Keith Johnstone

A Critical Biography

Theresa Robbins Dudeck

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781408184011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Keith Johnstone entered the Royal Court Theatre as a new playwright in 1956: a decade later he emerged as a groundbreaking director and teacher of improvisation. His decisive book Impro (1979), described Johnstone's unique system of training: weaving together theories and techniques to encourage spontaneous, collaborative creation using the intuition and imagination of the actors. Johnstone has since become world-renowned, inspiring theatre greats and beginners alike; and his work continues to influence practice within and beyond the traditional theatre. Theresa Robbins Dudeck is the first author to rigorously examine Johnstone's life and career using a combination of archival documents – many from Johnstone's personal collection – participant observation, and interviews with Johnstone, his colleagues and former students. Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography is a fascinating journey through the physical spaces that have served as Johnstone's transformative classrooms, and into the conceptual spaces which inform his radical pedagogy and approach to artistic work.

CHAPTER ONE

Introducing Keith Johnstone and his Impro System

Keith Johnstone is a groundbreaking teacher, theorist, and creator of contemporary theatre practices used worldwide. His contribution to pedagogy, to performers and performance technique, to writers, and to theatrical entrepreneurial models is significant. Partly in response to his personal search to rediscover his imaginative potential, Keith has spent over five decades developing and teaching improvisational theatre methods for the classroom and for performance. For him, theatre is an informal classroom where life experiences can be fleshed out collaboratively in order to re-create genuine behavior, relationships, and imaginative stories spontaneously and in dialogue with the public. This first critical biography of Keith Johnstone uses the concept of the classroom as its structural and theoretical frame. Each chapter journeys not only through the corporeal spaces that have served as Keith’s transformative “classrooms” but also into the conceptual spaces which inform his pedagogy. It is a journey that continues today.

Keith is still very much alive and teaching all over the world. I have attended and observed his workshops in San Francisco (2006, 2009), London (2010), Stockholm (2010), and Calgary (2008, 2011, 2012). In every location, Keith draws in an enthusiastic group of students who want to learn from the master teacher. In July of 2011, for instance, 14 of the 20 students in Keith’s 10-day Calgary workshop hailed from Brazil and other Latin American countries where his improvisational methods are influencing the next generation of theatre makers. This study concludes with a look at Keith’s present classroom and at Johnstonian-inspired classrooms developing in various fields and corners of the world.

The Impro System (i.e., my term for denoting Keith’s theories, pedagogy, techniques, exercises, games, and terminology) is Keith’s most important contribution to theatre practice worldwide. The Impro System is an approach to actor training and theatre practice that encourages spontaneous, collaborative creation using the intuitive, uncensored imaginative responses of the participants. Since 2005, I have been referring to Keith’s process as a “system” because, like other complex systems—the solar system, transportation systems, the nervous system—optimal functionality depends on all components working harmoniously. General System Theory is a scientific discipline postulated by Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1950s. In very basic terms, Bertalanffy’s theory dictates that all parts of the system interact with each other directly or indirectly but privileges the wholeness of the system over its parts. In this sense, the Impro System is a system because it cannot be reduced down to its parts without decreasing its efficacy. When students apply the theatre games without understanding the theory or when teachers teach the exercises without understanding Keith’s pedagogy, the process is compromised. Theatresports, a format Keith created, serves as an example of what can happen when a system goes global and people begin to privilege the parts over the whole.

Theatresports was the vehicle that catapulted Keith’s Impro System onto the world stage. After moving from London to Canada, Keith developed this format with a handful of drama students at the University of Calgary (UofC) who were also members of his Loose Moose Theatre Company. Keith cofounded this company to showcase his plays, his improvisational methods, and Theatresports. Inspired by the British pro-wrestling matches, Theatresports pits one team of improvisers against another team for points and audience approval. By the early 1980s, Theatresports leagues were appearing everywhere. Today Theatresports and two other competitive forms created by Keith—Gorilla Theatre and Maestro Impro—are licensed to leagues all over the world.¹ In 1999, Keith published Impro for Storytellers, a sourcebook of his formats and games. While assuring his popularity, the Theatresports franchise has amassed a reputation that often makes it difficult to articulate why Keith matters in other contexts like actor training, playwriting, and pedagogy and perhaps accounts for the lack of recognition in serious academic studies of twentieth-century theatre practice. Furthermore, Theatresports has taken on a life of its own, outside of the classroom so to speak, and often departs from Keith’s original intentions.

My personal introduction to Keith Johnstone and his Impro System was not through Theatresports or Impro for Storytellers. In the early 1990s, I was trained in and became a strong proponent of improvisational theatre techniques primarily through the work of Viola Spolin. Spolin became well-known in America in the early 1960s following the publication of her foundational text, Improvisation for the Theatre, and through the work of her son Paul Sills, cofounder of the Compass Players and Chicago’s Second City. Avery Schreiber, an original Second City member, was my improvisational teacher in Los Angeles, and he taught in the Spolin tradition. Then, in 2001, my friend and colleague, Amy Langer Schwartz, handed me a copy of Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Impro) and said, “You must read this.” Published in 1979, Impro illuminates the work developed by Keith when he directed and taught classes for the Royal Court Theatre Studio (RCT Studio) in London from 1963 to 1966. Until he moved to Canada, Keith tested his ideas on audiences around the world with his group The Theatre Machine, Britain’s first pure improvisational troupe. But the work Keith began developing almost 50 years ago resonates with immediateness today. As I delved into Impro, I felt as if Keith was in direct dialogue with me. It was the first time a teacher encouraged me to take risks and to fail good-naturedly; to accept my first spontaneous impulses in lieu of clever or intellectual ideas; to acknowledge my imagination, not my socially-constructed “personality,” as my true self; and to be more obvious, since trying to be original only concealed the real me.

Impro is a loosely structured practical guide for psychologically and physically unblocking human beings, thus enabling them to generate good stories with three-dimensional characters through spontaneous collaboration. In the foreword to the book, critic and historian Irving Wardle called it a “guide to imaginative survival.” In the foreword to the Swedish translation, Suzanne Osten, film director and artistic director of Stockholm’s Unga Klara, an influential theatre company championing children’s issues, wrote that Impro comprised “alla idéer till ett teaterspråk vi sökte” (“all the ideas for a theatre language we were looking for”; trans. Bagdade). The popularity of Theatresports has indisputably added to sales, but Impro’s appeal is widespread. Drama training programs, directors, writers, animators, educators, psychotherapists, and an ever-growing number of organizational scholars and business consultants have exploited various tools contained in this text. Keith’s second book, Impro for Storytellers, organizes the exercises and techniques found in Impro into categories and offers additional games and terminology created for or during the evolution of Theatresports. It is a useful resource and does build on and extend his earlier work; even so, it targets Theatresports audiences and this limits its accessibility.

Keith’s wit, intelligence, and personality jump off the page in all of his writings (e.g., in his plays; his short stories; Impro for Storytellers; Don’t Be Prepared: Theatresports for Teachers; and Keith Johnstone’s Theatresports and Life-Game Newsletters). Impro, though, seems to capture Keith in the midst of discovery and his writing enables him to integrate the variables into a whole system as if for the first time. Perhaps this explains why Impro has been translated into numerous languages and is in its eighth printing. Even though Keith continues to rework, revise, and refine his theories and techniques, Impro still illuminates the heart of the Impro System in a way that attracts generation upon generation. In the following introduction to the Impro System, Impro serves as the primary source of information; however, other writings by Keith are occasionally utilized to reinforce a specific theory, technique, or term.

So what is Keith Johnstone’s Impro System and how does it intersect with, shatter, and/or radically depart from other improvisational processes? First of all, “impro” and “improv” are abbreviations for improvisation. In standard British pronunciation, the first and fourth syllables of “improvisation” are given more stress, and the “o” in “pro” has a partially open “ә” sound as in “the” (.Im-prә-vī-'zā-shәn) which is closer to the ō in “imprō.” Whereas in standard American pronunciation, the second and fourth syllables receive more stress and the “o” has a very open “a” sound as in “father” (im-.prä-vә-'zā-shәn). Therefore, the preferred use of the abbreviation “impro” in Britain and “improv” (-präv) in America originally stems from phonetics. Largely due to the title of Keith’s book—Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre—“impro” is mistakenly interpreted to mean British-style improvisation, but actually “impro” and “improv” are synonymous.²

Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow, professors and historians at the University of East Anglia (United Kingdom), coauthored Improvisation in Drama (1990, 2007). In both their first and second editions, they define improvisation as:

[T]he skill of using bodies, space, all human resources, to generate a coherent physical expression of an idea, a situation, a character (even, perhaps, a text); to do this spontaneously, in response to the immediate stimuli of one’s environment, and to do it à l’improviste: as though taken by surprise, without preconceptions.(4)

Prior to Keith’s work with the RCT Studio, improvisation as defined above was not a new concept in European actor training and developmental processes. Konstantin Stanislavsky, Jacques Copeau, Michel Saint-Denis, Jacques Lecoq, Joan Littlewood, and Michael Chekhov all relied on improvisational theory and technique to develop truthful moments in text-based performance, to flesh-out characters (masked and unmasked), and to explore the nature of acting. Improvisations were also used to liberate the actor’s body and imagination, to generate new material, to achieve authentic ensemble interaction, and to incorporate “play” into the theatrical process. The Impro System is useful in all of these ways and Keith owes much to his predecessors and contemporaries; however, several factors render Impro and the Impro System unique. One is its emphasis on “pure” improvisation, that is, improvisation as a performance in and of itself. In Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, Paul Sills was presenting performances improvised around scenarios in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte and later using the structure of Spolin’s theatre games. But in Europe, Keith was the first to advocate and first to present purely improvised performances without scenarios. He put his improvisers on stage with nothing prepared and with no idea what was going to happen. “It was the ultimate risk,” says Keith, “and partly from a mistake. Cause in those days, when I didn’t know so much, I thought the commedia did that. Actually, they didn’t, but it worked.”³ Training in the Impro System also meant training in Keith’s clown work, very physical work which required little or no dialogue, so Keith’s improvisers had success performing for non-English-speaking audiences.⁴ Another factor that renders Impro and the Impro System distinctive is its accessibility and this has everything to do with how Keith situates himself in his writing and in his process. In order to better understand how Keith processes, imagines, teaches, and creates, one should be acquainted with the Impro System.

Impro is divided into five chapters: “Notes on Myself,” “Status,” “Spontaneity,” “Narrative Skills,” and “Masks and Trance.” A short chapter on Theatresports was to be included but, after the publishers told Johnstone that the book was too long, he took out what he thought was the least interesting material. In retrospect, Keith feels leaving that chapter out was a disastrous decision. That chapter on Theatresports included vital material for those early Theatresports groups who had to learn the game by copying other groups. “You had groups who had no idea what the basic principles were,” says Keith. “It was the least interesting material to me, but it would’ve been the most interesting thing to Theatresports players.”

Keith opens the first chapter of Impro with: “As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull” (13). He concludes the first section with an assertion that serves as the impetus behind the creation of the Impro System: “The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education” (14). Going forward, it is clear Keith developed the Impro System not just for unblocking and releasing the talents of the actors at the RCT Studio but for rediscovering the imaginative potential of individuals, like himself, who had been oppressed by their education.

Keith’s schooling had conditioned him to favor intellect over imagination: “I learned never to act on impulse, and that whatever came into my mind first should be rejected in favor of better ideas” (82). For a time, he had forgotten that inspiration wasn’t intellectual and that failure was part of the learning process. In order to reverse or undo what had been done, Keith began to embrace and teach spontaneity. Although he developed most of the exercises, techniques, and terminology in Impro teaching at the RCT Studio in the early 1960s, the theories underpinning his inventions (i.e., solutions to problems) had been germinating since childhood and continued to consolidate until his manuscript was published in 1979. It is important to remember that Keith had no interest or formal training in the theatre before he saw Peter Hall’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955 at the Criterion Theatre in London. His theories, therefore, are not based solely on theatre research, observation, or practice but on a broad range of sources and experiences.

Keith was moved by great silent films before he had any interest in the theatre, and he credits a 4-minute sequence in Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) as having an epiphanic impact on his way of judging himself and others. Vassily, a young, Ukrainian farmer, walks home alone in the twilight after a long day of reaping corn with a new tractor purchased collectively by the poor community. The tractor symbolizes a sense of unity and this agitates the well-to-do landowners. The audience senses imminent danger but Vassily heroically continues down the country road. Keith wrote: “The fact that he walks for so long, and that the image is so beautiful, linked with my own experience of being alone in the twilight—the gap between the worlds.” Then Vassily dances ecstatically just moments before he is shot and killed. Keith continued:

The dust swirls around his feet, so that he’s like an Indian god, like Siva— and with the man dancing along in the clouds of dust something unlocked in me. In one moment I knew that the valuing of man by their intelligence is crazy, that the peasants watching the night sky might feel more than I feel, that the man who dances might be superior to myself—word-bound and unable to dance. (Impro 18)

In Impro, Keith does not advocate a complete shutdown of the intellect but rather closing the gap that divides rhetoric from actions. Keith is an intellectual, whether he likes it or not. He is thought of by many as a genius and, over the years, has been invited to attend international think tanks. He aptly uses his intellect to illuminate a moment, an experience, or a process supporting his theories. But the driving force of the Impro System evolves from Keith’s desire to dance, that is, to defy his intellect in order to enter the world as an imaginative, physically liberated human being.

After completing his secondary school education, Keith attended a teacher’s training college in Exeter. “I had a brilliant art teacher called Anthony Stirling, and then all my work stemmed from his example. It wasn’t so much what he taught, as what he did” (18). Stirling’s teaching methodology was inspired by Lao Tzu’s concept of the invisible or unseen leader—a leader who facilitates in such a way, that when the work is accomplished, the followers think they did it all by themselves (Lau 73). Stirling also believed in the artist within and that it was the teacher’s job to bring the artist out of the child, not through demonstration or by imposing values of “good and bad” or “right and wrong,” but by skillfully setting up experiences in which the student could succeed (Impro 20). Keith’s first primary school teaching assignment was an opportunity to put Stirling’s ideas to the test. Keith succeeded in excavating the “art” from these students who had been written off by others as “ineducable”; and, instead of treating children like “immature adults,” he began to regard adults as “atrophied children” (25, 78).

In the early 1960s, behavioral therapist Joseph Wolpe, M.D., published his studies on systematic desensitization of phobias, and Keith immediately saw connections to Stirling’s ideas and to his own development of these ideas with the RCT Studio’s professional artists. Systematic desensitization is a method of inhibiting neurotic anxiety-response habits in patients. First, the patient is put into a state of relaxation and then, by degrees, exposed to his anxiety-evoking stimuli. Wolpe progresses from the least disturbing stimuli on the patient’s “anxiety hierarchy” to the most disturbing until all stimuli are deprived of their ability to evoke fear and anxiety (Wolpe 66). If, however, the patient experiences a setback, Wolpe returns to the botto...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Keith Johnstone and his Impro System
• 2 The formative years
• 3 All the world is a classroom
• 4 The master teacher in the university classroom
• 5 From classroom to world stage: The Loose Moose Theatre Company
• 6 What now? What comes next? What classrooms still remain?
• Bibliography
• Index