I wasn't thinking so much of Stanislavsky as people who developed
out of method such as Grotowski and his poor theater and Lee
Strassberg and his particular method. Are you talking about the
type of stuff that Second City does? Because you're right, this
is a very different type of improvisation. I want to say this
right, because I love the type of stuff that Second City does,
but the people I originally studied some improvisation with
(certainly not giants in the field to say the least) claimed
that what Second City did wasn't real improvisation: it was more
like the type of stuff that went on around the Algonquin Round
Table...people thinking of things that would be entertaining and
waiting until the situation developed so that they could use it.
It's not scripted, but again the motivations go beyond the interaction
itself. And I have to say, having seen Second City a few times,
they are far too entertaining to claim that the interaction is
the activity, and not simply the action (using Leontiev's terms).
So I wonder if its possible to say that for adults improvisation is
a tool while for children improvisation is the activity itself.
My thinking is this is possible, especially for very young children,
because experience has not yet forced a break between motive and
action, they are part of a direct flow. While with adults, even
incredibly well trained actors a break between motive and action is
so pervasive that we can't go back and recapture that flow. It's
not part of our personal sense of an activity.
Michael Glassman
University of Houston