Check Your Assumptions for Vulnerable Populations

I've had the privilege of bringing improvisation into some unexpected spaces — workshops for people experiencing homelessness, performances for seniors in assisted living, a workshop for caregivers of people with dementia. These experiences have been among the most meaningful of my practice. They've also been among the most instructive, in ways I didn't always anticipate.

In each of these contexts, something happened that made me look more carefully at the exercises I was using — not their mechanics, but their underlying assumptions.

The assumption problem

Automotive safety testing has historically used only male-modeled dummies, with female representation still inadequate or absent even today. As a result, women are up to 73% more likely to be severely injured or killed in frontal car crashes than men. Assumptions have real consequences.

Standard applied improv exercises are designed with a general participant in mind: someone who is reasonably comfortable with mild self-disclosure, able to engage playfully on demand, and operating from a stable enough foundation to take small social risks. Those are reasonable assumptions for many populations. They aren't universal.

When I began working with people whose circumstances were significantly different — people navigating housing instability, cognitive decline, grief, or caregiving exhaustion — I started noticing where exercises quietly required things participants couldn't easily give. Not because the exercises were poorly designed, but because they were designed for someone else.

Sometimes this showed up in language. An exercise that asks participants to name something in their home or describe their daily routine contains an assumption about what "home" and "routine" mean. For someone without stable housing, that assumption isn't neutral — it excludes before the exercise even begins, and can create inadvertent discomfort in what should be a safe space.

Sometimes it showed up in pacing. Formats that rely on quick word association or rapid suggestion-giving can be energizing for some populations and quietly defeating for others, including seniors who may process more slowly or struggle with word retrieval under pressure.

And sometimes it showed up in the emotional weight of an invitation. "Share anything you're comfortable sharing with a partner, and they'll introduce you to the group" sounds low-stakes. For someone who is exhausted, grieving, or hypervigilant about how they're perceived, it may not be.

What I've learned to ask

I've started approaching exercise selection for these contexts with a different set of questions. Not just "will this work?" but: What does this exercise assume about participants' emotional availability? What does it require cognitively? What does it take for granted about participants' lives and circumstances? Who was it designed for — and how different is this population from that person?

These questions don't always produce clean answers. Sometimes I adapt an exercise. Sometimes I replace it. Sometimes I find that an exercise I've used successfully in other contexts simply isn't right for this room.

What good design doesn't cover

What's harder to prepare for is the moment when something real surfaces through the frame of the game — when someone steps out into their actual experience, briefly and without warning. Like the senior who, when asked her last dog's name, tears up and whispers, "I don't remember."

I've been sitting with what it means to be genuinely present in those moments, rather than defaulting to a brief acknowledgment and moving forward. I don't have a complete answer yet. But I think it starts with the willingness to pause — to let the real moment matter — rather than letting the structure of the session sweep past it.

An ongoing inquiry

I'm sharing this not as a resolved set of best practices but as an active inquiry. Applied improvisation has remarkable potential in these spaces. Realizing that potential requires us to look honestly at what our exercises assume — and to develop, as a field, better frameworks for what we do when the play touches something that isn't play at all.

Written with the assistance of AI.