Viola Spolin - Birth of American "Improv"

Birth of American "Improv"

In 1946 Spolin founded the Young Actors Company in Hollywood. Children six years of age and older were trained, through the medium of the still developing Theater Games system, to perform in productions. This company continued until 1955. Spolin returned to Chicago in 1955 to direct for the Playwright's Theater Club and, subsequently, to conduct games workshops with the Compass Players, the country's first professional, improvisational acting company. The Compass Players made theater history in America. It began in the backroom of a bar near the University of Chicago campus in the summer of 1955 and out of this group was born a new form: improvisational theater. They are said to have created a radically new kind of comedy. "They did not plan to be funny or to change the course of comedy", writes Janet Coleman. "But that is what happened."

From 1960 to 1965, still in Chicago, she worked with her son Paul Sills as workshop director for the Second City Company and continued to teach and develop Theater Games theory and practice. As an outgrowth of this work, she published Improvisation for the Theater, consisting of approximately 220 games and exercises. It has become a classic reference text for teachers of acting, as well as for educators in other fields.

In the early-1960s Viola Spolin took on an assistant and protégé, Josephine Forsberg, to help with her workshops at the Second City, as well as with her children's theatre that performed there on weekends. Viola Spolin eventually handed both the children's show and the improv classes over to Forsberg, who continued teaching Spolin's work at the Second City from the mid-1960s on, leading to the creation of Forsberg's own improv school, Players Workshop in 1971, as well as the Improv Olympic and the Second City Training Center in the 1980s, all of which were based on Spolin's work.

In 1965, with Sills and others, Spolin co-founded the Game Theater in Chicago, and around the same time organized a small cooperative elementary school (called Playroom School and later Parents School) with Sills and other families in the Chicago area. The theater and the school's classes sought to have audiences participate directly in Theater Games, thus effectively eliminating the conventional separation between improvisational actors and audiences. The theater experiment achieved limited success, and it closed after only a few months, but the school continued to use the techniques, alongside a regular elementary curriculum, well into the 1970s.