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It seems that there are two professional communities who are focused on
organizational, cultural, and policy development that are unaware or uninformed about
one another. Applied Anthropologists have been in the realm of development formally
for over 50 years utilizing ethnographic techniques to learn about peoples’ lives and
communities in order to create and administer reasonable policies for these communities
theater techniques and ideas to develop organizations, has been around for over a decade
using theater techniques to elicit and explore peoples’ stories, as well as give them tools
for building sustainable organizations and relationships. Both of these fields share very
similar goals, but they differ in methodologies and slightly in theory. However, these
two fields can come together in helping one another achieve their ends through a
cooperative systemic exploration utilizing each others’ methods and theories. The field
Improvised theater shares a common trait with Applied Anthropology, and that is
the element of having to prove itself as a viable form next to a more ‘formal’ and ‘pure’
form of scripted theater, or the split “between those who know and those who act” in
beholden to a textual frame when it is a practice that operates within a living contextual
frame. They are both focused on active development through working with participants.
They both find insights and direction from eliciting and working with collective and
individual narratives. In the realm of performance studies, there has been a call for such
not transcendent…it must be engaged, not abstracted; and…it is forged from solidarity
with, not separation from the people” (Conquergood, 2002). This is the very essence of
what motivates Applied Improvisation. This active engagement with peoples’ spoken
stories serves one of the main goals of the theory of praxis in that it seeks an engagement
Melanie Harmon is currently the marketing director for a large firm that handles
collegiate ‘travel abroad’ programs, AHA International. She has an M.A. in Theater with
a focus on improvisation. Over the last decade, she has been involved with a couple of
different applied improvisation settings. She worked with Kaiser Permanente in Denver
for the theater outreach wing. Shortly after she signed on, she managed to bring in
Augusto Boal to run a workshop on the techniques of the “Theater of the Oppressed”.
This form of theater is used as a means for bolstering social action through repeated
simulation of difficult social situations where participants are encouraged to take the
place of certain characters in the scenario in order to find alternate solutions to the
situation. This workshop was the catalyst to the formation of an internal office for the
theater outreach program. From here, Melanie utilized improvised theater games and
improv stage or on the show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” are not operating on any sort
of theory. Many beginning improvisers enter into classes thinking ‘I just need to be fast
and funny’. They are then introduced to the ‘rules’ in improvisational theater, which are
really more of a core set of values and notions than a hard and fast set of rules.
at the heart of this art because it is impossible to build anything cohesive and
return to the first step of having to establish something (1.“Hi Mom” 2.”I’m not your
mother”). To keep disagreeing is to keep taking the first step again and again (1. “Oh,
Aunt Trudy. I mistook you for my Mom.” 2. “I’m not your Aunt Trudy, either”). This is
towards something (1.“Hi Mom” 2.“Hello, dear. Have a cookie”). In anthropology, this
may take the form of preliminary research that helps the anthropologist to understand the
situation they will be entering into, a sort of ‘platform’ to build from, or it could be
insights from the data from focus groups and interviews. However, this does not fully
enter into the realm of “shared reality” in that the researcher is also involved. It is more
so the reality of those being studied, but it does allow the researcher to understand the
established reality of those that they’ll be working with, which is an important step
understand the first “Hi Mom” in order to find a response that builds on what is
established and present when they add to the interaction “Hello, dear. Have a cookie”.
The notion of ‘agreement’ is then coupled with the notion of ‘heightening’.
detail, emotional involvement, or some sort of personal stake to what has been
established in the initial phase of an interaction (“A cookie? You’re trying to make me
fat”). An important element to note is that both sides of this interaction are expected to
be working from this same set of rules. On the improv stage, players are expected to
agree and heighten each others’ moves every step of the way to their best ability. This
fitting for a ‘good’ improviser. Amongst performers, the most valued performer is one
that concerns themselves with making their partner look good through this process of
agreeing and heightening (Huffaker et al., 2003). The colloquial term for the process of
This focus on agreement and heightening is very close to one of the other facets
of the theory of praxis which is the self-determination of peoples and the actualization of
human potential. In improvisation, each player chooses how they will build things with
their scene partners, and both are supported in that venture if their partner is being
generous and following the rules of improvisation. There are many basic improvisational
exercises that help to highlight these core concepts. These exercises are often introduced
conceptual frame to work from and 2) provide a visceral example of how these concepts
feel when they are successful (Huffaker, 2006, Harmon, 2006). Julie Huffaker, an
applied anthropologist working for an Applied Improv agency “On Your Feet: Improv for
Business”, suggests that these more basic exercises also create an atmosphere where
greater communication and comprehension can take place because it suspends typical
social norms and hierarchical power dynamics (Huffaker, 2006). She referred to this
state as “Shine”. This notion of bringing the physical and theatrical into Anthropology
experimented with. Unfortunately, most of the settings that these practices are being
applied are in the development of corporate culture and marketing strategy in western
businesses. The lessons emerging from this work have broad application in establishing
understanding that that also supports them, it creates validity for and momentum behind
Of course, there is a risky step in working towards trusting such a process. In the
initial phases of exposure to this system of knowing and acting, there is a realm of
compromise that must be crossed by those who are benefited by a hierarchy. This is one
of the friction points that applied improvisation is often concerned. It shares the same
characteristics of compromises that applied anthropologists may deal with in serving the
interests of their client. One runs a risk when recommending that a client may need to
change their mode of operating in order to improve conditions, or one may need to find a
way to implement an unsatisfying solution. This is the friction point that applied
interaction as a series of ‘offers’. These offers are what are being exchanged and
enhanced in the process of agreeing and heightening. Offers could be interpreted as the
organization. Applied Improv would most likely encourage the telling of and then
staging of a typical day or interaction in order to contextualize the offers that are present
in a particular setting to all stakeholders and policy makers. This format is an extremely
effective tool in getting to the heart of particular matters. In Julie Huffaker’s work, she
has used the notions of offers and blocking to contextualize and explore communication
difficulties. Participants would work their way through scenarios where they could
replay a scene/story where they were ‘blocked’ by someone and try different ‘offers’ to
find a solution. The participants were asked to make choices informed by a notion called
sorts of simulations are powerful tools for developing and investigating the effectiveness
Denver, the participants noted that the doctor was faced away from the patient while
entering prognostic data during the intake, and in the simulation, this was obviously
resulting in missed non-verbal cues that would be very helpful in discerning if there were
other unspoken factors contributing to an illness (stress, depression, etc.). This point was
reached through warming up the participants with improv exercises that introduced
collaborative concepts, then moving them into storytelling exercises, which led to the
staging of particular stories for dramatic exploration which led to the discovery above
and the imagined solution of computers on wall-mounted extender arms to facilitate face-
to-face interaction with the patient (Harmon, 2006). This is now the case in a number of
health-care settings within and outside of Kaiser Denver. The same discovery may have
taken a few days or weeks for an applied anthropologist to observe, interview, and focus
In other settings, where larger groups of people are involved in an applied improv
They are then stopped by a facilitator who asks for alternatives for the scenario to be
acted out. This forum often elicits audible levels of comprehension with participants
is often a very powerful experience for the participants, but one of the criticisms is that
the effects are rarely long-lasting. A workshop or two fades from memory as people
return to their routine (Booth, 2000). Julie noted that “the feel good stuff tends not to
stick”, but the lessons on communication and discoveries through simulations and replays
Applied Anthroprov
However, these tools, exercises, and practices would best serve applied
anthropologists as evaluative tools first and development strategies second. They are
well-suited to be elements for testing the accuracy of data and as a means of iteration in
Rapid Assessment Procedures (Ervin, 2005). The story exercises, as well as the staging
of life, allows for the communities being assessed to play a distinct role in how they are
depicted and understood by the researchers. This fits well with the goals inherent in the
theory of praxis of an interaction between objective knowledge and subjective
experience. It may also be a window into the elements of a culture that may otherwise be
missed in the short time allotted for Rapid Assessment studies by creating a sort of
enhanced cultural lab where the meaningful and emically important portion of a
community’s life are brought forward. Another benefit is that it does not require the
communicate solutions. This creates a needed detour around the sorts of textual
They could also be heavily incorporated into Participant Action research. Applied
Improv perfectly fits with the mission of PAR in that the people most affected have the
most to say in the ways that their own realities are analyzed and in the courses of action
taken to improve their conditions (Ervin, 2005). The stories of success offered by both
Melanie Harmon and Julie Huffaker support this notion. The concepts of improvisation
offered earlier like ‘agreement and heightening’, seeing interactions as ‘offers’, working
on making the other person look and feel good also feed into developing a productive and
generative set of behaviors that can lead to the sort of autonomy that is hoped for in
Anthropologists are coming at the solution from a somewhat positivist angle, and
improvisers are approaching the solutions from a naturalistic/artistic angle. The driving
forces behind applied improvisation match well with one of Michael Agrosino’s
epistemologies of the culture concept, and that is the “interactionist, which sees culture as
arising in an adaptive manner from people trying to cope with a given social setting in
such a way that they are guided by but not “determined by” a set of assumptions about
proper relations that are, to a greater or lesser degree, shared.” (1999) Communities,
organizations, policy makers, and stake holders have much to benefit from if a union of
these two approaches could occur. It would take a little trust and agreement, as well as
some investigation and research, to make this happen. “Hi, Improv.” “Hello,
Works Cited
Agrosino, Michael. “The Culture Concept and Applied Anthropology” NAPA Bulletin.
18 (1999): 45-65
Booth, Tamzin. “Improvisational Comedy Groups Work to Build Corporate Teams” Wall
Practice. 2nd Ed. ed. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2005. 209-224.
Fabian, Johannes, “Theater and Anthropology, Theatricality and Culture”, The Journal of
Huffaker, Julie S., Brad Robertson, Gary Hirsch, and Rob Poynton. "Improv Culture:
45-65