At the age of eighteen, she enrolled at the Recreational Training School, part of Chicago's Hull House run by the sociologist Neva Boyd. Poor grades prevented Spolinn from taking dramatics courses in school, and she never had any formal theater background. Still, she developed into one of the century's great teachers of performance and basically invented the art form that everyone now associates with the term improv
In the late 1930's, Spolin began teaching drama courses at the Hull House as part of the Works Progress Administration. As a method of helping underprivilidged children share their fears and frustrations, she began to design excercises in which students could act out scenarios. Spolin's book, Improvisation for the Theater, has acted as the seminal work in improv training for nearly forty years. As more and more children began to take her classes and more theaters began to teaching her techniques, Spolin expanded her encyclopedia of games. One game had players pantomiming a dinnner party while carrying on a conversation in which no player could mention the food. Another game might find a performer forced to translate the gibberish of an audience member. All of the excersises were centered around the quest for truth, the art of owning who one is. She wished to help children stop running from themselves, acting like actors, and instead to awaken their natural behavior and movement onstage. At the same time, she emphasized improvisation because good improv prevents one from getting lost in strong emotion.
When Paul Sills and David Shepherd began to design the form of the Compass, and later The Second City, they combined the influences of the Socialist cabaret with the playfulness of Viola Spolin. "Brecht influenced Paul more than any other playwright," one of Sills's friends once said, "But there are two lines in him. He's never fused them. There's the Brecht thing. And there's the Viola thing: the fairy-tale thing." For the first two or three years of The Second City, Spolin taught workshops and aided with rehearsals. In 1966, Spolin and Sills actually opened a Game Theatre devoted strictly to improvisational competition. This was the predecessor to the theater sports format that sprung up in Seattle (where the Spolin Center now is) and that audiences watch today on hundreds of stages, including The Second City's and the popular television show "Whose Line is it Anyway?".
In 1939, working with fourteen year-olds, not with professional actors, Spolin had the faith in her training techniques to initiate the audience suggestion, now the staple of all improv performance. To the modern audience member, this notion may seem ordinary, but this one innovation has sent ripples through all entertainment. In the first half of the century, their was a contract between the theater audience and the performers. No responsibility rested with the patrons. To bring the audience into the event was to shatter every convention of the theater, but Spolin did it and forever cemented herself as the "mother of modern improvisation." She passed away in 1994.
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