Social skills and audience agency in improvised social performance

Abstract

Performance theories treat social action as relatively improvisational, but how such spontaneous and unscripted actions manage to succeed with audiences is undertheorized. Cultural pragmatics is exceptional in this regard, specifying the elements of successful performances and placing particular emphasis on the dramatic skills of actors and the agency of audiences. But how exactly do actors make use of the active character of audiences in achieving performative success? In this article, I draw from interview and observational data on improvisational theatre to analyse and catalogue the skills and techniques that improvisers employ to engage their audiences. I find that improvisers achieve performative success consistently by exercising varying degree of “restrained reciprocity” with audiences, and developing skills and techniques to generate enthusiastic responses, make inferences about the audiences mental and emotional states, tailor performances to audience preferences, and coordinate performances with the affordances of performance venues. I use these insights to refine the conceptualization of dramatic skills, fusion, and mise-en-scène within cultural pragmatics.