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Improvisation and Human-Machine Interactivity Why incorporate improvisational acting in Nightingale? Not only is improvisation unpredictable and reputedly unwieldy in the context of a largely pre-scripted work such as this one, but it is also not obvious what improvisation might offer in the way of furthering the text's central themes and overall meaning. The central concern of Andersen's fable, as well as of the play as a whole, is the relationship between human and machine, and this theme seems at first glance to be unrelated to the experimental use of improvisatory scenework. The link between the two phenomena is that both human-machine interactivity and improvisation deal in the currency of emergent behavior, the set of actions that comes into existence as a natural consequence of its antecedents. The procedural logic of a computer program behind an interactive game, for example, guides the user in certain directions and away from others, and yet the interactor's behavior is not pre-determined; the game narrative unfolds as the user makes choices. Brenda Laurel's seminal work Computers as Theatre describes this phenomenon as follows: "Neither participants nor authors have ultimate control over the shape of interactive experiences; form and structure emerge as artifacts of complex, asynchronous collaboration" (212). This collaboration between software writer and user could be thought of as a shared or distributed "authorship" of the game narrative. While it is true that in a theatrically improvised narrative, collaboration occurs in a shared space and time, like the computer game, the actors' "offers" lead to ever-narrowing choices as the story proceeds (see Sawyer's Improvised Dialogues for a formal discussion of this process which he calls "downward causation" 236ff). This is to say that the character of the emergent behavior in both arenas can be quite similar. Laurel's method in Computers as Theatre was to look at human-computer interaction through the lens of Aristotle's Poetics, lauding his methodical treatment of a dramatic work as particularly applicable to the formal logic of computing. Although her book is concerned exclusively with traditional theater, it seems in one brief passage that Laurel is considering human-computer interaction against improvisational theater. She says, "A program that reformulates the potential for action, creating new possibilities and probabilities 'on the fly' as a response to what has gone before, is equivalent to a playwright changing a plot in real time as a collaboration with the actors and director, and communicating new portions of script to them in real time through some automagical means" (72-3). But Laurel retreats from the possibility of improvisation in performance and instead asserts that "the way in which human-computer activity is more dynamic than drama is in the aspect of formulating the action (playwriting) rather than in its enactment (performance)" (73). She is arguing that theater cannot change "on the fly;" it is fixed and scripted. When the frame opens to include improvisation, however, the performer who functions as playwright/actor/director can and does in fact change the plot in real time. Interactivity in Improvisation What does "interactivity" mean when borrowed from the human-machine realm and applied to acting improvisation? At the most obvious level, interactivity is a necessary aspect of improvisation, a function of multiple actors collaborating on stage. The solo actor need not be interactive; s/he could be exclusively engaged with interior processes, attempting to express the same in the shared space through improvisations in movement, sound, language. When multiple actors are on stage, however, improvisations are concerned with the relational space between or among actors, as well as the actors' interiority. It is a through the dialogic process, in which an individual makes an "offer" to which others react, making their own offers, that the group improvisational work emerges. Group improvisation is necessarily interactive by definition. Next theory page on improvisation Improvisation in Act I, Scene 3 |
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