 The first thing I'm going to do is play, what's this? No, I'm just going to show a little video. I want to introduce you, if you haven't seen this online or anything, to my teacher and mentor, Viola Spohlin. And then I'll use the rest of the time that this video doesn't use to talk about my experiences with her. In advertising, possibly in prison, a producer, director, singer, dancer, actor, or anyone who's involved in education or the arts. Spohlin was called the High Priestess of Improvisation. Her theater games, she said, could invoke genius. Before she fell ill, Spohlin taped some of her classes, offering a rare glimpse of the master at work. The thing is, if you have a problem and you can use a game, you're taken out of the head and we've got to think about it and they're boredom, and you are getting it into the body. Body, mind, and intuition. That's what we're after. Body, mind, and intuition. Spohlin invented theater games like Who Am I, Mirror, and Transformation in the 30s, when she was drama supervisor for the Works Progress Administration, the WPA, at Hull House in Chicago. Originally created to help students feel more natural on stage, the games took on a life of their own to produce some of the funniest moments in modern theater. The following game is called Gibberish, in which two actors improvise a completely made-up language with a third actor interpreting their conversation for the audience. You mean to tell me you would come in front of a group of people and have absolutely nothing to do? Of course. What else could you do? What else? Other games are played on a bare stage, where actors, based on audience suggestions, create an entire world filled with furniture, food, science labs, spaceships, even hot tubs. The best players can be so convincing, the audience swears it can almost smell the space food set upon an invisible table. Once they've got what's called the where, the actors are given a game. This throws the mind off balance, says Spohlin's son, director Paul Sills, which leads to the intuition. Viola says you have to be tricked into it. The game does that. In the 60s, Sills, in his mother's words, brought her work to the world. He played her games with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, then again when he formed Chicago Second City, which influenced comedic greats including Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and virtually every cast member from the television show Saturday Night Live. In rehearsal for a recent show, Sills tells actors the intuitions where true genius lies. You shouldn't be afraid of going for the not knowing. It varies in, varies in. In other words, where it outcomes stuff that you don't know is coming, and that you couldn't possibly even say where it gets from. You're really trying to get there. Because that's where the magic happens, according to Sills. The theatre is about nothing but presence. The experience there, if it works, is of a poetic reality, and it's a profound, moving, often and remarkable experience. I mean, it's art. It could be anything in Viola's work. It could be a queen, a hobo, a fish, a barnacle, a tree, a bit, a wisp of wind, anything, anything. Actors Valerie Harper says, Spolens improvisation, like method acting, is used to help actors be their most convincing. But method relies on memory, perhaps conjuring up anger from a childhood disappointment. Improvisation springs from the intuition, says Harper, a deeper source of creativity. People have told her Buddhist monks and people in metaphysics and so forth have said, you have opened an ancient door. So her work, in my view, it just stepped over the memory. Say we don't need memory, we need to open to allow the muse to flow. A muse that flows in traditional theatre too, from Shakespeare to Neil Simon, says veteran actor Hamilton Kamm. Playing a part. Sometimes you can be very tedious after you've run for six months. You found your moments, you got your laughs or your tears or whatever it was, and then you go on automatic. Well, there'd be good improvisation every night with the same lines. Keeping that chancey, open, I don't know what's going to happen. I've done it a thousand times. When I step on the stage, I am innocent. But Spolan didn't create theatre games simply to turn out more actors. She believed the games could break down barriers in a world where she saw people growing more distant and alienated from each other. At a 1972 speech, she made the following prediction. I do feel that the day will come, I doubt that I will be here for it, when people will meet from everywhere to play the games, to question, where am I, who am I, and what am I doing. And so perhaps together all of us can seek and perhaps evoke the oracle to answer her questions. Play the games, said Viola Spolan, and you may find yourself on a trip to the unknown, the intuitive, and perhaps beyond that, to the human spirit itself. Viola Spolan was my mentor, my teacher, and my dear friend. And I want to share with you the very first time I ever met Viola Spolan. Now I had been doing improvisation for about a year before I met her, and I had never heard of her. And I was learning in this improvisation class great tools, how to yes and how to not deny and how to accept offers and all of that stuff. And I thought, and also have enough space left over to look for the funny and interject my little brand of whatever I had. And I thought really well, you know, and I was holding my own amongst these pretty very funny people. Robin Williams would sometimes come into the workshop and just like the Tasmanian devil, and we'd all just try to catch up with him and then he would leave. And then that would be it, and we'd go, what the hell was that? And then he went on to a very nice career. But anyway, one day I had to go and find out about this Viola Spolan a friend of mine had asked me to look her up. She had just opened a place in Los Angeles. And so I want to tell you about the very first time and the very first exercise they ever did with her. Now I want to let you know that first of all I had been a mind since I was about 13 years old and I had real good movement and control of my body. And I knew really how to mirror and reflect anybody and everything. That was my stock in trade. So the very first exercise we did together was the mirror. And I'm sure you've all done the mirror exercise, you know. And so you start to reflect another person and then she calls switch and then you are the leader and then switch and you're the reflector. And she had a way of coaching that just sort of put me in this really strange thing. I was off balance. And I was really trying to switch and I was trying to do the mirror and I started to feel like I was out of control and I didn't know exactly what was happening to me. And Viola had a microphone that she coached with and she was literally out over my shoulder going, let it flow, let it flow. Follow the follower. And I'm like a holy roller. And I was really shaken up. And anyway, so she stopped. And she, I'll never forget this, she put her hand on my shoulder and she addressed the class. And she said, now you see this young fella here. He had a direct experience. He got to see Marty who was my female partner. She was a Jewish canter. And she said, he got to see her directly without using his head. And then she said, I suspect it's the first time in his life he ever saw anybody. Wow. And I knew she was right. I had developed a skill of grabbing information, storing information, filtering it through, having enough space left over to just manipulate the situation, interject what I thought was, and I had to feel armed with this information in order to go to any situation or any interaction. And really I thought that's what improvisation was, the perfecting of that skill, of that ability to, you know, do that. But here was something completely different. And I had never in my life just allowed myself to be without anything going on, without having anything prepared, without having the slightest clue of what was going to happen next. I always needed to have something. And I knew this was really profound. This was amazing. And I think that's what Viola Spohlen was after, going into that unknown space without an agenda, without a preparation, without anything to go into the unknown and to just accept the fact that something will happen. Now, so the exercise she did was called following the follower. And I was going to give you all a little follow the follower experience, but in the interest of time, I'm just going to talk about experiences that follow the follower that you had already. So I'm sure you've all had the experience of just walking down the street and somebody's coming right toward you, you get out of their way and they're getting out of your way and you're getting out of their way and they're getting out of your way and as you get closer, a little tension kind of builds. And you do the only socially acceptable thing. You crack a joke. Excuse me, you want to dance? Sorry. And you dispel that tension and off you go on your merry way, right? But what if you started just staying with that, you know, and the other person just felt okay about doing it too, just staying there and you know, you go, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. Hi, I'm Gary, how are you doing? Where are you? What would happen? Yes, you would meet. You would connect. You would have a connection with another person without an agenda, without what you want to bring to the table. You were just there with another person and you did not know what was going to happen next but you're both there and you say, hey, let's go on this little journey together. And I think that's what Biola Spohlen was after. Oh, my God. So what I want to say in conclusion to that is the fact that Biola was after that moment of stepping off into the unknown and into the unknown without fear because children don't have fear to discover new things. There's no thing to base it on. So they just explore and it's exciting. And when you go into the unknown like that, you really trace yourself back to your authentic self and get to the core of your authentic self and to the source of your true creativity. And when you do that with each other, the world is your oyster. And I think that Biola Spohlen was after more than just collaborating and using improvisation as a tool. She was after introducing you to what she called your personal treasure house, that inexhaustible fountain of creativity where you can all meet and not bring your past to it and go off into the unknown. And so improvisation in that sense is a celebration of that connection that's possible between all people. And that's what I like to share and what I do in my work. So anyway, that's my teacher Biola Spohlen and this is me, Gary Schwartz. Thank you.