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Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity
in Conversation (2002, Greenwood Publishing Company)
Improvised Dialogues is the first social-scientific study of Chicago improv theater. Improvised Dialogues focuses on the collaborative verbal creativity that improvising actors use to generate their unscripted dialogues. Sawyer spent two years as a performer, and he videotaped 15 different Chicago theater groups -- both live performances and rehearsals -- resulting in almost 50 hours of performance data. To analyze these dialogues, this book presents Sawyer’s theory of collaborative emergence. The theory focuses on how different pre-existing structures guide improvisation and how actors use dialogue to jointly create a novel, dramatically coherent performance. Although the dialogue is not scripted, a highly structured performance emerges. Because these elements of improvisation are present in all linguistic interaction, the theory shows how these dialogues are relevant to all researchers that study verbal performance. Improvised Dialogues thus is positioned at the intersection of several fields, each of which includes a tradition of research on improvisation and conversation. In sociology, researchers such as conversation analysts have long studied how participants in interaction creatively produce an orderly dialogue. In folkloristic and linguistic anthropology, researchers have begun to emphasize the importance of creativity in performance. In psychology, contemporary creativity theory has begun to take account of interactional and social factors influencing creativity. All of these fields study collaborative, interactive creativity; no single performer controls the group, but each performer is subtly influenced by the actions of the others. |
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