Instructing embodied exercises in theatre rehearsals and virtual improvisation workshops – the affordances and constraints of different spatiomaterial environments

Using Conversation Analysis, this paper examines how instructions for embodied exercises are constructed in a non-professional theatre rehearsal and an online improvisation workshop. We analyse how the leaders in both settings orient to the spatiomaterial environment when delivering the instructions and demonstrating the exercises. Thus, we aim at identifying the spatiomaterial affordances and constraints for instructing embodied exercises in each setting. In the rehearsal hall, the leader flexibly used affordances provided by the spatiomaterial environment. The instructive turns were designed to be immediately followable, and the leader’s movement, in combination with her verbal conduct, made the spatial targets projectable, enabling the participants to align movement trajectories. In the virtual setting, the instruction sequences were segmented as successive actions. The leader demonstrated the exercise while the participants were watching, and used verbal directives to mark the starting and ending points of the participants’ turn to perform the exercise. The leader anchored the instructional activity to the visually available screen, the location of which was inevitably known to the participants. When his embodied actions oriented away from the screen, he used declaratives to frame his embodied actions as part of the pedagogical activity. Across both settings, the leaders tailored the instructions of the embodied exercises to the participants’ embodied positioning and their shared visual access, thereby building on situationally shared contingencies of the spatiomaterial ecology.