed themselves as builders of a group performance, and • created a supportive, collaborative environment in which everyone feels comfortable participating.

Running the Exercise 1. Ask participants to find a comfortable location to stand in the room. 2. Explain that you will name various emotional states and their task is to enact those states in as large and bold a fashion as possible. 3. In a very theatrical way, ask participants to simultaneously perform as: • bored, • excited, • outraged, • polite but withholding, and • wildly enthusiastic.

Allow 30 seconds for each emotional state. Facilitators can add additional emotions if participants are engaged and in a playful mood.

Debrief • What did you discover about your performances in this exercise? • Did you express emotions you wouldn’t normally express? How did that feel?

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• How can playing with emotions in this way give you choices for responding in life situations? Connections: Mary Fridley and Susan Massad learned this exercise from Performance of a Lifetime, which developed it based on a direction that the late Fred Newman, co-founder of the East Side Institute, gave audiences at the opening of every performance of the Castillo Theatre improvisation troupe, “If you laugh, we’re funny.” For another exercise that encourages participants to playfully expand their performance range, try Do It As If (Workbook 1.1).

10.2 Pass the Clap (Modified) This is a modified version of the well-known warm-up Pass the Clap. This version gives participants the experience of working with people who have cognitive issues, such as poor focus and difficulty following directions. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • responded in the moment to unexpected, nonlinear offers, • loosened their notions of what constitutes a “right” or “wrong” response, and • seen there are a variety of responses they can actively choose in any situation.

Running the Exercise 1. Ask participants to form a circle. 2. Explain that the group will pass a clap to the left around the circle. Instruct two adjacent participants to make eye contact with one another and clap simultaneously. The participant on the left then turns to the next participant in the circle, makes eye contact, and the two clap simultaneously, and so on around the circle. 3. After the first round, have participants pass the clap around the circle at a faster rate.

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4. Once the group is warmed up, step out of the circle and give a specific and private direction to a participant to do something unexpected. For example, they might say “I don’t know what’s going on here,” stand still and do nothing, make an unrelated gesture, change the direction of the clap—anything that stops or changes the rhythm of the clap. The participant next to the “confused” participant then must decide how to respond. 5. As the passing of the clap resumes, instruct another participant to change their response in a new way. 6. Repeat these disruptions for two or three more cycles, then stop and debrief.

Debrief • What was your response to the unexpected disruption? • How did it feel to follow the participant who disrupted the exercise? • Did anyone feel that they wanted to correct the participant who broke the rhythm? • How well was the group able to respond to the change? Connections: Another group exercise that focuses on responding positively to disruptions and letting go of mistakes is Whoosh Bang Pow and Failure Bow (Dudeck and McClure 2018).

10.3 Hello I Am, Hello I Am, Hello I Am This exercise is designed to help people living and working closely with those suffering from dementia, who often express discomfort and frustration with not knowing how to respond to repetitive questions. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • learned that improvisation and performance can help to diffuse the frustration of dealing with repetitive questioning, • seen that responding in the moment can be part of building a new conversation, and

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• brought curiosity into their responses as a way of taking the conversation in new directions as opposed to shutting it down.

Running the Exercise 1. Ask participants to pair up and decide who is Participant A and Participant B. 2. Have the entire group walk aimlessly around the room. 3. Say “freeze,” and instruct the pairs to find one another. 4. Tell Participant A to introduce themselves in whatever way they choose. Instruct Participant B to give a Yes, And response and build on what their partner has said. 5. Again have participants walk around aimlessly, say “freeze,” and instruct pairs to find one another. Explain that in this round Participant A will say the exact same thing as in the previous round, but Participant B will perform a different response. 6. After a couple more rounds of Participant A being the speaker, have participants swap roles and repeat the exercise.

Debrief • What different conversational options did you discover during the exercise? • What was it like to perform new responses? • What assumptions or judgments did you make about your partner who was asking the same question repeatedly? Connections: Another well-known exercise that encourages players to remake verbal and physical offers is New Choice (Dudeck and McClure 2018).

11 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Disaster: Reimagining Learning for the Humanitarian Sector Barbara Tint and Bettina Koelle Barbara Tint is a psychologist, university professor, and global trainer and consultant. She travels the world (literally or virtually) working with individuals, groups, and organizations around issues of leadership, conflict resolution, resilience, status and power, gender dynamics, cross-cultural relations, and creative collaboration. She has performed and applied improvisation for over ten years and served as President of the Applied Improvisation Network from 2016 to 2020. She truly believes we can change the world through the magic of applied improvisation. Bettina Koelle is a geographer, humanitarian practitioner, game designer, and facilitator of learning dialogues. She is a senior learning specialist with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and works globally designing and facilitating interactive and experiential processes that stimulate the understanding of and work within complex systems, especially focusing on resilience of the most vulnerable. She loves what applied improvisation brings to the complex and often-challenging humanitarian sector and believes that we need to think out of the box to transform our society to be more just and equitable.

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This is the story of unlikely friendship—between colleagues, between organizations, and between professional worlds. It is the story of how the mindset, tools, and skills of applied improvisation (AI) infused the global humanitarian sector, where development workers engage with life and death issues such as climate change, poverty, racial inequity, communal conflict, and natural and human-made disasters. For the last six years, AI principles and methodologies have been incorporated into global humanitarian programs, transforming practices and perspectives within organizations and communities. We share here the journey of how improvisational techniques changed the world of climate change mitigation, adaptation, and response in both face-to-face and online programming through a collaboration between the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC) and the Applied Improvisation Network (AIN).1 Our story began, as many good things do, with the unexpected: a chance meeting between a member of the RCCC and a member of the AIN in 2013.2 Friendship, fantasizing, and fun quickly ensued and soon multiple members from both organizations were co-imagining, discovering synergies, and developing collaborative possibilities. RCCC saw a strong need to add more interactive and dynamic methods to its toolbox, and AIN knew that AI could be beneficial to the humanitarian sector. Since that initial meeting, our collaboration has taken us around the world through multiple face-to-face engagements to the prescient development of online programs, spreading the power and joy of AI deep into the humanitarian context.

Urgent Global Innovation Challenges Imagine you are in a room with a group of climate scientists, government officials, donors, community leaders, and development workers. Everyone has come together to discuss urgent global adaptation strategies, exploring political, social, environmental, and economic issues related to climate change. The first presentation is a long and complex PowerPoint providing a technical overview of current policies. Next, climate scientists present the latest forecasting models and long-term regional predictions. Last, a civil

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society organization addresses social justice concerns for the most vulnerable groups. Few questions are allowed. You feel disengaged and frustrated as other participants start to check their phones and computers. A tea break comes and you wonder if any successful, integrated strategies are within reach. Sound familiar? While this phenomenon is not unique to the humanitarian sector, it has been the prevalent—and often unsuccessful—approach to learning and knowledge in these high-stakes, global contexts. Humanitarian work is messy; typical strategic processes of timing, planning, decision-making, executing, and reflecting are challenged by pressured, emergent, and unpredictable circumstances. We face disasters that are difficult to navigate due to border issues, resource scarcity and inequity, clashes of cultures and religions, miscommunication, competing decision-makers, power imbalances, and a range of other deep-rooted challenges. There is a growing sense of urgency within the climate change adaptation field to more effectively anticipate and respond to these challenges (Ison 2010). Adaptation is a wicked problem (Levin et al. 2012) that requires us to understand the complexity of systems and creatively explore innovative solutions; agile leadership and teamwork are necessary (Horney, Pasmore, and Oshea 2010). Humanitarian workers need training in strategic risk taking, problem-solving, effective error recovery, managing complexity, navigating uncertainty, and communicating and collaborating effectively across cultural and professional contexts. Environmental scientist, Ray Ison, emphasizes that the capability to adapt quickly in times of uncertainty “will need to exist at personal, group, community, regional, national and international levels, all at the same time” (2010). Traditionally, the hope has been that by engaging multiple stakeholders from different professions, countries, and cultures, cross-sector dialogue and joint learning would take place and resilient and adaptive solutions would emerge. In practice, this has been more challenging. Stakeholders have different mindsets, language and jargon, hidden and open agendas, and potentially competing goals that often undermine constructive dialogue and learning. New ways of working are critical, and the need to develop approaches for effective co-creation and innovation to respond to these challenges is evident.

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New Ways to Innovate Enter, AI. We know that experiential learning can facilitate innovation (Kolb 1984) and that AI is a key tool for this in the humanitarian context (Suarez et al. 2014; Tint, McWaters, and van Driel 2015; Wetzel and Tint 2019).3 Skills for adaptation, resilience, and uncertainty management are core to the improviser’s toolbox and a perfect fit for humanitarian workers needing to be flexible, responsive, creative, and collaborative in both their own organizational training processes and their work with communities at risk. As our collaboration developed, RCCC practitioners attended and presented at AIN conferences, various shared projects were launched, and AIN facilitators provided support and consultation to the RCCC.4 AIN facilitators assisted in program design, delivery, and facilitation for RCCC events, such as Annual Leadership Retreats, Climate Change Dialogue Platforms, Content Specific Training, Interagency Learning Events, and United Nations Conferences. One of our core projects was providing creative content and process development for events related to a multi-year program called BRACED (Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters), which aimed at helping people become more resilient to climate extremes in South and Southeast Asia and in the African Sahel and its neighboring countries. The RCCC/AIN team was dispersed over four continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Each team member brought contextual insight, and regular reflection sessions focused on our own learning and intervention strategies. We endeavored to “walk our talk” by using AI principles and methods in our evolving work as a team. We convened in Amsterdam, Austin, Berlin, Dakar, Entebbe, Geneva, the Hague, Kathmandu, London, Montreal, Nairobi, New York, Oxford, and Paris, working with hundreds of participants from around the globe. Scientists, funders, community leaders, educators, and policy makers all came together and participated in innovative AI processes. Events included large group plenary sessions, breakout workshops, daylong trainings, dialogue processes, and project development work. In all events, AI was used for both process and content needs. Some exercises were integrated to break down barriers, develop connections, build cohesion, and generate a creative and open

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mindset amongst participants. Examples of these include clap and gesture circles, name games, story building exercises, Johnstone’s (1999) Giving Presents and Answer with Your Feet (Workbook 11.2), all of which are sociometry activities used to explore commonalities and relationships within the group (Sternberg and Garcia 2000). Other exercises were utilized to present content in more dynamic ways. These included Boal’s (2002) Enemy/Defender to look at complex team and organizational dynamics and Theatre of the Oppressed to explore community issues (see Figure 11.1); status mingling informed by Johnstone’s (1979) work to explore hierarchy and power dynamics between multiple stakeholders; Spolin’s (1999) Mirror/Follow the Follower to explore leadership and partnership patterns; and SNAP! (Workbook 11.1), a game to examine processes of spontaneity and quick decision-making with a range of content.

FIGURE 11.1 Applied Improvisation and Forum Theatre at the BRACED annual learning event in Dakar, Senegal, 2016 (Photo credit Climate Centre).

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Amazing facilitation and games that quickly broke down barriers and got people talking and interacting, and that made concepts [of community resilience] easy to understand. I can remember an event previously where I was nodding off to a PowerPoint. But not here! Annual Learning Event 2016 workshop participant

It soon became clear that these processes created a space that allowed participants to engage their minds, their senses, and their emotions, and created avenues for open, generative dialogue. The data collected from participants during and after our AI work provided important insights into the range of perceptions related to the interactive and experiential nature of the sessions.5 RCCC team practitioners also saw and anecdotally named the changes they were seeing in their professional worlds as relationships were deepened, collaborations were strengthened, and learning was enhanced. The momentum and interest around AI methodologies were strong. Because of their exposure to RCCC activities using AI methods, many other humanitarian organizations experimented with interactive workshop design and facilitation. Grassroots organizations in Africa, Asia, and South America, and many national Red Cross Societies embraced elements of AI in their work, influencing not only process design but also the development of a more flexible mindset when working directly with communities at risk. RCCC received multiple requests for AI training, and while some in-person trainings were offered, that became challenging as these face-to-face gatherings were resource intensive, requiring significant amounts of time, energy, and money, and impacting only a small portion of global humanitarians. The good news is that we had crossed the first hurdle: overcoming any resistance to the idea of AI. The next hurdle was to empower others to feel confident and skilled to do this themselves. It soon became apparent that if we wanted to reach a larger audience, our RCCC/AIN team would need to explore alternative ways to design and facilitate innovative learning events in the form of virtual training.

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Participate! Moving to the Virtual World In 2018 our joint team developed our first virtual training course, Participate!, for climate change academics, scientists, and practitioners interested in innovative facilitation and community engagement approaches. The primary goal was to help participants design face-to-face or virtual climate-related educational, policy, and community events, including workshops, conferences, and training courses. In developing the course, we knew we were trading some of the agility that face-to-face engagement provided for more equitable access, exposure, and wide-reaching impact. Who knew, when we began designing this program, that our online world would become the necessary norm in this Covid-19 era? With virtual training as our primary avenue for engagement, we have unwittingly created a vital vehicle for bringing interactive training to the online world. The Participate! course focused on combining theory, practical tools, experimentation, and collaboration and consisted of five ninety-minute sessions presented over five weeks. Each session was facilitated by a joint RCCC/AIN team and included content, discussion, presentation slides, and interactive exercises. We used Zoom as our main platform and also offered a Slack channel (called the “tea garden”) to dialogue between lectures, share reading to support the sessions, and develop real world projects where participants could anchor the course content within their own professional contexts. New exercises often emerged in the planning that combined elements from the adaptation field, AI, and experiential learning theory. For example, The Farming Juggle incorporated a traditional improvisation game of throwing multiple balls (real or imaginary) simultaneously around a circle and naming each ball a climate condition that farmers face. This illustrated, experientially, the stress and “ball-dropping” that occurs for farmers managing complex and difficult climate-related conditions. The following is the outline of our basic course structure.

Participate! Sessions 1)  Positioning: Building group connections and exploring foundational principles of experiential learning, AI, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction. AI exercise used: Stats to build group connections.6

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2)  Tools and Approaches: Introducing a range of tools, exercises, and frameworks for designing complex learning processes. AI exercises used: SNAP! (Workbook 11.1); Answer with Your Feet (Workbook 11.2); Yes And/Yes But; Word-at-a-Time Story (Johnstone 1979: 130); Farming Juggle; Climate Message.7 3)  Facilitation Skills: Providing basic facilitation strategies, considering different learning styles, and sharing important debrief approaches. AI exercises used: Snap, Clap, Stomp, Cheer (Dudeck and McClure 2018: 133) to explore mistakes; Zip, Zap, Zop to explore listening. 4)  Designing Your Session: Highlighting sequencing in design, using intention in choosing exercises, and planning the design sandwich (opening, core, closing). AI exercises used: Yes, And processes to build ideas around designing workshops. 5)  Adapting to the Unexpected: Addressing practical strategies for working with the unexpected; sharing stories and solutions from the field and sharing of group projects. AI exercises used: Closing Circles; Using “I Like …, I Wish …, I Wonder … ” for reflective feedback. While recreating ideal interactive conditions in the virtual space was not always easy, we carefully crafted the sessions experimenting with different ways to engage the participants. The sessions were synchronous with mostly live and some pre-taped presentations. We demonstrated exercises (both live and in videos) and then participants tried them on the spot. Participants worked in pairs and small groups and discussed and debriefed in real time, so that the experience of “being together” was preserved. As with face-to-face training, creating an open, safe, and dynamic learning environment was key in all of the sessions.

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What helped me most of all was a shift in mindset that allowed me to value letting go and being more connected, rather than worrying about getting everything right. Participate! participant

The Participate! course provided many layers of learning related to content, process, and technology. It allowed a global group to participate at no travel cost, increasing access and equity in humanitarian arenas. In evaluating what was most important in the course, all participants mentioned engagement and the “live feeling” and “real time” experience of the lectures. Many were struck by how much their perspective had shifted. After the first five-week pilot course concluded, the planning team reviewed, reflected, integrated feedback, and adapted the program for a second run of the course approximately six months

FIGURE 11.2  Participate! MOOC virtual training course (Photo credit Climate Centre).

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later. Following the second round of Participate!, the team saw that the potential for increased global impact through the online platform was high, so we moved to creating a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that has a more lasting and accessible presence in the global arena (see Figure 11.2). While the MOOC is fully pretaped and cannot provide that “live” feeling, all of the content for Participate! is there. Even pre-Covid, using these tools in the online world became so core to the RCCC, that the team developed a manifesto for working in the virtual space (Climate Centre).

Global Impact Applied improvisation has transformed my professional life. I am much better prepared to do what needs to get done, spending less time planning and more time imagining how people and organizations will “get in the flow,” enjoying the discovery that awaits by embracing the unknown. RCCC practitioner

A contextual mindset shift among humanitarian agencies became apparent as AI was more deeply embedded in the culture and practice of the RCCC and, through them, to many of the organizations with which they interface.8 Now, within a range of global agencies in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas, humanitarians use interactive facilitator approaches and dynamic content delivery methods for working with their own teams and the communities they serve. Currently, RCCC learning processes are regarded as a standard to follow within the humanitarian sector.

In part because of the richness we gained from AI, our humanitarian team is now being asked to run events for very impactful, “serious” organizations—from the World Bank to NASA. Partners tell us that they want our services because our participatory methods deliver results, and because it is delightful to get things done in these surprising ways. RCCC practitioner

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At the end of both courses, we had served over forty participants from twenty organizations and ten countries. Participants came from multiple sectors from Asia, Africa, and Europe, all working on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. AI changed perspectives, relationships, strategies, and mindsets. It encouraged participants to take risks, strengthen communities, and actively collaborate with each other in new ways. Groups developed longer term and more successful projects, mobilizing the diversity, collective intelligence, and creativity of the multiple stakeholders. Many of the tools and approaches are documented on the RCCC website, and RCCC practitioners are often pleasantly surprised when they attend global events and these methods are being used by presenters they have never met. The seed has been sown far and wide.

Global Challenges Of course, there were challenges. In both live and virtual training, some participants were more willing to engage than others and some were uncomfortable acting outside of traditional norms. We sometimes had to work intentionally to reframe our methods from what participants called “ice breakers” or “warm-ups” to the terms “experiential activities” or “learning processes.” We strove to convey that these methods were core, rather than adjacent, to the delivery of important content and knowledge. Both our face-to-face and online engagement deliveries included a wide range of participants, so design had to factor in the differing cultural, language, professional, and contextual backgrounds. Facilitator teams could not always be aware of hierarchical and cultural relationships in the room, so certain moments became more sensitive than others. This led to rich discussions about levels of appropriateness of certain exercises (e.g., would we use methods that involved touch or eye contact in certain cultures?). Power dynamics (e.g., donors or policy makers being seen as having more power than community leaders) sometimes led to different levels of comfort or ease in participation. Additionally, exercises and structures that either highlight power dynamics (status exercises) or work to change them (Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum

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Theatre; Boal 2002) have the potential to elicit resistance from elite players who may not want their power exposed or challenged. It was important to understand these tensions and then to work with them using creative formats. In the online engagement, the challenges were largely what we expected (and what everyone is now experiencing with virtual facilitation). Technology sometimes failed, some participants had limited connectivity, and some of the exercises were more difficult to run in the virtual space. Also challenging, but not impossible, was the ability to create strong group bonds across cultures, institutions, and time zones. And while people can learn exercises by reading about them or by watching video tutorials, we know that optimal learning happens through experience. Inevitably, some experiential learning got lost in the online modalities. We are also aware that while climate researchers and practitioners might be motivated to bring dynamic methods to their processes, giving people new tools does not necessarily make them skilled facilitators. In embodying the humanitarian credo of Do No Harm (Slim 2015), we remain cautious about the potential impact of sharing tools in limited ways that do not allow for deep learning or skill building to occur. Improvisation is a practice, a skill set, a mindset, and a discipline. AI is, as well; it requires effective facilitation skills, the ability to conduct insightful debriefs, the capacity to engage people well in content and process, and the competency to work with differing agendas and identities in the room. It is a delicate balance to weave together a deep understanding of both humanitarian content knowledge and AI theory and practice. If we do not keep up with the capacity development challenge, we run the risk that some of the tools and processes may be transferred and used in ineffective or possibly even harmful ways. We have observed inexperienced facilitators using these exercises incorrectly, causing confusion, embarrassment, and relational breakdown among participant groups. While the unskilled use of newly acquired methodology is not a unique phenomenon in AI training, we want to underscore the importance of deeper knowledge and experience in order to use these methods well.

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Twenty-First-Century Needs in the Humanitarian Sector Nothing has been as successful as applied improvisation for awakening that appetite for motivation and engagement. The ability to connect is core to the Climate Centre’s mission, the use of AI methodology has been instrumental in breaking down compartmentalization, silos, and disconnection. RCCC practitioner

As the urgency to have successful dialogue in complex situations is increasing with the advancing climate crisis and other humanitarian issues, the need for innovative interventions and individuals who can facilitate them is clear. We see an appreciation and a hunger for dynamic processes in many areas of the humanitarian sector. We strongly advocate for AI tools and processes to become a vital part of the toolkits embraced by the humanitarian sector. Reasons include: • We know that our methods help people access the cognitive, emotional, physical, and relational dimensions of experience. This impacts hearts and minds beyond the focus on cognitive learning prevalent in the humanitarian world. • With such a diverse range of cultures and languages involved, methods that are interactive, often nonverbal, playful, and dynamic can cut across potential barriers. These methods train workers and the communities they serve to develop new mindsets with which to navigate the complex and changing landscape of the humanitarian arena. • Humanitarian workers are often stressed and labored by the very contexts in which they are intervening. The work is difficult and challenging and burnout can be high. The interactive, connective, and playful dimension

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of AI methods can provide restorative dimensions to humanitarian workers, which helps not only them but also the populations that they serve. • Collaborations in these arenas address issues that can literally save lives. Every method that can increase connection, creativity, and cooperation is essential. Due to the global, time-sensitive climate challenges we are facing, it is not sufficient to just improve the process of a few programs focusing on adaptation. We do not have the luxury to implement on a small scale. We need AI skills in various spheres of the humanitarian context: in academia, on local, national, and global policy levels, within governments, civil society organizations, and scientific research. We deeply believe that cross-sector skills in flexibility, agility, and collaboration can harness innovative solutions for our planet. Along with our enthusiasm for this work, we also encourage a gentle path forward. While there is currently a real appetite and willingness to engage in innovative modes of working in the humanitarian field, starting with lighter, simpler AI exercises allows participants to develop confidence in their ability to improvise and enter the AI learning space comfortably. We must understand these professional and geographic cultures and choose methods that invite people into engagement rather than scare them away. By designing strategically in this way, we are much more likely to foster new unlikely friendships and contribute to a global mindset shift that is urgently needed. Virtual work was already becoming more integral to the humanitarian sector due to reasons of capacity, geography, resources, and to reduce carbon footprint. With Covid-19, it became our new normal. We were ready. Participate! revealed that we could create innovative ways to engage participants online. When we can, once again, join in physical rooms together, we believe a hybrid model of training, pairing the best of Participate! with face-to-face experiences, will be ideal. We take Maya Angelou’s words to heart, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” and know that global change will occur when we impact how people experience and feel their learning, which will deeply inform their choices in critical times.

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FIGURE 11.3 Energizing the humanitarian sector: AIN and RCCC partners in a joint drumming and dancing session at the BRACED annual learning event in Dakar (Senegal) (Photo credit Climate Centre).

So where are these unlikely friends now? Spanning continents, organizations, and airwaves, plotting for when we can all be together again. Barbara and Bettina fantasize about chasing snakes around Bettina’s South African farm in the bush and retreating to Barbara’s Oregon, USA, seaside landscape where we can move this work to the next level. The RCCC/AIN partnership has been so successful that we see it as a model for what can be developed in other humanitarian organizations around the world. It is time to creatively plan for and implement these capacity development measures across global institutions, so we do more than just promote an approach, we build a movement.

Acknowledgments The journey of infusing the humanitarian sector with AI has involved many remarkable individuals who were visionary and thoughtful in this collaborative process. We would like to especially acknowledge and thank Lesley Adams, Zohar Adner, Carina Bachofen, Sukaina Bahrwani, Angelina Castellini, Margot Curl, Ted

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DeMaisons, Renatus Hoogenrad, Paul Z Jackson, Eddie Jjemba, Kat Koppett, Jeanne Lambin, Janot Mendler de Suarez, Gabe Mercado, Belina Raffy, Patrick Short, Kirsten Sprick, Pablo Suarez, Mary Tyszkiewicz, and Lisa Yeager. Of course, this work would not have been possible without the courage and commitment of participants and community members from the Applied Improvisation Network, the Red Cross Climate Center, and the wider humanitarian sector joining us in this experimental journey to what is possible.

Notes 1 The Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC) is a reference center of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). The Climate Centre’s mission is to help the IFRC movement and its partners reduce the impacts of climate change and extreme-weather events on vulnerable people. The Centre provides strategic knowledge on climate-smart practice beyond its own walls, working with many partners and facilitating dialogue between diverse stakeholders. The Applied Improvisation Network (AIN) is a global, nonprofit organization that fosters the use of improvisational methods and mindsets for positive impact in non-performance arenas. Its global community applies improvisational principles and practices in a wide range of individual, community, and organizational contexts. 2 Eternal thanks to Pablo Suarez (RCCC) and Belina Raffy (AIN) who had the good fortune and sense to meet each other and imagine the powerful confluence possible between our two worlds. 3 Kolb’s experiential learning model parallels much of the practice of AI. It follows a four-step ongoing cycle that includes (1) concrete experience (an AI activity), (2) reflective observation (reflecting on the experience of the activity), (3) abstract conceptualization (drawing insights or conclusions from the activity that apply beyond that experience), and (4) active experimentation (applying those insights or new ways of being/doing to other circumstances). 4 In this chapter we will use the term “practitioners” to refer to any of the RCCC team: this includes scientists, community liaisons, aid workers, educators, and a range of other RCCC team members. We will use the term “facilitators” to refer to any of the AIN team: this includes trainers, performers, professors, consultants, and a range of other AIN community members.

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5 We collected data through in-person commentary, online surveys, and team reflections, which were used to document the learning experiences of participants and inform our own evolving practice. 6 Stats is a “rapid fire” activity to find commonality within the group of participants. One person starts with saying their name and a short single sentence about something true for them (e.g., I like chocolate). Everyone else who shares that raises their hands. People take turns sharing characteristics that can move from the personal to the professional commonalities people hold (e.g., I’ve worked in the climate change field for over ten years). 7 Climate Message was one of many exercises that emerged as a blend of AI tools and climate content. This one adapted the game of Telephone (similar to What They Said in Chapter 1) using climate content. 8 AI exercises are now used in a variety of humanitarian programs, such as Partners for Resilience, Forecast-based Financing, FRACTAL (a program for the long-term adaptation and integration of climate science in Southern Africa), the World Bank, UNICEF, USAID, and NASA.

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WORKBOOK 11.1 SNAP! Participants use their imaginations to learn about each other and unearth each other’s associations with topics. This exercise helps them break out of habituated ways of thinking about climate resilience, forecasts, cooperation or any topic relevant to the group. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • practiced focusing their attention on imagined objects and how to “use” them realistically, • experienced connecting with others through shared focus, • experienced the bewilderment of competition that necessitates collaboration, and • committed physically to actions by responding to others in the group.

Running the Exercise 1. Ask the participants to stand face-to-face in pairs (or move them to virtual breakout rooms in pairs, after the demonstration). 2. Demonstrate the game: • Each player creates an imaginary deck of cards containing numbers 1 to 10. • Each player physically “shuffles” their own deck of imaginary cards, then takes half of the deck and gives it to the other player (thus creating two mixed decks of imaginary cards). • Flipping Cards: The two players simultaneously flip the “top” card on an imaginary table while saying the number on it, loud and clear (e.g., Participant A might say “two!” and Participant B might simultaneously say “eight!”). If there is no match, they keep flipping. They can explore

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using body language to agree on when to say their numbers. There is no penalty if a partner is not ready or fails to say a word—just allow a moment for regrouping and start again, synchronized. • If both players say the same number, the first player to say “Snap!” (and point to the other player with their index finger) gets all the imaginary cards already flipped on the table, and wins an imaginary point. They continue playing right away for about one or two minutes until the facilitator announces “Time is up.” 3. Round Two follows the same rules, only now the deck of imaginary cards has no numbers but the name of animals. Any animals (but remember the goal is to snap as much as possible so common animals may be more effective). Play on for 1–2 minutes. Highlight as facilitator that even though everybody can think of dozens of names of animals, this round may seem harder than the round with numbers … And the third one will be even harder—be ready! 4. Round Three uses yet another deck: Players have about 10–15 seconds to come up with words in their imaginary deck of cards around a specific topic. “Words that you associate with the concept of [Core theme].” For example, the core theme can be “climate change,” “Red Cross,” “forecast,” “gender,” or whatever topic is relevant to the group.

Debrief • What did you notice or experience? • What made this easy or difficult? • What changed for you in the different rounds? • What did you learn through your own or your partner’s choices? • How was it playing SNAP! with a virtual partner?

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Suggestions This game is very dynamic in a face-to-face situation. In an online setup, time delay may make it challenging but still achieves the same objectives and boost of energy. If you have a diverse group, it is important to ensure that participants have a common language they feel comfortable using. Connections: SNAP! is originally a British card game. Paul Z Jackson was inspired to turn it into an applied improvisation game that was later tweaked by Pablo Suarez of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre to be used in the current form. Barbara Tint played it with an auditorium of 500 students in Uganda, where she said the energy and magic it inspired were awesome. See Tugof-War (Workbook 4.1) for another competition/collaboration imagination exercise.

APPENDIX A Key Improvisation Tenets and Terms

Below are descriptions of key tenets and terms commonly held by and part of the language of improvisers worldwide. Most are pulled directly from the first book of case studies, Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre (2018), because they are also relevant to this new collection of case studies. Tenets and terms marked with an asterisk (*) are new to this edition. The specific wording for each differs from group to group and from place to place, evolving in response to the specific needs of those improvisers at that time. Our intention is not to strictly codify these terms but rather to embrace the idea that they transform over time, like anything good in life. Active or Responsive Listening, sometimes called “whole body listening,” denotes a deeper listening, one that requires more than just hearing the words. Alan Alda describes responsively listening to someone as “letting everything about them affect you; not just their words, but also their tone of voice, their body language, even subtle things like where they’re standing in the room or how they occupy a chair” (2017: 33). Be Obvious (not clever or funny) is a reminder to trust your impulses instead of trying to come up with an “original” idea. Good improvisers are focused on solving problems and on developing the story, and the best way to do that is to pay attention and respond authentically to the moment. “The improviser has to realize that the more obvious he is, the more original he appears,” asserts

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Keith Johnstone. “An artist who is inspired is being obvious” (1979: 87–8). *Facilitators might use the terms “Dare to Be Dull” or “Be Average” to achieve similar outcomes. Circle of Probability is a structural storytelling concept developed by Keith Johnstone. As improvisers develop the plot onstage, audience members are anticipating what will happen next, creating their own shadow stories. When there’s a close connection between the audience’s amalgamation of shadow stories and the plot unfolding onstage, the audience is more likely to be dynamically engaged in the journey. Staying within the circle of probability does not mean pandering to the audience; it is simply a tool to train improvisers to move a story forward according to the logic of the imaginary world that has been established. Commit asks you to give 100 percent to an exercise, regardless of how silly or challenging it is. Making that decision allows you to better pay attention to the offers around you, rather than worry about whether you are “in” or “out.” Fully committing to an exercise is contagious, inspiring others to fully commit. Even when an exercise does not go as planned, committing helps develop selfconfidence because you know your willingness to fail/succeed was never in doubt. Give and Take refers to the principle of sharing control, that is, alternately giving/taking focus and giving/accepting offers. Give and take is crucial for any collaboration. It is about “diverting competitiveness to group endeavor” and “remembering that process comes before end-result,” wrote Spolin (1999: 12). This tenet encourages those who typically give focus and accept others’ offers to step up, take focus themselves and give bold offers. The opposite is true for those who typically resist giving focus and make more offers than they accept—they are encouraged to give themselves over to the story or idea getting the most traction, rather than holding desperately to their own ideas. * Give Up Control is not the same as being “out” of control, because you are choosing to allow your partner’s offers to move you emotionally, to take the scene in unexpected directions, and/ or to open your mind to differing perspectives. To give up control often requires a willingness to be vulnerable. Brené Brown says that for human connection to happen we must really be seen, that

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is, we have to be willing to let go of who we think we are in order to reveal our innermost, authentic self. This opening up makes us feel vulnerable, perhaps out of control; but vulnerability, according to Brown, is the birthplace of joy and love. For improvisers, it can be a wellspring of creativity. Give Up Control embodies the idea of sharing control, as in Give and Take above, as well as a “willingness to be changed” or to “be altered” by your partner. Attempting to control an outcome can be exhausting; giving up that control or sharing it is energizing and results in discovery and trust. Leap before You Look invites you to act first then figure out what to do, rather than the opposite. Of course, many situations are better served by planning but for the purpose of playing, this tenet reminds you to discover what comes next rather than try to control the future. * Meet the Monster was originally a word-at-a-time exercise created by Keith Johnstone in the late 1960s to help acting students at RADA and Dartington Hall (UK) experience, not just technically play at, different roles and to stop trying to control the future (Dudeck 2013: 72). Now, many Johnstone-trained improvisers use Meet the Monster as a reminder that adults often treat imaginary dangers as if they were real and, therefore, avoid them even in the safety of the classroom or on a theatre stage. When spontaneously creating stories on stage, remembering to Meet the Monster (or Go Into the Cave) also denotes taking care of the audience, because the audience wants the hero to get into trouble, to move courageously into the unknown future and encounter the beast. Make Your Partner Look Good asks you to focus on the other person and give them whatever they need in the moment. Another way to look at it is, be someone your partner enjoys working with! Find out what enthuses or inspires your partner. Delight them. Keith Johnstone wrote: “The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner’s imagination” (1979: 93). This all points to the benevolent nature of this tenet. Ultimately, when players are doing their best to make each other look good, all feel fully supported, and this creates a climate for collaborative creation and innovation. And if you are feeling self-conscious, having the objective to “make your partner look good” immediately takes the pressure off!

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Offer/Block/Accept are three interlocking terms we use quite often in improvisation. An offer is anything a player says or does. A block is anything that prevents the action from developing, or that dismisses the reality created by your partner’s offer. To accept moves the action forward by treating an offer as valid, by saying Yes (ideally Yes, And; see below) to it. Right to Fail/Mistakes Are Gifts means it is possible to create with any offer, regardless of whether that offer was intentional, or even welcome. A judgment of bad/good or mistake/success is purely a framework we impose upon our actions. Learning to put aside that judgment and build with mistakes is one of the most powerful tenets of all. Failure is a part of the process of learning and, as any good improviser will tell you, some of the biggest mistakes turn into the best ideas. This is actually a “law of innovation” in collaborative organizations, according to Keith Sawyer: “Successes can’t go up unless failures go up, too. And because we won’t have the successes without the failures, we need to create organizational cultures that cherish failure” (2017: 190). We suggest encouraging your students to fail good-naturedly or, as Johnstone advises, to “screw up and look happy!” Side Coaching is when a director off-stage gives directions to the improvisers on stage to help them stay focused on solving a problem and/or to moving a process forward in a positive direction. In Applied Improvisation, facilitators use side coaching in the same way, usually minus the stage. It also gives facilitators an opportunity to offer immediate, in the moment, feedback which is a key attribute of improvisational practice. Status is physical and verbal behavior that determines your placement in the social pecking order. Status is not what a person is (i.e., ascribed or fixed role) but what they play (i.e., achieved status). Status exercises, games, and techniques are often used in AI facilitation and much of the methodology comes from the foundational work of Keith Johnstone. To learn more about status, we recommend visiting the chapter on “Status” in Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). Yes, And is the shorthand term widely used by improvisers to denote the fundamental principle of “accepting offers” (saying “Yes”) and then building on those offers (“And”) with new ideas to move the

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process forward. Yes, And keeps you from “blocking” your own and others’ offers. The words themselves, “yes, and,” are often used to help new improvisers develop the habit of accepting and building on offers. Unfortunately, Yes, And is often taught as a dogmatic rule in which students are told by their teachers they must always Yes, And every offer made. This advice ignores the complexity of the principle. For example, if saying “No” moves the premise, scene, or story forward, then it is considered an acceptance, not a block. And if an improviser makes an offer that feels sexist, racist, and/or compromises another improviser’s personal safety, other improvisers—the one compromised and potential allies—learn to Yes, And their own reactions to the unwelcome offer, even if that means blocking the offer with a “No” or with something (a word or a gesture) other than “Yes.” Whenever possible, use these situations as opportunities for debrief and reflection. This practice of constantly assessing what the character needs and wants in a scene and what you, as an improviser, need and want from your partner, alongside attuning yourself to your partner’s needs (Make Your Partner Look Good) helps develop assertiveness and emotional intelligence. To help improvisers heighten their self-awareness and partnering skills, Keith Johnstone has recently added a cheerful “Nope” option to his impro training, encouraging students, in specific exercises, to voice a polite “Nope” if the offer made by their partner does not enthuse them or stay within the Circle of Probability (see above) being created. As mentioned earlier, improvisation rules must remain flexible and support, not hinder, the evolution of this work in transformative spaces.

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APPENDIX B About the Workbook and List of Exercises

We hope you will mix and match exercises from all case studies and try them yourself. While each setup and debrief is written for that case study’s target audience, we invite you customize them to suit the needs of your unique set of participants. There are infinite variations and names for each exercise—the descriptions included here are not intended to be the definitive variation. The debrief questions are intended to serve as starting points for discussion and can be used in any order, modified, or replaced altogether. While in theatrical improvisation, these are commonly referred to as games, in this anthology we call each an “exercise,” since that connotes an activity done explicitly to sustain or develop skills and improve health and fitness. The following variables are not explicitly addressed, with the expectation that you will tailor them to suit your needs: • Ways to divide a larger group into pairs or other smaller groups, then identify which person in each pair starts. • Ways to adjust the exercise when the total number of participants does not distribute evenly (e.g., an odd number of participants will not divide equally into pairs). • Unless otherwise stated, these exercises can be done with any number of participants. • The size of the room. • Time constraints. • Whether participants are seated or standing.

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About Connections At the bottom of each exercise, the editors have included a section called “Connections.” This space serves several purposes. The first is to credit the creator of the exercise, wherever possible. Several of the workbook exercises are original creations by the authors, others are adapted from existing exercises, many of which have been in circulation under various titles for years. Because it is imperative to honor the historical and theoretical foundations of our field, for exercises with no clear connection to an original source, this space is used to connect facilitators to foundational exercises by Spolin, Johnstone, and others that seem to share specific features and/or objectives with that particular exercise. The editors also use the “Connections” section to provide additional exercises and information intended to support and augment the objectives outlined.

About Online Delivery Most exercises in this collection can be adapted to an online setting. The Online Delivery section includes tips and tricks for doing so.

Workbook Exercises 1.1 Do It As If 1.2 Here’s What I Heard 1.3 Color/Advance 2.1 Performing Curiosity 2.2 Argue like a Philosopher 2.3 Constructive Debate 3.1 Moving Stories 3.2 Tangible Concepts 4.1 Tug-of-War 4.2 Dr. Know-It-All 4.3 Conducted Story 5.1 A Truth about Me … / Una Verdad Sobre Mi …

ABOUT THE WORKBOOK AND LIST OF EXERCISES

5.2 Tour of a Space 5.3 Story Circles 6.1 The Pineapple 6.2 Drawing the Line 6.3 The Lawyer 7.1 Learn to Be Looked At 7.2 Status Party 8.1 We Can Sell Anything 9.1 Hype (Wo)Man 9.2 Radical Relationality 10.1 Performance of an Audience 10.2 Pass the Clap (Modified) 10.3 Hello I Am, Hello I Am, Hello I Am 11.1 SNAP! Appendix B.1 Gravitational Silly Walk Appendix B.2 Matrix Madness/You

Exercises Described within Chapters Clown 12345 p. 252 Describe a Room p. 176 Elevator p. 137 Farming Juggle, The p. 287 Four-Chair Fishbowl p. 68 Funny You Should Say That! p. 194 Mirror/Follow the Follower p. 108 Name and Motion p. 156 Play Date p. 72 Portrait p. 75 Stats p. 297 n.6 Status Pass p. 34 Status Picnic p. 30 Story Spine, The p. 39 Story Walk p. 220 Swedish Story (group variation) p. 195 Ten Commandments p. 78 What They Said p. 42 World Café Reflection p. 80

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WORKBOOK B.1 Gravitational Silly Walk In this exercise, inspired by both Michael Chekhov’s methods on character development and Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch, participants create a personal Silly Walk based on where they are “rooted” now (i.e., their current emotional state of being). This exercise helps participants find their personal center, its root of energy and relationship to gravity, and then encourages creation from that psychophysical state. It helps participants understand that awareness of their current state of being, whether heavy or light, can be a wellspring of creativity. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • gained a better understanding of their current state of being and how it can be used as a springboard to creativity, • experienced how to shift their state of being (i.e., relationship to gravity), perhaps going from a feeling of heavy to light, which can prepare individuals or the group for the work ahead, • shared their current state of being with others in a fun, physical way, instead of in a verbal, intellectual one, and • connected to others’ current psychophysical states by simply observing/bearing witness to everyone’s Silly Walk performances. Terms to Know: Michael Chekhov—Russian actor, director, and beloved student of Stanislavsky who developed innovative acting techniques—believed every character (and every person) has an “Imaginary Center,” an area located in the body where impulses originate. This center initiates and leads the body in the world. And we have a “Root,” an imaginary bond of energy that connects our center to the earth. Energy flows through your root—up, down, and outwards—and has four relationships to gravity (molding, flowing, flying, and radiating) aligning with the elements (earth,

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water, air, and fire/light) that determine how your root/energy moves (physiologically and psychologically) and the degree of resistance your root experiences.

Running the Exercise 1. Ask participants to find their personal center. To do so, they must first find their neutral, balanced physical state of relaxed readiness, free of tension but ready to respond. We call this “centering.” There are many ways to get participants to center themselves (e.g., tension/release exercises, Yoga). Please find centering exercises that work for your group of participants. 2. Then, ask participants to point to their personal “Imaginary Center” (as defined above) and imagine standing on a mirror and that a root of energy connects their center to the same center in their mirrored image. 3. Now ask participants, what is your relationship to gravity today? How are you rooted right now? When you move does it feel like you are molding through the world, flowing, flying, or radiating? Don’t judge it, just be curious about it. If time allows, have the group explore each relationship to gravity before determining their present state of being. Side-coach them through each quality as follows: a. Molding: Imagine your root weighed down, planted in the ground; move through the space as if you are plowing a field, moving through wet clay, each movement molding the surrounding space; you are supporting yourself, dragging your root, using every bone and muscle in your body; you’ve arrived, replant your root. b. Flowing: Imagine being submerged under a body of water; the water is moving around you; you are floating in the space; your root is connected to the earth but also to the sky; it is fairly easy to pick up your root and move; energy flows upward, outward, and downward; your movements merge gently and beautifully, one into another; let the space support you; you’ve arrived, replant your root.

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c. Flying: Imagine flying through space; your root is not bound by gravity; you are rooted upward; you are so light you have to work to reconnect your root to the earth; continuously vary your tempos; you’ve arrived, replant your root. d. Radiating: Imagine a large fire; step into that fire, it will not harm you; send rays of light from your body into the space around you, in the direction of the movement you make; let your radiation move through others, beyond this space; you’ve arrived, replant your root. 4. Next, ask participants to explore “Silly Walks” initiated by their personal center’s current relationship to gravity. Ask them to follow impulses radiating from their center. Provide an example like, “If it is difficult to lift your root out of the earth and move from one part of the room to other, if it feels like you are plowing a field, then your relationship to gravity is probably ‘molding.’ Create a Silly Walk in the molding state, which might be rhythmically slow, dragging, and more weighted down.” a. Remind participants that once they start playing, their relationship to gravity may change. For example, they may initially feel very heavy, but after exploring a bit, they might feel lighter, perhaps moving toward flowing or beyond. This is absolutely fine. Remind them to explore how their Silly Walk changes according to their gravitational pull. It is okay to stay rooted where they are, as well. b. Music: try underscoring the exploration with instrumental music that inspires big, physical gestures. Remember the music will likely influence responses. You might try switching between three or four different types of music, with different tempos, or consciously select music that moves participants in a lighter direction, if that is the goal. While not necessary, music can help some participants get out of their heads and into their bodies. 5. After two minutes of exploration, ask participants to rejoin the group. Then have each participant share their personal “Silly Walk,” underscored by music (or not), entering and exiting the real or virtual space. Allow about thirty seconds for each Silly Walk performance.

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Debrief Because this is a nonverbal exercise, first ask participants whether or not they would like to talk about their experience. Often participants are excited to share not only what they discovered about themselves but also what they witnessed in others. On the other hand, this exercise, even with the Silly Walk component, can unearth some deep emotional discoveries, so you might also give participants the option to simply reflect and journal alone for a few minutes. If the group is eager to debrief, here are some prompts that focus participants on the immediate experience and its application: • What did you discover about yourself? • Did you begin with one relationship to gravity and move to another during your exploration? Was this intentional? • How did the music help or distract you? • How might you apply what you discovered in this exercise to your creative process, daily life, or to the work you do with others? • What was your experience witnessing others in their Silly Walk performances?

Online Delivery This exercise was created for an online platform but works very well for in-person workshops, too. When facilitating it online, give participants the option of turning off their cameras if they would like to explore and create their Silly Walk without being watched. For the performance portion, have everyone but the person performing turn off their cameras. Connections: Theresa Robbins Dudeck created this exercise in the summer of 2020 for her online applied impro class at Artists Repertory Theatre (Portland, Oregon) after she noticed participants having difficulty expressing, in words, what they were feeling in the midst of the pandemic. As a fan of Monty Python’s anarchic comedy and Michael Chekhov’s acting techniques, Theresa borrowed from both to create a nonverbal,

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pleasurable way to “check-in” that would encourage participants to become consciously aware of and curious about their present state of being and, instead of judging it, use it as a springboard to creativity. Moreover, the Silly Walk performances allow a group to connect with each other on an emotional, compassionate level rather than an intellectual one. Try Spolin’s Space Walk II (Support and Effort) exercise as another way to explore relationships to gravity (1999: 80–1).

B.2 Matrix Madness/You In this exercise, participants try to meet competing demands simultaneously, replicating the feeling often described by those working in a matrixed organization. Individuals and groups quickly learn and create new ways of interacting to be successful. This exercise is also a “brain fry” (overloading them with too much incomplete or contradictory information) and usually results in participants feeling a greater sense of possibility afterward. By the end of this exercise, participants will have … • focused intently on their partners, • challenged themselves to do the seemingly impossible, • developed greater self-awareness around how they handle competing priorities, and • identified tactics to help them better navigate a matrixed organization.

Running the Exercise 1. Have participants stand in a circle. 2. Identify one person in the circle to be the Starter. 3. Create the first pattern (You): a. Explain that they are going to create a pattern initiated by the Starter in which everyone is pointed to once. b. Ask everyone to raise one hand to signify they have not yet been added to the pattern. (Once they have been pointed to, they can lower their hands.)

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c. Ask the Starter to make eye contact with someone across the circle, point to them, and clearly say “You.” Then instruct that person to lower their hand, make eye contact with someone new in the circle, point to them and say, “You.” Continue like this until everyone gets the “you.” The last person selected points to the Starter, completing the pattern. d. Practice that exact same pattern a few times by asking the Starter to again point to the same person as before, clearly saying “you,” and so on. 4. Add a second pattern (Breakfast Foods): a. Tell them they’re going to create a new pattern using the same procedure. Try not to point to the same person this time. The category is Breakfast Foods. b. Ask them again to raise one hand to signify they have not yet been added to the pattern. c. The Starter will make eye contact with someone (else) across the circle, point to them and say a kind of breakfast food (e.g., “pancakes”). That person will then make eye contact with someone new, point to them and say another kind of breakfast food (“toast”), and so on until everyone gets a breakfast food. The last person points to the Starter. d. Practice that second pattern a few times. 5. Do both patterns at the same time! a. Repeat the first You pattern to refresh their memories. b. Repeat the second Breakfast Food pattern. c. Once participants are somewhat comfortable with each pattern, ask the Starter to start both patterns simultaneously. 6. Add a third pattern (custom category) a. Follow the same instructions as above using any category, ideally one that is relevant to the participants (e.g., car parts for a car manufacturing company). b. Once the third pattern has been created, practice it a few times.

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7. Do all three patterns at once. a. Review the You pattern. b. Review the Breakfast Foods pattern. c. Review the third pattern. d. Ask the Starter to start all three at the same time.

Debrief 1. Ask them to turn to the person next to them and share how this activity feels like a regular day at work. 2. Hold a full group discussion to hear some of those responses. 3. Collect on a flip chart what skills they needed to be successful at the activity. 4. Ask them to turn back to their partner (or small group) and share how these same skills would be applicable to their day-to-day challenges.

Suggestions Side-coach them that it is the sender’s responsibility to make sure the communication is received; if the recipient is initially distracted and misses what you send, send it again. And again. As needed, stop the exercise to review each pattern separately—the intention is to keep the game challenging but not so hard that they cannot learn ways to succeed. Finally, some people will never understand how the activity works, which can be included in the debrief—what did the group have to do to manage that? The exercise can be played simultaneously in multiple circles (six to twelve people/circle).

Online Delivery Online delivery works remarkably well. For the first pattern, say the person’s name (rather than pointing to them and saying “you”). Use the chat box for the second pattern (e.g., the Starter will type a person’s name and a breakfast food, then that person

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will type another person’s name and another breakfast food, and so on; once the pattern is established, they only need to type in the food, not the person’s name). Try a physical gesture for the third pattern. Connections: In ComedySports the exercise is called “Where is the Celery?” Caitlin McClure learned it at BATS Improv in San Francisco and adapted it to a business context.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Theresa Robbins Dudeck, PhD, is a theatre scholar-practitioner with expertise in improvisation and applied improvisation. She works globally, in both professional and academic settings, applying the power of impro to pedagogy, leadership, teamwork, collaborative creation, and social change. She was a recent US Fulbright Scholar in Brazil and is considered one of the foremost teachers of Keith Johnstone’s Impro System. Theresa wrote the critically acclaimed Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography and is co-director/executive producer of the YouTube docuseries “On Keith: Artists Speak on Johnstone & Impro.” She co-founded the Global Improvisation Initiative, an international symposium focused on theatrical improvisation. Theresa lives in Portland, Oregon. Caitlin McClure has been researching, studying, performing, directing, and teaching improv and applied improv since 1995. Her formative years were spent at BATS Improv in San Francisco and studying with Keith Johnstone. At Caitlin McClure & Company, she works primarily in the corporate sector as a coach, designer, and facilitator, helping leaders around the world to live and work according to the tenets of the improv. Her MA is in Adult Learning and Leadership from Columbia University. She lives in New Rochelle, New York. Theresa and Caitlin edited the first volume in this series, Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre, in 2018.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers that refer to figures are in italics; numbers in bold refer to tables. activism/activists 252, 254 dementia 275 grassroots 171 performance 18, 246, 249, 258 playful 247, 259 social 10, 114, 249, 250 theatre 255 activities see Exercises and Games Adams, Kenn 220, 223 n.2 Adams, Lesley 295 adaptation 100, 119, 122, 175, 188–9, 194–6, 202, 246, 247 climate science 18, 297 n.8, 282, 283, 284, 287, 291, 294 Adner, Zohar 295 AI Open Space community 86 Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science 142 All Stars Project, Inc. 260 n.2, 260 n.8 All Stars Talent Show Network 232 Alms, Eric 222 Alon, Uri 220, 221 Alrutz, Megan 160 Alzheimer’s disease see dementia American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) 135 American Psychiatric Association (APA) 136 Anderson, Mia Y. 229

Angelou, Maya 294 anxiety 7, 9, 19 n.5, 84 n.10, 110, 113, 116, 131, 259 social 136–9, 142–3, 145–6 n.8, 147 teen 17, 135 Applied Improvisation (AI) consideration for facilitators 11–14 cycle of practice, application, and reflection 15 defined 4–5 designing your own experience 14–15 Applied Improvisation mindset 5–7, 12, 14–15 defined 4–5 Applied Improvisation Network (AIN) 262, 282, 284, 296, 296 n.1 applied performance 97, 99, 103, 106, 110, 112, 115 n.7 archetypes 35–6, 36 Artists Repertory Theatre (Portland, Oregon) 10, 313 Arts Academy in the Woods (AAW) 135 The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) 271 attunement 107, 115 n.6, 200 audience

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INDEX

connecting with 41–2 debriefing 92 gathering and assessing needs of 25 performance of 269 authenticity 4, 14, 15, 26–7, 29, 37, 54, 55, 75, 167, 180, 239, 249, 262, 302, 303 authority 32, 35, 47, 149 autonomy 167, 196 Bachofen, Carina 295 Bahrwani, Sukaina 295 BATS Improv 317 behavioral therapy 19 n.5 Belleville, Mike 273 biculturalism 155 bilingualism 155 Bing, Dave 128 BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) 7–8, 20 n.7 Black Lives Matter movement 7, 113 Blader, Steven 32 Boal, Augusto 106, 119, 269, 285 body as instrument 25, 27, 52 body language 89, 190, 219, 299, 301 (see also nonverbal communication) Bogart, Anne 8–9 Boyatzis, Richard 6 Boyd, Neva 70 BRACED (Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters) 284, 285, 295 brain alpha and beta brainwaves 111 fry 314 narrative circuitry 121 and neural circuits 6

(see also neuroscience) bravery 74, 220 be brave, 64, 74, 157 space, 13, 15, 156, 157, 159. 171 (see also psychological safety) breathing exercises 98, 105–6 Brown, Brené 302–3 Brown, Stuart 70 Bruener, Jerome 38 Burke, Pamela 63, 90 cabotinage 215 Cambridge Science Festival 240 Campbell, Larry Joe 128 caregivers 265–6, 270–2 Carson Brainset States inventory 72 Carson, Jennifer 274 Castellini, Angelina 295 Castillo Theatre 278 Catapult College 16–17, 24–52 centering 311 change of behavior patterns 6, 31, 101, 106 culture 239–41, 250, 266 disruption and 2, 6 organizational/institutional 10, 16, 78 political 246, 250 social 8, 17, 246, 247, 252, 255, 318 willingness to 3, 8, 202, 303 (see also climate change) Changing Real Objects exercise 203 chaos, finding balance in 52 Chekhov, Michael 10, 310, 313 Chen, Ya-Ru 32 Chenot, Pat 24 circle of probability 302, 305

INDEX

climate learning 12, 14, 67, 193, 241, 303 political 170 climate change 8, 51, 282, 287, 294, 296 n.1 adaptation to 283, 287, 291 intervention 18 Close, Del 213, 244 coaching see side coaching cocoons 18, 123, 216–17, 221 co-creation 137, 155, 208, 250, 263, 283 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) 114 n.3, 136, 138 cognitive decline 18, 272 (see also dementia) cognitive dissonance 139 Cole, Jordan 107 Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) 145 n.5 ComedySports 317 comfort zone 29, 31, 54, 85 conflict, resolving 44, 73, 91, 92, 221, 227, 254–5, 272, 281 Connected Futures initiative 144 consciousness 102, 107, 217 Copeau, Jacques 215 Covid-19 pandemic 7, 51, 86, 112–13, 143, 197, 259, 275, 287, 294 creative abrasion 73, 74, 91 culture academic 171, 210, 221 building 25 changing 239–41, 250, 266 cultural competency, 154, 294 cultural norms, 67 cultural pluralism 154 cultural wealth 154, 158, 166, 169, 170–1

333

curiosity 69, 71, 137, 230 Curl, Margot 295 Davis, Miles 213 Dawson, Karen 78 Dawson, Kathryn 156 debrief and reflection importance of 15, 75, 100, 185, 292 purpose of 30, 79, 101, 111, 296 n.3 reflection and action 106 sample questions 55, 57, 60, 89, 92, 94, 118, 121, 148, 150, 174, 176, 199–201, 203, 225, 227, 243, 277, 279, 299, 313, 316 self-assessments 15, 71–2, 145–6 n.8 self-reflection 8, 80, 86, 185, 196 “temperature” check 156 tips 31, 45, 58, 82, 84, 305 about the Workbook debriefs 307 DeMaisons, Ted 295–6 dementia 18, 265–75 holistic, humanistic care for 273–4 statistics 275–6 n.1 as “tragedy narrative” 272–5 Dementia Action Alliance Advisory Board 273 Dementia Engagement, Education, and Research program 274 DePace, Angela 230, 238, 239, 240, 241 n.2 depression 9, 79, 131, 139, 145–6 n8, 256, 265 Detroit Creativity Project (DCP) 128 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 136

334

INDEX

DiSC 27 discomfort 29, 50, 55, 67, 99, 279 diversity in/of groups 65, 76, 81, 168, 232, 267, 292, 293 in perspectives and ideas 64, 73–5, 79–80, 94, 275, 282, 289, 291, 302 Drag Kings, Sluts & Goddesses (cabaret show) 232–3 “drip by drip” and “thunderclap” experiences 16, 240 Du Preez, Janet 108–9, 122 Dweck, Carol 3, 6 East Side Institute 246–52 Edmondson, Amy 14, 50 Edwards, Nancy Hayden 131 Edwartowski, Margaret 130, 131, 141 EMBA program 65, 85 emergence/emergent conditions 1, 12, 79, 183, 246, 251, 253, 268, 283 emotional intelligence 5, 9, 111, 305 empathy 73, 74, 111, 131, 193 empowerment 135, 250, 255, 266, 286 of teachers 14 engagement 104, 108, 168, 187, 219, 282, 289, 291, 292, 294 authentic 14 community 113–14 n.1, 144, 287 student 133, 138–41 English as a Second Language (ESL) programs 154 equity 7, 8, 155, 289 Erichsen, Nicole 208–9, 209 exercises and games Ad Game 244 Answer with Your Feet 285, 288

Appreciative Inquiry 78 Argue Like a Philosopher 74, 90–2 Bag Exercise 235 Ball Exercise 67–8, 87 n.2 Be a Beginner 70 Building a Story 152 Changing Real Objects 203 Climate Message 288, 297 n.7 Closing Circles 288 Clown 12345 warmup 252–4, 260 n.4 Color/Advance 41, 59–61, 80 Conducted Story 151–2 Constructive Debate 74, 74, 92–6 Conversation with a Time Traveler 73 Count How High 73, 81 Describe a Room 177 Dr. Know-It-All 149–50 Drawing the Line 200–1 Elevator 137 Enemy/Defender 285 Eyewitness Story 144 Failure Bow 260 n.5, 279 The Farming Juggle 287, 288 Five-Sentence Story 220 Fruit exercise 235 Gibberish 269 Giving Presents 285 Gravitational Silly Walk 10, 310–14 Group Mirror 235 Hello I Am, Hello I Am, Hello I Am 279–80 Here’s What I Heard 44–5, 56–8 Hype (Wo)Man 261–3 “I Like, I Wish, I Wonder” 288 Introduce Yourself 175 Kitty Wants a Corner 70 Language games 248

INDEX

The Lawyer 202–3 Learn to Be Looked At 215–16, 218, 224–6 Listening to the City 78 Lists 218 Matrix Madness/You 13, 203, 203, 314–17 Meeting the Monster 220, 303 Mingle 129 Mirror 73 Mirror/Follow the Follower 108, 285 Moving Stories 116–19 Name and Motion 156, 175 New Choice 280 Object Moving Players 148 Open Space technology 78 Part of a Whole 148 Party Endowments 226 Pass the Clap 269, 278–9 Patterns 178 Performance of an Audience 269, 277–8 Performing Curiosity Bookstore 70, 70, 88–90 The Pineapple 198–200 Portrait 75 Quick Draw (The Eyes) 201 Radical Relationality 263–4 Sensory Awareness 199–200 SNAP! 148, 285, 288, 298–300 Snap, Clap, Stomp, Cheer! 260n4, 288 Space Shaping 148 Space Walk II 314 Stats 175, 287, 297 n.6 Status Party 226–7 Status Pass 34–8, 227 Status Picnic 30–3, 226–7 Story Circles 163–5, 164, 177–8 Story Spine 39–41, 220, 223 n.2 Story-Story-Die 152

335

Story Walk 220 Swedish Story 195 Tangible Concept 110, 113, 120–3 Ten Commandments 78 Tour of a Space 161–2, 162, 172 n.8, 175–7 Truth About Me 157–9, 173–5 Tug of War 137, 147–58, 300 Upside-Down Introductions 175, 276 n.4 We Can Sell Anything 235–7, 242–4 What Are You Doing? 203 Where is the Celery? 317 Whoosh Bang Pow 260 n.5, 279 Word-at-a-Time 218, 222–3 n.1, 288 Word-at-a-Time Expert 150 World Café 78, 80, 83 Yes, And/Yes, But 73, 75, 81, 83, 90, 115 n.6, 269, 272, 288 Zip Zap Zop 238, 288 experimentation 25, 71, 82, 105, 106, 108, 109, 116, 214, 241, 296 n.3 exposure therapy 136 eye contact 30–1, 37, 47, 68, 75, 256, 263–4, 278, 291, 315 facilitation skills 82–4, 195, 288, 292 developing dialogic practice 191–3 and facilitators 12–14, 168–9, 292 intervention strategies 193 failure 3, 7, 113, 212–13, 221, 241, 253, 302, 304 (see also mistakes) feedback 15, 26, 48–9, 78, 80, 81–2, 84, 234, 238–9, 288–9

336

INDEX

Felsman, Peter 127, 135, 142 Flagler, Moriah 153, 175 Floyd, George 7 Forum Theatre 291–2 Freire, Paulo 191 Fridley, Mary 265 games see exercises and games Garza, Carmen Lomas 158 gender issues 174, 227 George, William 98 Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Themes (Ohio State University) 171 global humanitarian sector 18, 282 innovation in 284–6 twenty-first-century needs 293–5 Godin, Seth 16, 240 Goleman, Daniel 6 growth mindset theory 3, 6 Hagenlocker, Beth 130 Hamtramck HS improv troupe 143–4 Harris, Leah 171 n.4 Harvard Medical School 18, 230, 241 Havas Health 24 Holmes, Raquell 229, 241 n.2 Holzman, Lois 247, 250, 254, 257 Hoogenrad, Renatus 296 hooks, bell 14, 161, 191 Huffaker, Julie 78 Huizinga, Johan 246 humanitarian sector see global humanitarian sector humanitarian work 283 (see also global humanitarian sector) Hunter, Kate 106 identity 27, 157, 160, 163, 171 n.3, 174, 246

Image Theatre 119 imagination 9, 69, 72, 99, 116, 119, 148, 212, 224, 231, 242, 298, 303, 321 Impro Theatre 177 The Improv Project 17 (see also Detroit Creativity Project (DCP)) improvisation 19 n.2 defined 182–3 disciplined 15 gym as metaphor for 9, 24, 28, 30, 38, 48, 50, 51, 66, 69, 81, 252 (see also tenets of improvisation) improvisation mindset applying to the current moment 7–11 defined 2–4 values intrinsic to 19 improvscience 231–3 IMRaD Model (Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion) 219–20 inequity/inequality economic 51 racial 282 resource 283 social 153, 255, 283 Infante, Cathy 24, 25 inner censor/judge 29, 31, 208, 217–18, 221 intelligence 3, 28 collective 79, 291 emotional 5, 9, 111, 305 inter/intrapersonal 5 kinesthetic 5, 120 social 5, 6 Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) theory 114 n.3 International Class of the East Side Institute 18

INDEX

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) 296 n.1 (see also Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre [RCCC]) Ison, Ray 283 Jackson, Marc Evan 128 Jackson, Paul Z 296, 300 Janse van Vuuren, Petro 97 “Jazz Freddy” 75 jazz musicians 186, 189, 192–3 Jedrusiak, Jason 252 Jjemba, Eddie 296 Johnstone, Keith 5, 19 n.5, 19 n.6, 31, 32, 150, 159, 203, 213, 214, 219, 285, 302, 304, 305, 308 justice 155 racial 144, 259 social 153, 255, 283 Kashdan Curiosity and Exploration Inventory 71 Key, Keegan-Michael 128, 131, 143 Kirsten, Burgert 110 Kline, Nancy 108, 114–15, 217 knowledge(s) 171 n.1 Koelle, Bettina 281 Koppett, Kat 23, 296 Kramer, Gregory 114 Kruger, Ester 111 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 104 Lahav, Galit 230, 233–40, 241 n.2 Lambin, Jeanne 296 Landy, Robert 106 Langer, Ellen 2, 18 Latinx students 171 n.3 laughter, benefits of 9–10 leadership development 12–13, 16, 24, 30, 48, 64, 103, 109, 110–12

337

learning action 101, 110 experiential 5, 6, 15, 68, 284, 287, 296 n.3 habituation 137 Kolb’s experiential model 296 n.3 nonlinear 214, 221 Social and Emotional (SEL) 131, 135, 145 n.5 Lee, Bridget 156 Lewis, John 8 listening, active or responsive 4, 41–5, 49, 55–9, 68, 73–5, 81, 90–2, 111, 157, 173, 190, 195, 198, 237, 255, 263, 269, 301 Lobman, Carrie 245 Logan, Dave 108 Lösel, Gunter 207, 209 Luna, Rafael 219 marginalization of identity 163 of populations 8, 154, 156, 250 Massad, Susan 265 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) 290 McChrystal, Stanley 32–3 McDermott, Phelim 2 McLaren, Peter 15 Meadows, Tim 143 memory loss see dementia Mendler de Suarez, Janot 296 Mercado, Gabe 296 metaphor 9, 25, 30, 41, 50, 212, 220 metaskills 2 Michigan Arts Education Instruction and Assessment (MAEIA) Performance Standards 133, 145 n.5 mindfulness 17, 69, 94–115

338

INDEX

“Ministry of Silly Walks” (Monty Python) 10, 310 Minor, Jerry 128 Mischel, Walter 26, 27 mistakes and creativity 253–4 dealing with 213 embracing 213, 221, 252–3 fear of making 14, 210 as gifts or offers 4, 216, 234, 304 and innovation 76 rethinking 214, 218, 253–4 willingness to make 34, 139 (see also failure) modeling behavior 14, 83, 224, 225, 238, 253, 254 Monroe, Maribeth 128 Monty Python 10, 310, 313 Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit 144 NASA 290, 297 n.8 neuroscience 101, 103, 111, 114–15 n.4, 122 (see also brain) Newman, Fred 247, 256, 278 No Mistakes Land 212–15, 220–2 nonlinear learning 214, 221 nonverbal communication 10, 35, 75, 200, 201, 218, 219, 225, 266, 293, 314 body language 89, 190, 219, 299, 301 “not knowing” 2, 83, 253 offers 3–4, 7, 10, 43, 45, 56, 58, 92, 157, 159, 173, 189, 216, 218, 232, 236, 242, 247, 249, 252, 254–9, 262–3, 270–1, 302, 304–5 Open Space technology 78 pedagogy/pedagogies critical 15, 227

culturally sustaining 154–71 drama-based 155, 156 engaged 14, 191 of games 214 informed by 12 studies of 5 performance coaching 46–7 expanding options for 28–9 flexibility in 33 human propensity for 26–8 practice 45–6 Performance of a Lifetime 278 performed conversations 269 Pert, Candace 211 Piaget, Jean 214 Pink, Daniel 108 Planet Ant Theatre 131 play/playfulness 21, 27, 49, 69, 70, 72, 246–7, 251, 252, 258, 259, 267–9, 270, 272–5, 293–4 generative 168 as radical act 18 role of in development 248 Powell, Tia 266 power see status Power to the People Mover 128 Poynton, Robert 190 presence (being present) 3, 10, 82, 98, 105, 107, 113, 200, 215, 235, 254, 256, 266 presentation skills 25–6, 38–9, 45–7, 237–9 psychological safety 14, 53 n.8, 91 (see also bravery) Raffy, Belina 296 Red Cross Climate Centre 293, 296 Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC) 282, 284–6, 287, 296 n.1 reflection see debrief and reflection

INDEX

Reimagining Dementia: A Creative Coalition for Justice 275 relationship building 78 relationship skills 145 n.5 relaxation 109, 190, 215, 216, 311 resilience 7, 9, 18, 104, 114 n.2, 281, 284, 286, 298 responsive listening see listening, active or responsive Rich, Marian 245 Richardson, Sam 128 risk taking 13–4, 28, 120, 140, 156–7, 163–4, 269 (see also bravery) Rock, David 114–15 n.4 Rogers, Carl 217 Roginson, Tim 128 Rowe, Aimee Carrillo 160 safe space 14, 157, 168 (see also psychological safety) Salit, Cathy 65, 70 Sawyer, Keith 12, 65, 75–6, 196 scaffolding 69, 73 Schools of Choice policy (Michigan) 139, 146 n.9 Second City Chicago 131 Second City Detroit 128, 131, 139, 141 Second City improv theatre 128, 150 self-awareness 28, 71, 81, 105–6, 139–40, 145 n.5, 314 Short, Patrick 296 side-coaching 41, 59–60, 67, 78, 83, 131, 147, 172 n.8, 176, 235, 253, 256, 263, 304 Simpson, Lee 2 Slack channel 287 social and emotional learning (SEL) 131, 135, 145 n.5 (see also learning) social anxiety see anxiety social intelligence 5, 6

339

Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) 145–6 n.8 social therapeutics 232, 247–9, 254, 258, 259, 267 soft focus 190 Sorensen, Nick 179 Spanish for Heritage Speakers 17, 155 spect-actors 106 Spolin, Viola 5, 18, 108, 148, 150, 152, 214, 235, 302, 308, 314 spontaneity 4, 50, 72, 154–71, 208, 285 Sprick, Kirsten 296 stage fright 19 n.5, 208, 215 status 31–3, 218–19, 226–7, 304 defined 304 giving and taking 33–4 and power 31, 32, 76, 119, 159, 160, 259, 281, 285, 286 Stevens Institute of Technology 64, 85 Stobbe, Karen 274 STORI arc of change 104–10, 104, 112–13 StoryCenter 155 storytelling 25, 38, 48, 155–6, 163–4, 167–71, 170, 175, 219–20 strategic accomplices 155, 171 n.4 Strategic Narrative Embodiment (SNE) 98, 99, 101, 103–4 stress causes of 99, 169, 287 decreasing 9, 97, 114 n.2, 116 disorders related to 265 response to 114 n.4 in youth 135 Suarez, Pablo 296, 300 subtractive schooling 154, 161, 171 Systems Biology program (Harvard) 230

340

INDEX

teacher skills See facilitation skills tenets of improvisation 301–5 active or responsive listening 301 (see also listening, active or responsive) be obvious xii, 212, 301–2 circle of probability 302, 305 commit 4, 10, 67–8, 75, 236, 252, 302 give and take 33, 37, 235, 302, 303 give up control 8, 14, 217, 224–5, 271, 302–3 leap before you look 195, 303 meet the monster 220, 303 make your partner look good 4, 41, 73, 75, 216, 261, 303, 305 offer/block/accept 304–5 (see also offers) right to fail/mistakes are gifts 304 (see also mistakes) side coaching 304 (see also side coaching) Yes, And 304–5 (see also status) theatre language 82, 87 n.3, 268 Theatre of the Oppressed 119, 269, 291 Theatresports 150, 152 Tint, Barbara 281 Tisdale, Sallie 274 TRAILS (Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students) 136

transformation 4, 8, 9, 14, 16, 18, 27, 72, 97, 103, 106, 112, 114, 134, 187 transformative teleology 187 trust 138, 160, 208, 258, 272, 301 building 32–3, 34, 51, 75, 137, 141, 220, 264, 303 mutual 4, 14, 186, 216–17 in the process 77, 79, 84, 104 in self 84 Tyszkiewicz, Mary 296 uncertainty 2, 4, 11, 18, 136, 139, 283, 284 University of Michigan, study on The Improv Project 137–40 University of Zurich (UZH) 18, 208 utopian thinking 15, 19 Veenstra, Tiger 127 vulnerability 14, 73, 140, 158–61, 263 Vygotsky, Lev 248 Weinstein, Matt 262 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 248 Y Arts Detroit 130, 141, 143 Yeager, Lisa 296 Zaffon, Steve 108 Zeng, Cheng 259

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342

343

344

345

346