Americans are lonely.
As political scientist Robert D. Putnam points out in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, the average American’s connection with other human beings has fallen off a cliff since the 1970s, with devastating impacts on our health and politics. Loneliness has gotten so bad that, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, we have a full-blown loneliness epidemic on our hands.
Again and again, we’ve heard that community is the answer to loneliness. But what exactly is community? And how can improv help build it?
Defining Community
In his blog post “What is ‘community’ and why is it important?”, researcher and political theorist Toby Lowe defines community as “a group of people who share an identity-forming narrative.”
According to Lowe, a community forms when a group of people tells and retells a story that defines them—a narrative that explains who they are and how they relate to each other and the wider world.
Community-building, in other words, is an exercise in ongoing collaborative storytelling. The stories that community members create together influence the way they see the world—and bind them to each other in a shared identity.
Making the Troupe: How Improv Forms Communities
In her blog post “Unique Shared Experiences: A Modern Framework for Rapidly Building Relationships”, travel writer Michaela Murray argues that the key to quickly forming deep connections in a new environment is to create “unique shared experiences” that
- “create a story,”
- “break the day-to-day context,” and
- “force vulnerability.”
All three elements of “unique shared experiences” come to bear whenever a group of improvisers gets together to practice, play, or perform.
Create a Story
A group of new improvisers in a typical 101 class will almost always develop their own set of inside jokes—especially funny scenes and bits that they will revisit, again and again, throughout the course and beyond.
These inside jokes act as milestones along the narrative arc of a group’s time together, from their first awkward icebreakers through the hard work of learning new material and, in many schools, a climactic showcase in front of friends and family.
By the end of their two or three months together, the students have created a shared story which brings them closer as a troupe.
Break the Day-to-Day Context
By its very nature, improv asks the people practicing it to drop their reliable social scripts and try new things as a group.
On a commute, or at work, it is rare for a person to use silly voices, move around a space in strange ways, and pretend to be someone they’re not—but these are the sorts of things improvisers do all the time.
With so many unusual things happening around them, improvisers in a given group are quick to develop new memories together, further adding to the growing sense of a shared identity.
Force Vulnerability
The same exercises which take improvisers out of their daily routines are also likely to make them feel a bit awkward, especially at the start of their journey. For many people, acting silly is a tall order—never mind doing so in front of strangers!
When a good instructor provides the container in which new improvisers can safely be vulnerable, they get to know each other more quickly than they would otherwise, leading to a deepened sense of trust and understanding.
Why Community Matters
As Putnam points out in his book, the experience of community found in healthy improv troupes and theaters is getting hard to find in American society, leading to a collective loss of social capital, or “the connections among individuals’ social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”
In other words, as we drift further apart from each other, our ability to solve collective problems declines, as do our health and happiness.
Part of the solution to this problem is to create and support thriving communities. Involvement in community gives back to individuals a vital sense of connection that they are too often missing. Meanwhile, the presence of robust communities in a neighborhood, city, or country helps build the trust that makes social activity possible.
More urgently, Lowe explains that community is an important part of social change. In his words: “social change requires a change in some of the most important stories we tell ourselves. Social change requires that we rewrite our communal narratives. Social change is change in community.”
To put it another way, when communities are lacking or toxic—when the shared narratives that create community are missing or destructive—our ability to imagine and act out a better future for our society becomes stunted. As a collection of isolated, atomized, alienated individuals, we are frozen in place, unable to rewrite the narratives that keep us locked in harmful patterns.
Improv, with its emphasis on spontaneity and play, has the unique potential to create communities with the tools needed to examine and improve on their own collective narratives.
Approaching classes and performances with a spirit of willingness and curiosity, improvisers create strong friendships among themselves—and strengthen the skills that will help them build reciprocity and trust outside of class.