Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

Capturing Presence and Contemplation through Applied Improvisational Theater

Lauren Esposito

Abstract: This course design integrates the use of contemplative practices, specifically applied improvisational theater, into writing pedagogies to foster mindfulness and critical engagement. It explores the theoretical, neuroscientific, and practical rationale for incorporating contemplative pedagogies in writing classrooms, arguing that applied improv offers a unique framework for examining sociocultural and political contexts in writing instruction. Drawing on research in neuroscience, it demonstrates how applied improv promotes affective well-being, interpersonal skills, and rhetorical listening. By embracing uncertainty and cultivating resilience, students engage in contemplative practices and presence, challenging dominant discourses and power dynamics. The course design emphasizes the potential of applied improv to disrupt conventional teaching paradigms and empower students in their literacy learning. Through reflective analysis and student feedback, it evaluates the effectiveness and limitations of this approach in facilitating mindful engagement with writing and dismantling inequitable structures in education.

In their November 2022 episode for NPR’s Life Kit, Oluwakemi Aladesuyi and Audrey Nguyen explore what it’s like to use improvisational theater, or improv, in everyday life. They address the benefits of improv to build self-confidence, reduce social anxiety (Felsman et al.), and cope with uncertainty (Felsman et al.). Universities and colleges have responded to the uncertainties of the global pandemic and mounting social, economic, and political inequities that existed well before COVID, with greater attention to mindfulness, especially a deepening focus on presence and contemplation to assist with learning and well-being. In a recent issue of Composition Forum, Kate Chaterdon addresses how mindfulness can help students develop a metacognitive awareness of their own learning and of “their internal states in the present moment.” Contributing to this emphasis on mindful reflection and improv, I offer an approach that weaves together these two areas: building contemplative practices to rethink writing classrooms and learning core dispositions of improvisational theater for life off stage.

Approaches and Appropriation of Contemplation

As an improv performer and teacher for over a decade, I use improv techniques and principles in first-year and upper-level composition courses to heighten connection, concentration, and reflection. Improv is a form of unscripted, creative expression that requires performers to be highly mindful of what they observe on stage. It also requires a great deal of resiliency on the part of performers to adapt to uncertain circumstances and to respond in the moment since no one, including the audience, knows what will happen next. Performers learn to observe each other’s speech, sounds, movements, and actions to co-create in a shared space. Through improv exercises and class activities, I create individual and collaborative spaces for practicing this same type of observation and presence. I focus on what students are experiencing in the moment so that the emphasis is on what students are doing and saying in the here and now. I facilitate the exercises with the goal of tapping into embodied ways of creating. We work together to problem solve and to create stories and characters on the spot. This approach emphasizes literal, physical classroom space for students and teachers to practice interacting mindfully.

Applying improv in this way also sets up a theoretical space to slow down, reflect, and examine mindfulness within systems of education writ large, including assumptions about “epistemological and cultural beliefs, and ideological commitments” (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak). If mindfulness is about increasing awareness of one’s surroundings, these surroundings must also include environments, institutions, and contexts in which students and teachers work and learn. That requires being aware of material conditions, oppressions, and barriers that historically and presently affect students’ literacy learning, including dominant discourses and superstructures of race, gender, class, and ability (Kynard, Stayin Woke). Taking my cue from Carmen Kynard, Paulo Freire’s theories of critical consciousness, and bell hooks’ call to “teach to transgress,” I turn this approach on myself, my course design, and my use of mindfulness as a practice and as a framework for communal learning in a specific political, social, and economic context: I am a white, woman-identifying, cisgender teacher working at a Catholic, predominantly white institution. I work and teach on land stolen from Lenape Indigenous communities in Pennsylvania. Mindfulness, meditation, and contemplation are practices rooted in Indigenous and marginalized cultures that Eurocentric, colonizing forces have historically and violently worked to erase and silence, and that are continually ignored at many universities and colleges: How can I use mindfulness practices in teaching without acknowledging and challenging my complicity in this violence and erasure as a white teacher at an institution that has benefited from colonization? And without acknowledging the cultural capital I gain by publishing a course design about mindfulness? In an effort to answer these questions, I embrace Moya Bailey’s methodology for enacting feminist ethics in research and making explicit insights into course design as research. Bailey builds connections with Black trans women, a community in which Bailey is not immersed, and seeks the permission of collaborators in order to do just research (Bailey). Following Bailey’s example, I make my relationship to this research known and commit to collaborating with communities of which I am not a part, whose histories and cultures produce the work of mindfulness practices and contemplative pedagogies. While I make connections to mindfulness through improvisational theater, I am still a white teacher in Western institutional spaces with neoliberal goals and use mindfulness practices in ways that are often divorced from their origins. I have been changed by this research and commit to collaborating, seeking permission, and building connections with communities going forward. I shaped this research ethics retroactively, as this was not part of the original course design, in order to recognize my need to reflect, to acknowledge my responsibility and accountability in not perpetuating further harm, and to “do just research” through curriculum and pedagogy (Bailey).

Additionally, I continue to learn from Augusto Boal and Viola Spolin, each of whom envisioned theater as a means of liberation. Improv has been theorized as an anticolonial, non-hierarchical way of creating theater. My goal in applying improv to classroom spaces is to share aspects of learning improv as contemplative practices, while committing to a constant journey of unlearning and relearning the impact of white disciplinary practices and white language norms in the spaces I teach and work with students (Inoue). Mindfulness in education exists within power structures and material circumstances that impact students’ lives. To be a reflective practitioner, I ask myself and my students to consider who benefits from mindfulness and how, and how engaging with contemplation can lead to changes to their individual learning and systemic and structural changes.

Course Design

To explore improv as a contemplative practice, I offer a sequence of assignments from a specific upper-level composition course I have taught since 2019. This course, titled “Improv for Professional Writers,” emphasizes improv as a disposition for reflection and investigating alternative definitions of professional writing. In the third iteration of the course, I encouraged students to reflect on why they held specific beliefs about what professional writing is meant to do, and the extent to which limited definitions reinforce dominant narratives, perspectives, and white language norms. Here are two guiding questions that shape the course design and that I shared explicitly with students:

• How does improv (mindful observation, presence, contemplation, etc.) affect the way we relate to ourselves, others, and the world?

• How can we use improv as a contemplative and metacognitive tool to cultivate awareness of our learning and to apply that awareness to new contexts?

I followed up each assignment description with debriefing questions that I used to cultivate contemplation about students’ experiences with the improv exercises. In class, we spent the first 3–4 weeks of the semester practicing five core dispositions of improv (Bernard and Short):

• Listening and Observing

• Accepting ideas

• Supporting ideas

• Taking risks

• Letting go of mistakes

Students engaged in exercises typically taught in introductory improv courses: collaborative storytelling, mirroring exercises that invited them to speak and move in sync with another person without a script, and additional theater games from Viola Spolin to increase connection, collaboration, and communication as a group. We paused in between exercises and at the end of each class session to debrief these experiences through discussion and writing. I also assigned weekly writing responses to make space for students to gather and record their conclusions about improv and mindful observation, or presence. My goal was to guide students through synthesizing their experiential learning with improv in class and to encourage their application of improv as a mindfulness practice to real-life examples, experiences, and situations outside of the course. Students returned to class with written observations about what worked and what didn’t work when applying improv. Their responses were generative when making connections between in-class discussions about improv and course readings, including excerpts from Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater and selected chapters from Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure’s edited collection Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre. While I made the assignment goals explicit, I encouraged students to engage with their own ideas about improv and mindful observation. Below are three sample assignments:

Assignment #1: Being Present with “Yes, and”

In this first assignment [1], I asked students to explore the improv concept of “Yes, and,” which improvisers use to develop two core dispositions: accepting and supporting ideas. In class, we practiced “Yes, and” through several collaborative exercises, including telling a one-word-at-a-time story, and working with a partner to give a speech as one person by speaking the same words at the same time without making any plans beforehand. Through these exercises, which we did in class more than once on more than one occasion, I encouraged students to slow down and observe one another in order to collaboratively create a story with words, movements, and even images, or tableaux. The concept of “Yes, and” became a way for us to concretize or pinpoint what we were doing when we created a story, or text, together. It became a phrase students and I started to use in class to identify moments and interactions when we observed presence and mindful observation. Next, students completed the following assignment as part of a weekly writing response:

“Yes, and” is an improv concept we’ve used in class to create stories and scenes. It helps improvisers work together to build and connect ideas, and it shifts the focus to being present to what someone else is saying or doing. Now it’s time to try out this concept in everyday conversations and interactions.

This week I’d like you to practice applying the concept of “Yes, and” for 48 hours. Try to observe and possibly participate in conversations from a stance of “Yes, and.” Keep track of the other person’s reactions and your own. Does being present to this person’s ideas affect the conversations you have or the ones you observe between other people? Your practice can take the form of saying the words “Yes, and” or approaching the situation with a “Yes, and” mindset. You might even disagree with someone, and that’s okay. Before sharing your disagreement, can you pay attention to what they say and do, and still stay present to it? (Please note: Your safety and well-being are a top priority. I trust you’ll use your judgment to determine when it’s safe to use “yes, and” in a conversation.)

Here’s an example of what I mean: Seek out situations (on the phone, over a video call, or in person) in which a lack of “Yes, and” affects mindfulness and being present. Maybe one speaker changes topics without paying attention or only talks about themselves. Are they “Yes-anding” the other person’s ideas or not really paying attention?

Contemplation and Reflection:

After completing this assignment, students came to class with their observations and conclusions in writing or audio notes. I asked them to also include responses to these debriefing questions:

• How did your approach (or the approach you observed in others) impact the kinds of conversations and interactions that took place? Did you observe it open up or shut down communication in ways you found surprising, new, or unpredictable? Explain.

• Did “Yes, and” encourage mindful observation and presence during an interaction or conversation? If so, why? If not, why?

• Were you able to stay present to how the interaction or conversation unfolded, or were you thinking ahead to what you wanted to say or do next?

In class, students shared and discussed their findings in small groups first, and then in whole-class discussion. In groups, one student acted as a note-taker to record each group member’s response. Then, as a whole class, we discussed details they noticed about “being present” based on their observations. Bobbi, a young man in the course, explained how a specific warm-up exercise reminded him of what it was like to have a conversation from a stance of “Yes, and”: “Like in the zip, zap, zop game, when someone motioned that it was my turn, I had to be tuned into where they were at to see how I should respond.” Bobbi’s remark gave us a way of describing presence and reflected an awareness of being affected by his peers’ ideas and perspectives. It also reminded me that in making curricular and pedagogical choices, I am trying to challenge the way students relate to each other and to value their ability “to be tuned into where [someone] is at.”

Assignment #2: Observation Exercise

In an effort to build on students’ experiences of “Yes, and,” I assigned the next weekly response based on observation exercises we did in class first that included verbal and non-verbal communication. In small groups, we practiced carrying imaginary boxes of different heights and weights, or folding an imaginary blanket, for example, with as much believability as possible. I sometimes asked students to try the imagined activity without speaking, but by paying attention to each other’s movements so that it appeared they were carrying the same heavy box. Other times, I asked students to work together to cook an imaginary meal they both knew about, to take an imaginary dog for a walk, or to complete another activity of their choice without verbally narrating it. No matter the activity, we spent time discussing what it was like to stay present in these moments, before students worked on this next assignment:

Remember the observation exercises we did in class? This week please practice being present with others by observing non-verbal communication, particularly by paying attention with your whole body. (Observing someone else’s non-verbal cues– not just what they’re staying, how they are saying it– is a big part of improv; performers observe each other on stage to use this information in their scenes.) For the next 48 hours, try paying close attention to people you encounter, and if you choose, people in your work and/or personal life during conversations or interactions you have with them.

Please consider a range of observations that might include, but are not limited to the following: How might eye contact, physical proximity, body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, or movement feature into the practice of being present? Pay attention to the way you respond, but more importantly, how others respond to your behavior, and record your findings.

Contemplation and Reflection:

As with the previous weekly writing response, students returned to class with their observations and conclusions written up or recorded on a smartphone, laptop, or another recording device. I asked them to address these questions in their spoken or written responses:

• Did you find yourself feeling more or less present during this assignment? Why or why not?

• Did your feelings of presence, or non-presence, affect the way you interacted with others? Please explain.

• How did others respond to what you were saying or doing as a result of your behavior? For example, did their level of attention or presence change and/or match yours?

• How did this approach impact communication with the people you encountered overall? If it didn’t impact communication, why might that be?

Once students came to class with their responses to Assignment #2, I continued a set-up of small group to whole-group discussions, with note-takers, so that every student had a chance to share and discuss their findings. We also compared this assignment to the previous one using “Yes, and.” Students’ responses included insightful reflection and awareness. One group shared this response in their notes: “Non verbal communication… is always a baseline to establish transparency. Regarding work [in a chosen field] we need to acknowledge people’s non-verbal cultures without aggressive confrontation.” We discussed the danger of making judgments and assessments of non-verbal communication, and the ways in which these assessments are rooted in specific racialized understandings, and often deemed inferior against white norms and standards. Students decided that these assumptions contribute negatively to perpetuating “universal” definitions of professional writing that are culturally and racially driven. They used their written responses and reflections to build alternative definitions of professional writing that challenged standards of professionalism they were taught, including dress, hair, and language, all of which reflected a questioning of the status quo.

Assignment #3: Bringing it All Together

In the final weeks of the course, I spent time on reflective writing to draw connections across the work we had done throughout the semester. One of the assignments later in the semester was to respond to connections to future contexts that might benefit from practicing presence:

Now that we’re approaching the end of the semester, I’ll ask you to think back to different ways you’ve practiced “being present” throughout the semester and the impact of the core improv dispositions we encountered. How do these dispositions feature into your ability to be mindful? How might you apply the dispositions to writing and speaking situations outside this course—in a chosen field and/or your major?

Contemplation and Reflection:

In addition to the assignment prompt above, I asked students to write about, or record themselves in an audio format, the limitations or challenges to practicing presence and contemplation:

• What was it like to pay attention mindfully? Were you able to be more or less present? Please explain what you experienced.

• What might it be like to be fully present to someone’s idea or perspective? Would you be more or less open to someone’s opinion if it was different from your own?

• How does college life encourage or inhibit your ability to practice presence and mindfulness?

• How does your life outside of college, or future goals or plans, encourage or inhibit your ability to practice presence and mindfulness?

When discussing these questions in class, one young woman, whom I will call Mara, remarked, “paying attention to what the other person is saying and or doing is really important in these activities, and often these skills are hard to remember. Often, it’s easier to make things one-sided when presenting information that another person doesn’t know. However, things should be two-sided, so balancing communication on both sides is important, just like it is in these games. . . following the conversation or activities in a meaningful and intense way.” Mara’s comment not only revealed her observations about being present but pushed me to consider what this presence revealed about students’ perceptions of communication, whether in conversations, in writing, or in the many instances in which they are “presenting information” to communicate and express what they want to say. Using improv as a mindfulness practice meant questioning students’ relationships to the skills and dispositions they identified as “hard to remember” and to specific contexts that reinforce or challenge ideas about “balanc[ed] communication” in relation to the language, writing, and texts they produce. We can also ask to what extent language and writing in institutional spaces has impacted the way students understand “balanced” communication. If students write thesis-driven essays to their instructor, someone who typically knows more, then they aren’t having real opportunities to truly be the experts and to use language and writing outside of an instructor’s expertise. Applied improv shapes the kinds of conversations I have with students about their relationships to writing, language, and audience in college classrooms.

Making Room “to be Present”

Paula Mathieu writes that “becoming mindful of the working of one’s mind can offer avenues to process that information and put it into perspective” (182). Teaching with applied improv as a contemplative practice has done just that. I learned the potential value of teaching core improv dispositions in writing courses, and asking students to apply those dispositions to interactions within and outside of class. Students responded positively to having a classroom space to ultimately play and connect. Most of our class discussions were driven by students’ experiences and what they shared from their in and out-of-class observations. It’s been rewarding to talk with students about these observations and the dissonances they noticed– moments, interactions, or spaces that produced surprise, frustration, or confusion– in specific contexts, including college classrooms and workplaces, that inhibit or give way to mindful contemplation. It’s been helpful to highlight gaps, rifts, and perceived “mistakes” from doing the improv exercises with students, while resisting any impulse to flatten difference or difficulty in how students show up as present.

Learning from Black Feminist Compositionists, I recognize that students’ responses to core improv dispositions and my observations about them are context-specific, so as not to generalize my course design to all students in writing classrooms everywhere. While I offer these assignment descriptions for adaptation in classrooms, I recognize that these methods are informed by who I am, who I teach, where I teach, and how I teach, since “students’ responses are always conditioned by their social and cultural background and the institutions in which they express themselves” (Kynard, This Bridge128). Given where I work, I have used improv as a mindfulness practice with mostly white students. In future courses, I plan to address my epistemological values, perspectives, and assumptions more explicitly with students than before. I recognize that the aim of contemplative pedagogies must be deeply connected to introspection. I continue to invite students into conversations about institutions that have historically erased cultural histories attached to mindfulness practices, especially institutions they experience. Using improv exercises as classroom applications potentially provides a set of practices for mindful contemplation, and a framework for examining the potentialities and limitations of who practices it, when, where, why, and how.

Embracing core improv dispositions came through not only in the improv exercises and assignments, but also through curricular moments I created. I learned that the improv exercises produced experiential learning and mindful interaction, places for students to learn and engage collaboratively, and spaces for them to take responsibility for their peers’ learning. In debriefing conversations, in-class writing, and written responses between classes, students reflected on the impact of listening to and affirming each other’s ideas in order for the improv exercises to be effective. Annalisa Dias reminds us that applied improv disrupts dominant narratives and power structures, as they relate to institutional power and knowledge-making. This course design motivated me to make different curricular choices to promote multiple ways of making meaning and to challenge a single narrative of how schooling works. I changed the spatial arrangement of the room; students moved and interacted in new configurations outside of rows of desks. To learn “Yes, and,” students participated in mirroring exercises that had them moving and speaking in sync without any pre-planning. There was also a slowing down that forced new patterns of interaction. The improv exercises challenged static, hegemonic ways of schooling in that students learned from and with their peers. The exercises and assignments were designed to make physical and intellectual space for the work of collaboration and accountability to one another.

Adapting these methods helped me rethink writing classrooms. I learned of improv’s potential to shift power dynamics, especially when I participated in the exercises with students, instead of directing them from outside. I will continue to implement applied improv in my curriculum and pedagogy to capture presence, with the understanding that this approach compels me to contemplate and re-examine frameworks rooted in teaching and assessing writing before COVID, and to use applied improv to disrupt a singular, “neutral” standard of writing and language. If my teaching is to tackle barriers to contemplation and presence, both perceived and material, I must understand mindfulness, not simply as individual practices, behaviors, or choices, but as operating within specific contexts, histories, and places. I accept the uncertainty and possibility of not knowing what will happen next, while “being in the moment” alongside students.

Notes

[1] I adapted assignments #1 and #2 from Doug Shaw at the University of Northern Iowa and from Alan Alda’s book If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating. I’m grateful to Doug for helping me rethink improv in my teaching.

Works Cited

Aladesuyi, Oluwakemi and Audrey Nguyen. The Rules of Improv Can Make You Funnier. They Can Also Make You More Confident. NPR: Life Kit, 1 December 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/19/1129907651/improv-can-build-confidence-heres-how-to-apply-it-to-your-everyday-life.

Alda, Alan. If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on my Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating. Random House, 2017.

Bailey, Moya. #transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics. Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2, 2015, https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000209/000209.html.

Bernard, Jill and Patick Short. Small Book of Improv for Business. Viewers Like You, LLC, 2018.

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1979.

Chaterdon, Kate. Mindful Practice and Metacognitive Awareness in the Writing Class: A Quantitative Pilot Research Study. Composition Forum, vol. 50, 2022, https://compositionforum.org/issue/50/mindful-practice.php.

Dias, Annalisa. Decolonizing ‘Diversity’ on Campus Using Applied Improvisation. Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre, edited by Theresa Robbins and Caitlin McClure, Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 222–43.

Dudeck, Theresa Robbins, and Caitlin McClure. Eds. Introduction. Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 1–15.

Felsman, Peter, Sanuri Gunawardena, and Colleen M. Seifert. Improv Experience Promotes Divergent Thinking, Uncertainty Tolerance, and Affective Well-Being. Thinking Skills and Creativity, vol. 35, 2020, pp. 1–14.

Felsman, Peter, Colleen M. Seifert, and Joseph A. Himle. The Use of Improvisational Theater Training to Reduce Social Anxiety in Adolescents. The Arts in Psychotherapy, vol. 63, 2019, pp. 111–17.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, Continuum, 1989.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Inoue, Asao B. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. U of Colorado P, 2019.

Kynard, Carmen. Stayin Woke: Race-Radical Literacies in the Makings of a Higher Education.

College Composition and Communication, vol. 69, no. 3, 2018, pp. 519–29.

Kynard, Carmen. This Bridge: The BlackFeministCompositionist’s Guide to the Colonial and Imperial Violence of Schooling Today. Feminist Teacher, vol. 26, no. 2-3, 2018, pp. 126–141.

Mathieu, Paula. Excavating Indoor Voices: Inner Rhetoric and the Mindful Writing Teacher. Journal of Advanced Composition, vol. 34, no. 1-2, 2014, pp. 173–190.

Spolin, Viola. Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques. 2nd Edition. Northwestern UP, 1983.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak. Writing Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. U of Chicago P, 2014.