When do we develop the self-consciousness that inhibits us from improvising, whether it's dance, acting, or any other art—or even just conversing? I often hear that improvisation is a "muscle" that must be exercised, but to me it seems quite the opposite—You're born with the ability to improvise. Babies bop to music in their carriers long before they can walk; kids invent elaborate role-play scenarios years before they freeze up in an improv exercise in drama or speech class; young children ask questions and make announcements without worrying how the listener will perceive them for their words.
I ask my three-to-eight-year-old ballet students to improv and they do it with smiles on their faces, responding to the tempo, rhythm, and even the levels suggested by the music. But my teen students freeze—hands in pockets, not even a head bop or rock side to side to the beat. Is it because of a "muscle" they haven't exercised or because they feel judged? Or some other factor entirely?
In thinking about it, I realized that while I stayed comfortable improvising in theatre and dance, it's my ease of conversing with those I don’t know well that suffered when I left early childhood. I can come off as shy, but it's not that words don't come to me or that I'm standoffish, nor do I have any fear of public speaking—It's that I started censoring myself when I started getting picked on in school, and now I find myself with words in my head that sometimes never get said aloud. Sometimes they build up, and eventually all the feelings conveyed by those words that were never said, conversations that were never had, swirl together with everything else inside me and come out as dance... improvised dance. Without that outlet I would explode.
So how do you get teens to improvise? How do you keep children from inhibiting themselves in expression? How do you get older kids and adults to have that same breathless smile of joy as they twirl and leap that they did when they were six?
