If you’d asked me six months ago if “online improv” has any place in this world, I would have chuckled and told you that our online lives stand opposite the deeply transformative experiences applied improvisation can provide in person. Yet, for the past three months, I’ve been proven wrong over and over again.

Yesterday night I watched four students brand new to improv perform one of the most playful and hilarious scenes I’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing. On Zoom. In a class that I’m teaching this summer using improv to teach leadership skills (originally scheduled to meet in person), we played the game “dubbed interview.”* Everyone turned off and hid their video cameras except for two students who muted their mics and acted out a job interview. While they spoke to each other, two other students dubbed over their voices. Aside from the lessons in commitment, listening, yes, anding and more offered by the exercise, it struck me that with an experimental mindset online improv can offer different and sometimes better ways of doing improv than in person formats. I’ve observed improv communities in the last few months experimenting by using the chat box to have everyone in an audience provide suggestions, changing backgrounds for scenes (e.g. so that we can actually see two improvisers seated in a park), and even all kinds of angles and on/off and close/distant features with their cameras to replicate the experience of film.

As I found myself rushing to figure out how I could teach an applied improv class online, I went through all my lesson plans and put a check mark next to each exercise that seemed like it could be pulled off through Zoom in some way. To my surprise, exactly 92% of what I’d normally teach in the course worked. It just took sitting down and thinking through how to do each. I also turned to the incredible knowledge sharing and creative applications offered by so many members of the Applied Improvisation Network Facebook page that has been abuzz with how to pull this off (many are even experimenting with improv in virtual reality!), and the inspiring new Global Play Brigade, formed by performers around the world as a response to the pandemic. Improvisers have been busy doing what they do best: working with what’s at hand, co-creating, and developing new ways of connecting amid one of the most challenging times in modern history.

As I prepare to run an applied improv workshop with a group in Japan this evening, through all this one larger conclusion has been hard to miss. While the virtues of in person improv may never be fully replicated online, the online experience is democratizing improv as never before—bringing improv to more people, in more places, with more accessible digital tools at our disposal, unshackling the offer of improv’s benefits from bounded places to unbounded spaces. As we all look to a world filled with new futures, that’s worth building on.

Don Waisanen is a professor at the Marxe School for Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Improv for Democracy: How to Bridge Differences and Develop the Communication and Leadership Skills Our World Needs, SUNY Press New Political Science series (hardback release November 1, 2020, paperback release January 1, 2021).

*Kudos to Marian Rich for introducing me to the Zoom version of this exercise.