Space Work: Building an Environment Out of Nothing

Space work is the improviser’s word for building your environment out of nothing. There’s no refrigerator on the stage, so you open one, and if you do it right the audience sees the light come on. It started as an improv skill and it has quietly become a film skill, because an actor in front of a green screen is doing exactly the same thing with a stranger’s dragon.

The audience believes the room as much as you do

Any environment, however ridiculous, can become real in improv, and the tools are your body and your eyes. In a kitchen? Open the cabinet. Run the sink. Chop the onion. Stir the pot. But the room isn’t believable because you mimed the objects. It’s believable because you took the time to see them and feel them: the weight of the knife, the pull of the refrigerator door, the steam off the stew, the sound of the faucet. When you actually see your surroundings, the audience watches you see them, and follows you in. When you don’t, no amount of miming will save it. They’ll believe your kitchen exactly as much as you do.

Remember where you put things

Part of holding the illusion is consistency. If the refrigerator was far stage left, don’t open it at center. If you brought a horse into the living room, it’s still there, and you cannot walk through it. Improvisers who lose track of their own furniture lose the audience one object at a time. The fix is simple and hard: pay attention to what you built.

Space work on camera

Everything above applies on film, and the camera adds a demand: your eyes. The lens catches more than the back row ever could, so the audience needs to see you see the thing. Green screens and effects will add the object, the creature, the explosion, and you may be asked to hold it, throw it, react to it or be chased by it, with nothing in your hands and a tennis ball on a stick. Same skill. Your imagination is the whole set. Whatever you’re asked to see, see all of it.

Practicing at home

Never use real objects on stage; your actual wallet limits the scene to what’s actually in it, while the space work wallet has a thousand hundred dollar bills and might be made of gold. But at home, practice with the real thing first. Make a cup of coffee and pay attention to every step: the weight of the kettle, where your other hand goes, how you hold the mug. Then make the same coffee with nothing in your hands, and try to keep every detail. The gap between the two is your homework.

Acting is work. The more you train and the more you notice, the easier the work gets, and space work is the clearest example I know: it’s just paying attention, on purpose, until paying attention becomes what you do.