Improvisational theater involves actors in a scene making everything up on the spot.
The practice is a mental exercise that challenges actors to perform in a way that advances the scene.
It proves to be useful offstage, as well.
Dr. Alicia Nordstrom, a Psychology Professor and local actor, uses it in her classes at Misericordia University.
“As an instructor, just having the experiential practice over and over and over is the biggest growth point that I see over the semester,” she said. “I feel like the class would absolutely not be the same without that kind of practice.”
She started implementing the extemporaneous exercise with a child therapy class. Two of her students will play the roles of therapist and child, and improvise a therapy session.
Nordstrom will sometimes pause the role play to do some side-coaching. She’ll ask the therapist in the scenario how they are feeling and invite the class to chime in with ideas and advice.
“Then, as the semester hits sort of the climax… I actually bring in an actor to come in and simulate being a parent of either an extremely difficult child, or a teenager with autism,” she said. “And then the students have to use their therapy skills to work with, we call it, a resistant parent."
That is a parent who is not very cooperative who is coming in with lots of negative emotion, she explained.
The first lesson in improv is “Yes, and.” The principle teaches performers to agree with what their scene partner says and add to it. In Nordstrom’s class, that “yes” validates the other person’s feelings and allows them to learn empathy.
“Especially if you have a resistant parent, you have to empathize, which isn't the same thing as agree,” she said. “But you have to empathize and try and discover what's underneath that.”
Improv in History Class
Dr. Allan Austin said he spends a lot of time talking to his students about historical empathy.
“If we really want to fully explore the past and get a fuller understanding of what it is, we can't just take our present selves and impose judgments upon it,” he said. “We need to at least understand where different groups are coming from.”
In Austin’s classes, his students take on historical figures and put themselves in scenarios from the past.
“Because I feel like students are a little bit reticent and nervous at first, I'll usually break them into groups. And I'll give them a couple of minutes to kind of work through how they want to do it,” he said. “And I’d kind of assign different roles across groups, and then have them talk to each other.”
Austin once prompted his American History students to portray the Lowell Mill Girls, young girls who came to Massachusetts to work in textile mills during the Industrial Revolution.
“It was an amazing outcome to me when you could feel students feeling it,” he said. “Like what does it mean to be a parent who's watching your daughter go off to work a factory job in a way that would have been inconceivable at any other point in your family's history.”
The students also learn confidence while immersing themselves in the historical and multicultural scenarios.
Austin and Nordstrom have worked together to portray President Bill Clinton and President Richard Nixon in front of a class. They consider it a form of storytelling.
Improv is often comedy with the goal of making people laugh while telling a coherent story. The professors say it increases communication skills and reduces anxiety.
"Improv is great that way," he said. "There's never a time we do improv in class where we're not rolling on the floor at some point because somebody has come up with something, and you're like, where did that come from?"
