Bringing Life to Online Meetings: Using Improv to Enhance Virtual Collaboration

Background

It’s tempting to associate improv with non-stop laughter. Or at least a handful of guffaws. But quality improv reveals an array of emotions, and most laughter is generated from unexpected discoveries within a realistic scene. To arrive at a laugh, the ensemble must first create a world recognizable to the audience. This requires the creation of characters with tangible relationships (Madson, 2005). These links are often mundane – think mothers and daughters. Or doctors and patients. Most everyday conversations, at heart, are lively exercises in improvisation.

Improv is best defined in opposition to another type of performance: Stand-up comedy. The author has spent time in both worlds, and his few years in stand-up comedy remain a harrowing memory of self-loathing and isolation. The stand-up comic recites the same joke or story for months, refining each pause and mannerism, in a desperate act to preserve the oral history of a culture of one. Improv, however, requires a collective effort. Stand-up is a monologue; improv is a symphony.

Amid the eccentric world of improv, participants are often divided over the appellations of “theater” versus “comedy.” The former adds an air of intrigue to an otherwise silly event. The latter, alas, is easier to market to paying audiences. We’ll define improv here as unscripted theater, in which small groups of performers create scenes, settings, and characters from scratch. Improv, too, can be performed in front of an audience or in a living room among friends. No tickets required.

And if the notion of unscripted acting sounds terrifying, it’s not! When performed with supportive teammates, it can be a source of great joy. The author has performed amateur improv for a decade and a half, and there is nothing more thrilling than introducing new participants to the medium. In its simplest form, known as “short form” improv, performers act within small, defined games that offer scaffolding for each scene. The television show Whose Line Is It Anyway? offer countless examples of “short form” exercises.

In its most advanced iteration, “long form” improv features an hour-long, seamless narrative with multiple settings. The recent Netflix series Middleditch and Schwartz offers an example of this niche art. The author once witnessed a group of eight performers sit on stools, turn off all the lights in the theater, ask the audience to close their eyes, and use their voices to create an improvised dramatic play. Settings shifted through song. Elaborate sound effects were created with voices and hands. It was remarkable. But improv needn’t be this complex.