How Improv Can Flip Your Creativity “Switch”

In a paradoxical way, an improv experience in which we play characters very different from who we are in real life cultivates courage to express our authentic self.

There is an improv exercise called Everything Is Alive — also a wonderful podcast by the same name — in which players take on the role and perspective of an inanimate object and tell its story. A popcorn machine at a movie theater gives it’s history and perspective. A pregnancy test shares it’s high-stakes role in someone’s life. A child’s car seat does a deep dive into its relationship with a toddler whose life depends on it, but who will quickly outgrow it and move on. It might seem silly, but give it a try and see how quickly it can “switch on” enough creativity to imagine what this object notices and cares about. When we examine what these items care about, want and feel, they become a channel for our own emotions and concerns. The exercise taps imagination and the capacity to explore a slice of life from an unusual point of view.

As an improv exercise, the structure makes it safe, the creative expansion makes it interesting, and the balance between safety and freedom to explore activates brain plasticity associated with creative expansion. In “The Neuroscience Of…