Sideways

How to Explain It

"You may only move sideways. You may not face upstage or downstage. Every choice you make about space and direction must work within that constraint. Start a scene."

Objectives

Sideways develops spatial awareness and challenges habitual blocking. Most performers default to a front-facing orientation that serves the audience but may not serve the scene's physical logic. The sideways constraint makes this habit visible by removing it and requiring performers to find alternatives.

The exercise also develops physical problem-solving: how does an actor play a fight, an embrace, or a meal in a sustained sideways orientation? The solutions performers find under constraint often reveal creative physical choices that would never arise in conventional staging.

Scaffolding

Begin by having performers walk the space in a sustained sideways orientation for two minutes before any scene work. This builds physical familiarity with the orientation and surfaces its basic challenges.

For the scene version, start with simple scenes that have minimal physical interaction: two characters talking. Add physical complexity gradually: scenes that require movement, then scenes that require physical contact.

Common Coaching Notes

• "Your body is facing forward. Sideways means sideways."
• "What can you see from this angle that you couldn't see from the front?"
• "Find a solution. Don't pause the scene to figure it out."
• "The constraint is not the problem. The scene is still the scene."

The game's entertainment value comes from the visible effort of maintaining an unusual physical constraint while performing a coherent scene. The audience's pleasure is partly in the constraint itself and partly in watching performers find creative solutions.

The most successful performances find ways to make the constraint serve the scene rather than merely endure it. When a sideways orientation creates a visual metaphor for distance, alienation, or parallel action without connection, the constraint becomes expressive rather than just comic. When performers fight the constraint or visibly ignore it, the game collapses.

Coaching the scene from outside is effective: a director who redirects performers back to the constraint when they drift toward conventional orientation helps maintain the game's premise.

Sideways belongs to a family of physical constraint games that use unusual body orientation or movement restriction to develop performers' spatial creativity and challenge habitual staging choices. Physical constraint exercises appear throughout improv and physical theatre training curricula.

Augusto Boal in Games for Actors and Non-Actors documents exercises in which participants move in prescribed spatial patterns (including sideways like crabs), demonstrating the training value of restricted movement as a tool for physical awareness. The specific game of performing scenes in a sustained sideways orientation has not been documented under this name in published improv sources, though the pedagogical principle it embodies is well-established.