In high school, I was on the Academic Decathlon team. One of the activities we had to do were impromptu speeches—you would get one minute to choose one of three prompts and prepare a small speech, and then two minutes to deliver it. Practicing for that event was awesome, and my ability to react in that domain clearly climbed over the months of practice.
It didn’t seem to transfer to my prepared speech. I was more nervous delivering that, because I hadn’t had as much practice on simply recalling text with the specific distraction of judges, and because I was much more aware of the cost of a mistake in delivery. I can’t say if the impromptu practice carried over to any other domains, but I didn’t notice if it did.
In college, the closest thing I did was post on forums. I used to post ideas as I thought of them, write “speed” comments and check them later. I did this less as everyone on my forums became better writers and thinkers, and the cost of fast writing went up. Disturbingly, I have seen my ability to react decrease across all domains. So the skill has faded. But it can be trained, at least in some single domain!
In my experience, the primary benefit of getting good at improvisational performance to delivering prepared content is that I can handle unexpected events.
If I get heckled, or challenged, or I go up on my lines, or my scene partner does something completely unexpected, or a prop turns out to be missing, or the couch suddenly collapses, I can ad-lib some kind of a plausible response and maintain an air of everything being under control.
And simply knowing that helps reduce performance anxiety, so it pays off even in the more common case where nothing goes catastrophically wrong.
In high school, I was on the Academic Decathlon team. One of the activities we had to do were impromptu speeches—you would get one minute to choose one of three prompts and prepare a small speech, and then two minutes to deliver it. Practicing for that event was awesome, and my ability to react in that domain clearly climbed over the months of practice.
It didn’t seem to transfer to my prepared speech. I was more nervous delivering that, because I hadn’t had as much practice on simply recalling text with the specific distraction of judges, and because I was much more aware of the cost of a mistake in delivery. I can’t say if the impromptu practice carried over to any other domains, but I didn’t notice if it did.
In college, the closest thing I did was post on forums. I used to post ideas as I thought of them, write “speed” comments and check them later. I did this less as everyone on my forums became better writers and thinkers, and the cost of fast writing went up. Disturbingly, I have seen my ability to react decrease across all domains. So the skill has faded. But it can be trained, at least in some single domain!
In my experience, the primary benefit of getting good at improvisational performance to delivering prepared content is that I can handle unexpected events.
If I get heckled, or challenged, or I go up on my lines, or my scene partner does something completely unexpected, or a prop turns out to be missing, or the couch suddenly collapses, I can ad-lib some kind of a plausible response and maintain an air of everything being under control.
And simply knowing that helps reduce performance anxiety, so it pays off even in the more common case where nothing goes catastrophically wrong.