Free improvisation in choral settings: An ecological perspective

This instrumental case study explores and theorizes on the educational potential and value of free collaborative vocal improvisation, a process that enables equal access to music regardless of musical skills. The focus of the article is on the musical activities of an adult choir in Finland that applied tenets from improvisational theatre to facilitate the social and musical processes of free improvisation. This study applies an ecological perspective to understand how improvisation can offer asylum—a physical or conceptual safe space within which an individual can flourish socially and musically—and explore how it is sought, constructed, and supported, and what opportunities it can afford to those participating in it. The analysis shows how the participants used various techniques for seeking asylum, both in and away from their shared social space, when they encountered the inherent discomforts of improvisation. Depending on the social ecology of each situation, the musicking activities provided the participants with the resources to construct both social and musical agency as well as experiences in playful collaborative musical learning and wellbeing. The present study calls for an ecological framework for music education and improvisation that supports musicking in a safe and playful learning environment with a focus on social processes, and which could be considered the starting point for music education at all ages.

Improving teenagers’ divergent thinking with improvisational theatre

Improvisational theatre (improv) is supposed to have an impact on cognitive processes (divergent thinking, flexibility, language, memory, problem solving, and co-construction), academic performance, and everyday life in many ways. However, little research studied on the psychological impact of improv, with some results highlighting a divergent thinking enhancement in children and adults, but not with teenagers, one of the most important age groups to practice improv. Therefore, this study aims to assess divergent thinking for middle school students before and after an 11-week session compared to a control group with a sport practice. The Alternative Uses Task was used before and after the session for both groups to evaluate divergent thinking. The improv group had better performance in originality, flexibility and gave less prototypical items after the improv sessions compared to before, while the control group performance was similar before and after. Our results suggest that improv helps teenagers’ divergent thinking to improve, not only with experimental games in the lab context but also after ecological sessions. We urge scientists to study in depth psychological impacts of improvisational theatre and applied improvisation, for a better understanding of improv and as a model to study embodied cognition.

MOVE YOUR AVATAR! Improvisational Theatre Methods in Virtual Teams

The importance of a process for a successful start of a new project team is common in business management. Warming up and cooling down exercises are already well accepted methods to activate learning groups. Improvisational theatre has become very popular during the last years as one of these activating practices. Compared to real life settings, meetings in avatar-based, 3-dimensional virtual environments suffer from various communication issues - there is no body language, no gestures or mime you could see in the face of an avatar. To increase the interactivity of virtual avatar groups, face-to-face best practices of improvisational theatre methods were transferred into virtual 3D course sessions at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. The impact of these extemporaneous exercises on the interactivity and team performance during the virtual sessions was observed using the participatory action research method (PAR). The transferability of successful real life settings into a virtual 3D course was analyzed. The paper recommends the top improvisational theatre trainings and their impact on the interactivity and team building outcome.