ABSTRACT

As a Playwright, Poblete has long employed collaborative acting exercises in his writing process as a way to anticipate potential Performer challenges and to incorporate feedback early in the worldbuilding process. Creating a setting with consistent physical and moral rules that don’t just serve a play, but drive it forward, is a skillset that can take a career to master. In recent years, he has embraced devising and improvisation as a writer/Performer, both of which have greatly influenced his playwriting praxis. In this chapter, he provides a number of his own embodied performative exercises, as well as exercises he has modified from practitioners, such as improviser Keith Johnstone and deviser Alison Oddey, that are aimed at helping Playwrights create a dynamic world that tells a play’s story as much as the characters that inhabit it.