exercise · all tools
The Letter
Worked alone, as a study in status shift. The circumstances are fixed: you are in your flat waiting for an important letter, you hear the post arrive, fetch it, sort it, find the letter, react, open, read, react, finish. You decide in advance what you are waiting for and what your status is toward the wait, the post, the letter and its contents — and the letter must be about what you expected but contain the opposite.
- The sheet's own examples of what might be awaited are a medical diagnosis and a declaration of love; participants choosing their own may land somewhere real, and the exercise gives no way to step out
Practical
- Time
- — min
- Group
- ?–∞ · individual, large-group
- Settings
- in-person
- Mechanisms
- perspective-taking, behavioral-rehearsal, emotional-processing
- Change scope
- state → skill · repeatable
Instructions
- Where
- teatermila.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Brevet.pdf — Teater Mila — Övningar, open
- Availability
- In the source document — the instructions live inside the material linked, on its terms
Source link checked 1 Sep 2026 — reachable
This directory describes and points home; the instructions stay with the people who made them.
Origin
Keith Johnstone — Improvisation; Johnstone's status work
The sheet says outright that this exercise is borrowed from Keith Johnstone, whose work on status — how people raise and lower themselves relative to each other, and what a shift in that costs — underlies a good deal of improvisation teaching. Two other records here touch the same lineage without attribution (Status bridge, Yes, let's...); this is the one whose source names him.
In this directory via Teater Mila — Övningar
status: checked · added 2026-08-31