For the last three years, I have been very interested in pursuing the potential of improv as an educational tool. I’d only previously done educational improv workshops around the theme of environmental justice. But during my brainstorming process, I realised that Buddhism has some core values that could make the world a better place too. In the end, I set out to create a workshop format that could be replicable across different value systems. While I believe that this is far from the final version, I think there have been many, many improvements from the very first workshop I ran, and I am proud of this version for now!

I ran two workshops with members from my improv troupe. I took the first workshop to be a more experimental one, where I could try different things with my participants and bring those lessons into my second. Thus, I gave my participants discussion questions on different topics in Buddhist philosophy that we covered in class: the idea of dependent origination, the idea of detachment in fighting for justice, and the idea of detached love. 

I found that my participants connected best with the concept of love, so I focused more on love for my second workshop. In both workshops, I also introduced the Buddhist argument that we should eliminate attachment from the Saccavibhaṅga Sutta. I didn’t want to simply throw the concept of detachment at my participants; instead, I wanted them to feel the force of the argument for detachment themselves.

The first workshop I ran was already the result of some playtesting from previous iterations in environmental justice contexts. However, we ran into some new problems. For one, it was much more difficult to make Buddhist principles feel concrete in a scene. While environmental justice lent itself quite easily to generating concrete facts about the world (e.g. imagining a scene with renewable energy sources or a flat power structure), it was much harder to do so for Buddhism. As such, my participants and I struggled to immerse ourselves into the scene as we were trying very hard to force Buddhist principles into our characters each time.

Working on this feedback, I talked through some ideas with my friend Elisa, who happened to also be doing improv as a creative assignment for another class. She suggested something similar to our final format: what if we did the same scene, but over and over with a twist? I worked on her suggestion and came up with a new plan, which would eventually make it into the final version of the guidebook. 

Through playtesting, we found that this new format worked extremely well. The reason was that we could focus on just doing a regular improv scene on our first go. Then, because we already had a world and a story structure to follow, it was much easier to ground our scene when trying to introduce Buddhist values. Finally, because we were focusing on changing aspects of our own characters (i.e. making our characters detached/attached instead of changing parts of the world), it was easier to imagine and immerse ourselves as we only needed to focus on our individual reactions, rather than the big picture of the world.

I really enjoyed the experience! My participants in the first workshop, well, didn’t enjoy the experience that much, and neither did I. But my participants in the second workshop certainly did. In fact, Elisa (who participated in the second workshop) sent me this text that evening:

Buddhist Philosophy is so interesting. I literally have headache rn but I don't care 😯 I think I'm influenced by our detachment practice. Cuz usually I'd feel stressed or pay a lot of useless attention to that ache.

(I’m sharing this with her permission. She said this verbatim. She’s okay now. I made sure to remind her that she should definitely care a little bit about that headache).

I also remember some very interesting reflections from the participants during the workshop. One of them remarked that he found it a little harder to be attached when everyone else in the scene was detached; likewise, another participant said that it was much easier to play the detached character when everyone else was also detached. This is fascinating to me—it was clear from these comments that the environment around us plays such an important role in cultivating Buddhist principles. Whether we like it or not, we are affected by the actions and attitudes of others.

One participant also remarked that it was difficult to see the Buddhist principles being implemented while they were on stage, even though they were exaggerating the level of attachedness/ detachedness. However, he said that the benefits of detachment became much clearer to him when he reflected on his character after performing the scene. This isn’t related to Buddhism, but I found it fascinating to see this evidence that we must intentionally reflect on our values in order to become better people! That’s why I took care to highlight the importance of the reflection questions in my guidebook.