Company
About
The mission in one sentence: every part on its own card, so an acting teacher can rehearse, teach and run a show without saying it all out loud. Everything else on this page is how we got there.
Spontar is built by a very small team. It started with one structural problem in a room full of people — whatever is said out loud, everybody hears — and grew into a rehearsal and class kit for acting teachers.
Where it started
One second in a drama class, watched closely enough.
Watch a good improvisation teacher work and you will see the same thing happen several times an hour. A scene is running. Someone is drifting — playing at a feeling instead of having one, or arguing a point they should already have lost. The teacher knows the exact sentence that would fix it.
They say it. And in the second after they say it, four things happen at once: the student stops, the room turns, the student who was inside the exercise is now outside it looking at themselves, and the teacher has spent the attention they were trying to protect.
Everyone who teaches this has made peace with that trade. Nobody thinks it is a good trade. It is simply what a room does to a voice.
Spontar started from a narrow question beside that second. Much of what a teacher tells one player during a scene — who comes in next, what they want, how they feel — could have been written down before the lesson. That part does not need to be said aloud at all. So the first version took it out of the air: written beforehand, it reached only its player, at its moment.
You are Mara
You came back. I told myself you wouldn't. I bought one ticket, sat on this bench, and spent an hour working out what to say if you did —
quietly
You are The clerk
You offer to call the manager over yourself, right now.
calm
You are The traveller
The last train has gone.
The idea
Every part on its own card — then scripts, the room and the show.
Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater (1963) describes side-coaching: a short instruction delivered while a scene runs, aimed at one player, adjusting something without breaking the fiction. It is the most useful thing a drama teacher does with an improvisation class.
It has one problem, and it is not a problem of craft. A room is full of people who can hear you. A note called across it reaches everybody.
Spontar began with the part that can be prepared: a situation and a feeling for each player, in order, reaching each player privately on their card as the teacher moves the scene on.
Then the teachers we showed it to asked for more. Improv is only part of what a studio teaches, and one wanted the same thing for scripts: each actor holding only their own lines, told when their cue is coming, with nobody prompting and nobody holding paper. Another wanted to send a prompt in the moment, without preparing a scene at all, and to put a picture on the card. So a beat can now be a line, a situation or a picture, and Live mode lets you type prompts as the scene goes.
Then we looked at where an acting class loses its time. The loudest problem in an acting class is not improvisation: it is lines. Actors not off book, a partner's time spent waiting, a teacher calling "line" across the room or refusing to. And several times every evening the same small logistics — who goes up next, with whom, for how long, and on a show night who is on in five minutes. So the kit now rehearses a script — each actor's cue and line, a silent prompt when they dry — runs the room and runs the show night. Improv stayed in; it is no longer the headline. The principle did not change: each actor sees only their own part, at their moment.
Everything else — Composer, the record, the room-only mode — exists so that this works in a real room with a real class.
Where it comes from
The traditions this is built on
Viola Spolin
Side-coaching, the point of concentration, and the argument that a student focused on a game acts naturally while a student focused on acting does not. The reason an improvised beat in Spontar is a situation and a feeling, and leaves the words to the player.
Keith Johnstone
Status as the engine of a scene, and Theatresports (1977) as the proof that scored, constrained improvisation works as a form. When a scenario's learning goal is status, its constraints are Johnstone-shaped, because a teacher can tell instantly when they are not.
Augusto Boal
Forum Theatre, and the Joker as a role distinct from both performer and audience. The teacher's console sits in a similar place: running a scene from outside it, without entering it.
Del Close
The Harold, and long-form structure as something that can be written down without being scripted — which is what a scene of situations is.
None of this is ours. We are changing how a player's part reaches them, and the pedagogy belongs to people who worked it out in rooms.
There is also a body of research on why public correction costs what it costs — on feedback, on audiences, and on drama teaching. We have collected it, with what it does and does not show. Read the evidence.
What we will not build
Some things are deliberately absent.
No student-facing scores, ever. Not a number, not a badge, not a streak. A student who is being scored is performing for the score, and the thing improvisation trains is the opposite of that.
No AI on lesson records. The AI features help you shape a scene and summarise usage figures. There is no code path from session data to a model, and there will not be one — that is enforced in the type system, at runtime, and by a test that fails the build. One exception, named: a class-list import that cannot tell what a column is may send its headers and up to five sample rows to the model, and you review the result before anything is created.
No recording. No camera, no use of a microphone, no video of a class. Nothing is recorded as sound or picture, and the answer stays no.
No student email addresses. Not for sign-up, not for recovery, not as a convenience. Players do not sign in at all; they hold a card the institution owns.
Honestly
What we do not know yet.
Whether a private card changes what a class risks, or how quickly a cast gets off book. We believe it does, and we have not measured it.
Whether a scene survives contact with a teacher who did not write it. A scene is a specific thing; a colleague's may not fit your room.
If you try it and it does not work, we would rather hear that than not.