A Search for Community: Neva Boyd, Viola Spolin, Paul Sills and the Origins of Improvisational Theater in America: Keynote Speech at AIN 2019

Aretha Sills gave a keynote address at the 2019 Applied Improvisation Network World Conference entitled: A Search for Community: Neva Boyd, Viola Spolin, Paul Sills and the Origins of Improvisational Theater in America.

In 1923, eighteen-year-old Viola Spolin (author of Improvisation for the Theater and creator of theater games) began studying with pioneering social worker and educator Neva Boyd at Chicago’s Hull House. Boyd’s theory of play inspired Spolin to create new ways of teaching dramatics to her students often immigrants and children. Spolin’s son, Paul Sills (founding director of Compass, The Second City, and Story Theater) brought her discoveries to the world when co-founding the first improvisational theaters in the United States. Through family stories, personal history, archival photographs, and Spolin's own words and writing, Aretha Sills traces the roots of Spolin’s groundbreaking work to the social activism cultivated at Jane Addams’ Hull House, exploring how Progressive-era ideals of community and democracy created the fertile conditions for the birth of improvisational theater in America.