Viola Spolin - Early Work

Early Work

Viola Spolin initially trained to be a settlement worker (from 1924–1927), studying at Neva Boyd's Group Work School in Chicago. Boyd's innovative teaching in the areas of group leadership, recreation, and social group work strongly influenced Spolin, as did the use of traditional game structures to affect social behavior in inner-city and immigrant children. While serving as drama supervisor for the Chicago branch of the Works Progress Administration's Recreational Project (1939–1941), Spolin perceived a need to create within the WPA drama programan easily grasped system of theater training that could cross the cultural and ethnic barriers of the immigrant children with whom she worked.

According to Spolin, Boyd's teachings provided "an extraordinary training in the use of games, story-telling, folk dance and dramatics as tools for stimulating creative expression in both children and adults, through self discovery and personal experiencing." Building upon the experience of Boyd's work, she responded by developing new games that focused on individual creativity, adapting and focusing the concept of play to unlock the individual's capacity for creative self-expression. These techniques were later to be formalized under the rubric "Theater Games".