Le Théâtre d'Improvisation ou comment apprendre à improviser : de l'exercice artistique à la performance interactionnelle

Abstract

By focusing on the workshop as a training place for theatre improvisers, this article aims to reintroduce Improvisational Theatre into the learning process that accompanies it. An improv workshop is led by a workshop leader, in charge of managing the exercises, providing instructions and feedback. It is built as an interactional and discursive exercise aimed at conveying improvisation skills. The workshop process involves collective adjustments and mutual understanding modalities between the actors practicing and the workshop leader, who takes on a role of advisor, evaluator and teacher. Therefore, improv workshops take place within a specific dynamic of performance prior to public performance, which implies to broaden the notion of exercise to its interactional outbursts. In that context, the feedback given by the workshop leader, which is a moment of exchange that follows the exercise, becomes a primordial phenomenon. Feedback covers different functions such as evaluation, criticism or advice, but it also offers the possibility of dereferencing the topic of the exercise itself in order to deal with Improvisational Theatre as a practice. When taking feedback in its episemiotic dimension, we can grasp how the exercise turns from an ephemeral and localized phenomenon, into the practice of Improvisational Theatre as a stabilized and collective discipline.

Keywords

• improvisation
• theatre
• practice
• exercice
• performance
• feedback