Impro - Improvisation and the theatre

Keith Johnstone

Methuen Drama

2007

208 páginas

6h 56m

ISBN-13: 9780713687019

Keith Johnstone's involvement with the theatre began when George Devine and Tony Richardson, artistic directors of the Royal Court Theatre, commissioned a play from him. This was the year of Look Back in Anger in 1956. A few years later he was himself Associate Artistic Director, in particular helping to run the writers' group. The techniques and exercises evolved there to foster spontaneity and narrative skills were developed further in the actors' studio, then in demonstrations to schools and colleges and ultimately in the founding of a company of performers called The Theatre Machine. Divided into four sections, "Status", "Spontaneity", "Narrative Skills" and "Masks and Trance", arranged more or less in the order a group might approach them, the book sets out the specific techniques and exercises which Johnstone has himself found most useful and most stimulating. The result is a fascinating exploration of the nature of spontaneous creativity."If teachers were honoured in the British theatre along-side directors, designers and playwrights, Keith Johnstone would be as familiar a name as are those of...;Jocelyn Herbert, Edward Bond and other young talents who were drawn to the great lodestone of the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s. As head of the script department, Johnstone played a crucial part in the development of the 'writers' theatre...;'" (Irving Wardle)

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

Amazing book. I abandoned the last 20 pages or so, on masks.. But the part on status and trances are worth it, and his insights on teaching and his personal way of doing it are gems!

"My classes were hysterically funny, but I remembered Stirling's contempt for artists who form 'self-admiration groups' and wondered if we were deluding ourselves."

"until the audience is like a great beast rolling over to let you kick it. Then hubris gets you, you lose your humility, you expect to be loved, and you turn into Sisyphus. All comedians know these feelings."

"directed the Wakerfield Mystery Cycle there, and I was so far away from anyone whose criticism I cared about that I felt free to do exactly what I felt like. Suddenly I was spontaneous again; and since then, I've always directed plays as if I was totally ignorant about directing; I simply approach each problem on a basis of common sense and try to find the most obvious solutions possible."

"My feeling is that a good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher can wreck any method."

"I have already changed the group profoundly, because failure is suddenly not so frightening any more. They'll want to test me, of course; but I really will apologise to them when they fail, and ask them to be patient with me, and explain that I'm not perfect."

"Relaxation is incompatible with anxiety; and by maintaining the relaxed state, and presenting images that gradually neared the centre of the phobia, the state of alarm was soon dissipated - in most cases"

"Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic, and this completely changes the teacher's relationship with them."

"It's as if they're ill, and lacking in vitality. They've to play for sympathy. However easy the problem, the'll use the same old trick of looking inadequate. This ploy is supposed to make the onlookers have sympathy with them if they 'fail' and it's expected to bring greater rewards if they 'win'."

"When it's their turn to take part they're to come out and just do what they're asked to, and see what happens. It;s this decision not to try and control the future which allows the students to be spontaneous."

"My answer is that acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together."

"If I'm going to lower my end of the see-saw, and my mind blocks, I can always switch to raising the other end. That is, I can achieve a similar effect by saying 'I smell beautiful' as 'You stink'. I therefore teach actors to switch between raising themselves and lowering their partners in alternate sentences; and vice versa. Good playwrights also add variety in this way."

"While he describes himself in this pathetic way he leaps about, and express manic happiness, thus absolving the audience of the need to pity him. We want people to be very low-status, but we don't want to feel sympathy for them - slaves are always supposed to sing at their work."

"What is essentially laughable is what is done automatically."

"Chaplin being sucked into the machine is funny because his style absolves us the need for sympathy."

"Social animals have inbuilt rules which prevent them killing each other for food, mates, and so on. Such animals confront each other, and sometimes fight, until a hierarchy is established, after which there is no fighting unless an attempt is being made to change the 'pecking order'."

"If you ignore someone your status rises, if you feel impelled to look back than it falls."

"Thus dark glasses raise status because we can't see the submission of the eyes."

"The short 'er' is an invitation for people to interrupt you; the long 'er' says 'Don't interrupt me, even though I haven't thought what to say yet."

"A person who plays high status is saying 'Don't come near me, I bite.' Someone who plays low status is saying 'Don't bite me, I'm not worth the trouble."

"Status is played to anything, objects as well as people."

"The actor or improviser must accept his disabilities, and allow himself to be insulted, or he'll never really feel safe."

"It's no use just giving the exercises and expecting them to work. You have to understand where the resistance is, and devise ways of getting it to crumble."

"When we stand on a hill and look across fifty miles of emptiness at the mountains, we are experiencing the pleasure of having our space flow out unhindered."

"I teach that a master-servant scene is one in which both parties act as if all the space belonged to the master. (Johnstone law)"

"The contrast between the status played between the characters and the status played to the space fascinates the audience."

"A servants primary function is to elevate the status of the master."

"I train actors to use minimum status gaps, because then they have to assess the status of their partners accurately, but I also teach them to play maximum status-gaps scenes. For maximum-status-gap exercises produces 'absurd' improvisations."

"Once we believe that art is self-expression, then that individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is."

"Foulkes and Anthony say that a therapeutic situation is on 'in which the patient can freely voice his innermost thoughts towards himself, towards any other person, and towards the analyst. He can be confident that he is not being judged, and that he is fully accepted, whatever he may be, or whatever he may disclose."

"Ordinary people asked to improvise will search for some 'original' idea, because they want to be thought clever. They'll say and do all sorts of inappropriate things."

"I say that either they can put their hand out, and see what it closes on; or else they can think first, and decide what they'll pick up, and then do the mime. If they're worried about failing, then they'll have to think first; if they're being playful, then they can allow their hand to make its own decision."

"High-status players will block any action unless they fell they can control it."

"Even in what seems to be a tremendous argument, the actors should still be co-operating, and coolly developing the action. The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner's imagination."

"If you'll stop reading for a moment and think of something that happen to you, or to someone you love, then you'll have a thought of something worth staging or filming."

"Once you have established the categories of offer, 'block' and 'accept' you can give some very interesting instructions. For example, you can ask an actor to make dull offers, or interesting offers, or to 'overaccept', or to 'accept and block' and so on."

"Once the basic technique has been mastered, the nest step is to get the actors to play the game while discussing some quite different subject."

"would classify 'It's Tuesday' as a 'make boring offers and overaccept' game."

"Lie down on yonder block and pray... prompt? 'I'll kill her at the break of day...' suggests someone in the audience. No one in their right senses would think up a scene about sacrificing a cripple at Stonehenge, but the verse precipitates it. My job is to get the actors to go where the verse takes them."

"The stages I try to take students through involve the realisation that (1) we struggle against our imaginations, especially when we try to be imaginative; (2) that we are not responsible for the content of our imaginations; and (3) that we are not, as we are taught to think, our 'personalities', but that the imagination is our true self."

"spontaneity means abandoning some of your defences."

"Whatever dredges up from their unconscious I'll accept, and treat as 'normal'. If I seized on the content of the scenes as revealing secrets about the student, then I'd be perceived as a threat."

"They admire the improviser's grasp, since he not only generates new material, but remembers and make use of earlier events that the audience itself may have temporarily forgotten."

"It seems obvious to teach storytelling as two separate activities. I get the actors to work in pairs, with actor A telling a story for thirty seconds, and then with actor B finishing it for thirty seconds. Actor A is to provide disconnected material, and Actor B is somehow to connect it."

"Once people have learned to play each stage of this game with no effort or anxiety, I let them play both halves themselves. I say 'Free-associate', and then when thay've produced unconnected material, I say 'connect', o 'Reincorporate'."

"It also means that you look back when you get stuck, intead of searching forward."

"It I tell a student, 'Say a word', he'll probably gawp. He wants a context in which his answer will be 'right'. He wants his answer to bring credit to him, that's what he's been taught answers are for."

"People can get upset playing the game, but if they weep you can cuddle them, which makes them feel better. When people abreact I always establish that (1) it's good for them; (2) they'll feel marvelous in half an hour; (3) it happens to everybody."

"Word-at-a-time letters usually go through four stages: (1) the letters are usually cautious or nonsensical and full of concealed sexual references; (2) the letters are obscene and psychotic; (3) they are full of religious feeling; (4) finally, they express vulnerability and loneliness."

"He shouldn't really think of making up stories, but of interrupting routines."

"We don't play the game in order to get 'good stories', although 'good stories' may emerge; the important thing is to investigate exactly why the playwright 'blocks'."

"An audience will remais interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organized manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors."

"the important thing is the effect the revelation produces on the other characters. Otherwise it stops being theatre, and becomes 'literature'."

"Vakhtangov forced his students to act spontaneously. This produces a light trance in which the actors feel as if something else is controlling them. They 'know' what to do, whereas normally they 'choose' what to do. The state is regressive, but they experience no selfconsciousness."

"A mask is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take possession of it."

"The mask dies when it is entirely subjected to the will of the performer."

"Other people help to stop us drifting. They will laugh if we don't seem immediately in possession of ourselves, and we'll laugh too in acknowledgement of our inappropriate behaviour."

"I see the 'personality' as a public-relations department for the real mind, which remains unknown. My personality always seems to be functioning, at some level, in terms of what other people think. If I am alone in a room and someone knocks on the door, the I 'come back to myself'."

"A high-status person whom you accept as dominant can easily propel you into unusual states of being."

"Student improvisers asked to pretend to be hypnotised, show sudden improvement."

"Crowds are trance-inducing because the anonymity imposed by the crowds absolves you of the need to maintain your identity."

"I encourage students to throw themselves in, and to stop being 'critical', by saying: 'Make mistakes!'. Don't worry about being wrong! Rely on me to stop you!'".