Improvisation
“This may be the most commonly used technique. The improvisation can be done starting from a basic outline or not.
In Guayaquil, the Student Theatre presented a show on a serious problem for this city in particular and for the whole country in general, which was (and still is) the problem of unemployment. With so little work and so many people unemployed, large numbers of men and women consider emigration to the US. Given the quantity of people who want to do this, the yankee consulate puts every possible obstacle in their way, demanding, amongst other things, an examination of the faeces of every applicant. As hygiene conditions in Guayaquil are not of the best, there is a lot of water pollution and this results in the majority of inhabitants’ shit not being of the highest standard, from the yankee-medico point of view. But there was one man in the city who was the creator of the most perfect shit in all the land, in which no yankee could find even the smallest non-permissible microbe. His shit was a marvel. As might be expected, the gentleman ended up living off his own excrement he ended up becoming his own factory, he industrialised his product selling small quantities in match-boxes to all interested in emigration. The scenes, improvised within this general outline, showed the day to day problems arising from this phenomenon: the consul discovered the ruse and demanded that all future defecation should take place within the actual consul premises, and be caught in little jars sealed with the yankee eagle etc. The whole show was based on improvisation and was open to modification according to any new tactics adopted by the consulate, and to the responses to these invented by the people.
Improvisations can be performed as shows in front of an audience, as well as being technique and development for the actors, especially when the latter are workers or students who do not wish to become actors themselves but simply to act. Improvisation serves to get to know the enemy better: for instance, before a meeting with the management, the workers can improvise it, with some worker-actors taking the parts of the boss, the deputy, the manager, etc.” Augusto Boal
Boal is writing how the Newspaper theatre had two distinctive purposes. The first one was the one of giving the means of production of theatre into the hands of the people. By his definition “the people” are the oppressed – those who are selling their labour (primarily workers and peasants), as well as those connected to them (most notably in the aftermath of ‘68 the students). And while the popular theatre was present in Brasila as well as in many other Latin American countries, that theatre was created from the popular perspective, usually aimed at the audience of the people, but Newspaper theatre was a set of techniques that allowed the people to create their own shows. In that way, improvisation was originally more aimed to allow the people to put any type of a story on stage, rather than focus closely on the relationship between the news and its interpretation. The reading of newspaper, or any of the other techniques, can be the trigger for improvisation, and the improvisation can be developed from there into new performances.
Improvisation is a time-old method that can be used with any type of input. We have experimented with social media videos that we first recreated, and then developed further through improvisation. For example, we started from the social media video that showed a person being interviewed in the street, who said that they don’t support migration, because people should be solving their economic problems in their own country. The group that was participating in the workshop consisted of migrants who came to Croatia for different reasons, and they focused on the idea of “solving economic problems at home”.
So they improvised how the situation at home is – them trying to solve their “economic problems” in the middle of the war, or in the deep poverty caused by climate crisis or colonial exploitation. The improvisation continued by reversing the roles and investigating how Croatian people, who are leaving Croatia in search of a better life (i.e. solving their economic problems abroad), are treated in Germany or Ireland. The improvisation was also used in replaying a short video that became popular on social media where a foreign worker was interviewed about the date of completion f the road he was working on. Not understanding the language he just kept repeating “the boss is good”. Thus was further developed in the improvisation to point to the exploitation and corruption that kept the media of exploring it further.
Improvisation can be a great tool for initial exploration of topics, especially with groups that don’t have much experience with theatre. Rather then isolating specific components, it provides the freedom of playing around with the prompt and bringing in the elements that might not be present in the original text, and which might point to the more central topic for the group. Improvisation allows for the opening of innate creativity and playfulness, that are vital for people to have the confidence in their ability to make theatre.