Trust Exercise

How to Explain It

"In this exercise, your job is to be reliable. Your partner's job is to take a risk based on that reliability. Everything we do here is in service of that: someone makes themselves physically vulnerable, and someone else receives that vulnerability safely. There is nothing to perform. There is only the task."

Objectives

Trust Exercise develops the physical component of ensemble trust. Before players can surrender a scene to their partners, many need to experience literal surrender: allowing their body to fall without controlling the outcome. The exercise makes the abstract principle of "trust your ensemble" into something felt rather than merely understood.

Facilitating the Circle Form

Spend time before the exercise establishing the circle. Hands must be up and ready before the center player begins to fall. A center player who tips and finds no hands learns the wrong lesson. Run a full demonstration with a trusted player at the center before rotating.

Coach the circle members to receive with palms, not fingers, and to push gently rather than grip. The goal is a smooth, continuous pass, not a series of catches. Players who grip or jerk the center player interrupt the flow.

Coach the center player:

• "Let your ankles go. Don't hold yourself up."
• "If you feel yourself stepping, reset and start again."
• "The group will not let you fall."

Sequencing

Run trust exercises early in an ensemble's work together, not as a standalone. They function best as a gateway into scene work rather than as a stand-alone team-building activity. Return to them at the start of sessions during periods when the ensemble is working on listening and physical availability.

Begin with the paired trust fall before the full circle. Players who have never surrendered their weight to a partner may tense involuntarily; the smaller configuration gives them a lower-stakes first experience.

Common Coaching Notes

• "You are not falling. You are being passed."
• "Your job at the center is to be heavy, not to help."
• "Catchers: your arms go up before they need to. Not after."
• "If you flinched, that's information. Let's do it again."

Trust exercises as an ensemble practice entered American theatre through the influence of the Living Theatre, the experimental company founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in New York in the 1940s. The Living Theatre's ensemble methods, which emphasized physical vulnerability, mutual reliance, and collective presence, were absorbed into the emerging improvisational theatre movement of the 1960s.

Del Close brought trust exercises into his workshop practice at Second City and later at ImprovOlympic, crediting the Living Theatre as their source. Close's application of the trust fall became legendary at Second City: he would climb to the upper level of the stage and fling himself off, expecting the ensemble to catch him. On at least one occasion, Second City members did not realize he was performing a trust exercise and failed to catch him. Close reportedly broke his shoulder in that fall. His quip on the event became one of the most quoted lines in improv history: "I knew the sixties were coming to an end when they dropped me."

Viola Spolin's body of work addresses physical awareness and ensemble presence through different means, but the trust exercise as a discrete form belongs to the physical training traditions that Close and his contemporaries imported from experimental theatre into improv pedagogy. The exercise appears across acting, improv, and outdoor education curricula as a foundational ensemble-building tool.