“The Honesty of the World Is Between Us”: Playing With Identity, Violence, and Futurity in Chicago’s Improv Comedy Theatres

Abstract

This arts-based ethnography of Chicago’s iO Theater explores how comedic improvisers navigate identity in the wake of multiple grassroots movements to address systemic racism and sexism. It theorizes improvisation as an intercorporeal process of playful materialization. In this framework, bodies act as filters of experience. Identity forms when social debris accumulates within and upon the flesh. Social debris results from violent relations including racialization, gendering, and ableism. A transition from containerized conceptions of the body and identity complicates discourses of inclusion within academic scholarship, popular culture, and performance. The author argues for the contemporary relevance of humanism, as well as the use of improvisation to practice political solidarities and enact glimmers of futurity beyond violence.

Photographs and collaborative ethnodramatic exercises are central to this project’s fieldwork, analysis, and public presentation. The author urges ethnographers to use vulnerability, storytelling, and research-creation methods to address issues of representation in anthropology and performance studies.