Pecking Order

How to Explain It

"Everyone has a rank, but you do not know what yours is. Interact with the other people in the room. Pay attention to how people treat you. By the end, you should be able to figure out where you stand in the hierarchy from the signals you received."

Objectives

Pecking Order develops the ability to read and play status through physical behavior rather than social label. Many performers conflate status with personality or power: they believe a character labeled "boss" should be high status. The exercise demonstrates that status is enacted through physical behavior independent of social role , a janitor can dominate a CEO through physical and vocal choices.

The debrief is the exercise's most important phase. Asking observers to name exactly which physical behavior communicated rank (eye contact duration, space taken up, the completeness of gestures) gives performers precise vocabulary for status work.

Facilitation

Assign numbers secretly. If players assign their own, they tend to gravitate to comfortable status levels. The assignment should push performers to play both extremes.

Run the exercise in a neutral setting rather than one with built-in status implications (a throne room already tells performers who should be high status). A kitchen, a waiting room, or a bus stop requires performers to construct the hierarchy from behavior alone.

Common Coaching Notes

• "Low status is not shy. It is actively managing the threat of someone above you."
• "High status is not cruel. It is comfortable with authority."
• "You have to read everyone in the room, not just the person you're talking to."
• "If you can't tell the ranking from the outside, the physical signals are not specific enough."

Pecking Order is attributed to Keith Johnstone and appears in the TheatreSports tradition as a status training exercise. Lynda Belt documents it as "Pecking Order I (Johnstone)" in Acting Through Improv: Improv Through Theatresports, specifying the four-person format and secret number assignment.

The concept of status as a behavioral hierarchy rather than a social category was central to Johnstone's contribution to improv pedagogy, developed in his work at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the 1960s and elaborated in Impro (1979). Johnstone's insight that performers could play status as a dynamic physical quality, not a fixed character trait, transformed how actors and improvisers approached character relationships.

The specific phrase "pecking order" was drawn from social science: David Shepherd at The Compass in Chicago had encountered Mark Kennedy's book The Pecking Order, a popular campus text about group behavior, and used its language to describe social hierarchy in performance. Johnstone, independently arriving at the same territory from a theater direction perspective, codified the exercises. Gavin Levy documents the exercise as Game 129 in 112 Acting Games.