Impro by Keith Johnstone - Revision history

Snapai at 05:39, 3 January 2021

2021-01-03T05:39:32Z

Snapai: /* Verse */

2020-06-06T01:42:11Z

Verse

Snapai: /* 4 Insults */

2020-05-31T02:40:10Z

4 Insults

Snapai: /* 1 The See-saw */

2020-05-31T02:37:37Z

1 The See-saw

Show changes

Snapai: /* Being a Teacher */

2020-05-31T02:22:16Z

Being a Teacher

Snapai: /* Anthony Stirling */

2020-05-31T02:13:58Z

Anthony Stirling

Snapai: /* Growing Up */

2020-05-31T01:13:50Z

Growing Up

Snapai: /* Contrariness */

2020-05-31T01:13:16Z

Contrariness

Snapai: /* Growing Up */

2020-05-31T01:10:46Z

Growing Up

Snapai: /* 'Education' as a Substance */

2020-05-31T01:04:57Z

'Education' as a Substance

← Older revision		Revision as of 05:39, 3 January 2021
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		+	[[Category:Books]]
	If teachers were honoured in the British theatre alongside directors, designers, and playwrights, Keith Johnstone would be as familiar a name as are those of John Dexter, Jocelyn Herbert, Edward Bond and the other young talents who were drawn to the great lodestone of the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s. As head of the Court's script department, Johnstone played a crucial part in the development of the 'writers' theatre', but to the general public he was known only as the author of occasional and less than triumphant Court plays like Brixham Regatta and Performing Giant. As he recounts in this book, he started as a writer who lost the ability to write, and then ran into the same melancholy impasse again when he turned to directing.		If teachers were honoured in the British theatre alongside directors, designers, and playwrights, Keith Johnstone would be as familiar a name as are those of John Dexter, Jocelyn Herbert, Edward Bond and the other young talents who were drawn to the great lodestone of the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s. As head of the Court's script department, Johnstone played a crucial part in the development of the 'writers' theatre', but to the general public he was known only as the author of occasional and less than triumphant Court plays like Brixham Regatta and Performing Giant. As he recounts in this book, he started as a writer who lost the ability to write, and then ran into the same melancholy impasse again when he turned to directing.

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 I start to talk in verse, and explain that it doesn't matter whether the verse is good or bad, and that anyway we're going to start with the worst possible verse:
 The worse the verse I speak, the more encouraged the actors are. I get them to stop thinking ahead, and just say a line, and trust to luck that there'll be something to rhyme with it. If they're in trouble and can't think what to say, they're not to rack their brain, and try and force their inspiration. I get them to say 'prompt' and then either I shout something out, or one of the audience does.
-Once a scene starts, the verse has to control the content and the action. Someone says:
+Once a scene starts, the verse has to control the content and the action.
 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. If you don't care what you say, and you go with the verse, the exercise is exhilarating. But if an actor suddenly produces a really witty couplet, you'll see him suddenly 'dry' as his standard rises, and he tries to produce 'better' verse.

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 I put the lists aside and get the students to play 'shop'.
-'Can I help you?'
+I explain that I don't want them to make the scene 'interesting', that they are just to buy and sell something.
 I have to struggle with the actors before they will agree just to buy something and sell something. Then I get them to play the scene again, but adding the insults. I give them a list each, and get them to add an insult to the end of each sentence. This idea delights everyone, but it's very boring.
 I explain that insulting is of no interest. What we really want to see is someone being insulted. The interest we have in custard pies is in seeing them hit people. I tell them to repeat every insult in disbelief and outrage. As soon as they do this the performers get deeply involved and are often impossible to stop. People who are bound physically relax into a greater physical freedom. Gestures flow instead of being suddenly jerked to a stop.
 The insults must remain an ornamentation to the scene, they mustn't become the scene itself Once this is understood they can be applied to any situation. If you keep changing the lists then the most terrible things will have been said to everybody. I then give one actor a list, and let the other actor make up his own, and I set up scenes with several people. For example master-servant teams can meet, and insult in this way. But there must be some purpose they're trying to achieve as well as 'being insulted'. In my experience this game is very 'releasing'. The status lowering is so drastic, and at the same time so pleasurable, that ordinary status scenes hold fewer terrors.
 In the average school the teachers are supposed to inhibit their pupils, and the kind of healing openness typical of therapy groups simply isn't possible, but the game is useful even with censored lists, or even in gibberish. Gibberish imposes an acceptance of the insult, or no one can understand what's happening. The technique is to repeat the last sound of any gibberish sentence.
 This insult game can be played between two groups who slowly approach each other, but the teacher must ensure that every insult is received. Enormous energy is released, with individuals running forwards to hurl their insults, and then being dragged back by their friends. The target of the insults should be the opposing group, not individual members. The game usually ends with actors standing face to face and screaming at each other, and everyone having a very good time. If they've got 'high' on the game, you can make them repeat it in mime. It makes a good 'aside' exercise if actors who are insulted repeat the word to the audience.

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 ==Being a Teacher==
-	I chose to teach in Battersea, a working-class area that most new teachers avoided—but I'd been a postman there, and I loved the place.
+I'd believed that teachers were respected figures, but in Battersea they were likely to be feared or hated.
-My new colleagues bewildered me. 'Never tell people you're a teacher!' they said. 'If they find you're a teacher in the pub, they'll all move away!' It was true! I'd believed that teachers were respected figures, but in Battersea they were likely to be feared or hated. I liked my colleagues, but they had a colonist's attitude to the children; they referred to them as 'poor stock', and they disliked exactly those children I found most inventive. If a child is creative he's likely to be more difficult to control, but that isn't a reason for disliking him. My colleagues had a poor view of themselves: again and again I heard them say, 'Man among boys; boy among men' when describing their condition. I came to see that their unhappiness, and lack of acceptance in the community, came from a feeling that they were irrelevant, or rather that the school was something middle class being forcibly imposed on to the working-class culture. Everyone seemed to accept that if you could educate one of these children you'd remove him away from his parents (which is what my education had done for me). Educated people were snobs, and many parents didn't want their children alienated from them.
+I liked my colleagues, but they had a colonist's attitude to the children; they referred to them as 'poor stock', and they disliked exactly those children I found most inventive.
-Like most new teachers, I was given the class no one else wanted. Mine was a mix of twenty-six 'average' eight-year-olds, and twenty 'backward' ten-year-olds whom the school had written off as ineducable. Some of the ten-year-olds couldn't write their names after live years of schooling. I'm sure Professor Skinner could teach even pigeons to type out their names in a couple of weeks, so I couldn't believe that these children were really dull: it was more likely that they were putting up a resistance. One astounding thing was the way cowed and dead-looking children would suddenly brighten up and look intelligent when they weren't being asked to learn. When they were cleaning out the fish tank, they looked fine. When writing a sentence, they looked numb and defeated.
+If a child is creative he's likely to be more difficult to control, but that isn't a reason for disliking him.
-Almost all teachers, even if they weren't very bright, got along reasonably well as schoolchildren, so presumably it's difficult for them to identify with the children who fail. My case was peculiar in that I'd apparently been exceptionally intelligent up to the age of eleven, winning all the prizes (which embarrassed me, since I thought they should be given to the dull children as compensation) and being teacher's pet, and so on. Then, spectacularly, I'd suddenly come bottom of the class—'down among the dregs', as my headmaster described it. He never forgave me. I was puzzled too, but gradually I realised that I wouldn't work for people I didn't like. Over the years my work gradually improved, but I never fulfilled my promise. When I liked a particular teacher and won a prize, the head would say: 'Johnstone is taking this prize away from the boys who deserve it!' If you've been bottom of the class for years it gives you a different perspective: I was friends with boys who were failures, and nothing would induce me to write them off as 'useless' or 'ineducable'. My 'failure' was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now.
+My colleagues had a poor view of themselves: again and again I heard them say, 'Man among boys; boy among men' when describing their condition.
-I was determined that my classes shouldn't be dull, so I used to jump about and wave my arms, and generally stir things up—which is exciting, but bad for discipline. If you shove an inexperienced teacher into the toughest class, he either sinks or swims. However idealistic he is, he tends to clutch at traditional ways of enforcing discipline. My problem was to resist the pressures that would turn me into a conventional teacher. I had to establish a quite different relationship before I could hope to release the creativity that was so apparent in the children when they weren't thinking of themselves as 'being educated'.
+Like most new teachers, I was given the class no one else wanted. I couldn't believe that these children were really dull: it was more likely that they were putting up a resistance. One astounding thing was the way cowed and dead-looking children would suddenly brighten up and look intelligent when they weren't being asked to learn. When they were cleaning out the fish tank, they looked fine. When writing a sentence, they looked numb and defeated.
-I didn't see why Stirling's ideas shouldn't apply to all areas, and in particular to writing: literacy was clearly of great importance, and anyway writing interested me, and I wanted to infect the children with enthusiasm. I tried getting them to send secret notes to each other, and write rude comments about me, and so on, but the results were nil. One day I took my typewriter and my art books into the class, and said I'd type out anything they wanted to write about the pictures. As an afterthought, I said I'd also type out their dreams—and suddenly they were actually wanting to write. I typed out everything exactly as they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me. Typing out spelling mistakes was a weird idea in the early fifties (and probably now)—but it worked. The pressure to get things right was coming from the children, not the teacher. I was amazed at the intensity of feeling and outrage the children expressed, and their determination to be correct, because no one would have dreamt that they cared. Even the illiterates were getting their friends to spell out every word for them. I scrapped the time-table, and for a month they wrote for hours every day. I had to force them out of the classroom to take breaks. When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I'm amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school-hence the misbehaviour.
+Almost all teachers find it difficult to identify with the children who fail.
-I was even more astounded by the quality of the things the children wrote. I'd never seen any examples of children's writing during my training; I thought it was a hoax (one of my colleagues must have smuggled a book of modern verse in). By far the best work came from the 'ineducable' ten-year-olds. At the end of my first year the Divisional Officer refused to end my probation. He'd found my class doing arithmetic with masks over their faces—they'd made them in art class and I didn't see why they shouldn't wear them. There was a cardboard tunnel he was supposed to crawl through (because the classroom was doubling as an igloo), and an imaginary hole in the floor that he refused to walk around. I'd stuck all the art paper together and pinned it along the back wall, and when a child got bored he'd leave what he was doing and stick some more leaves on the burning forest.
+My problem was to resist the pressures that would turn me into a conventional teacher. I had to establish a quite different relationship before I could hope to release the creativity that was so apparent in the children
-My headmaster had discouraged my ambition to become a teacher: 'You're not the right type,' he said, 'not the right type at all.' Now it looked as if I was going to be rejected officially. Fortunately the school was inspected, and Her Majesty's Inspector thought that my class were doing the most interesting work. I remember one incident that struck him as amazing: the children screaming out that there were only three chickens drawn on the blackboard, while I was insisting that there were five (two were still inside the hen-house). Then the children started scribbling furiously away, writing stories about chickens, and shouting out any words they wanted spelt on the blackboard. I shouldn't think half of them had ever seen a chicken, but it delighted the Inspector. 'You realise that they're trying to throw me out,' I said, and he fixed it so that I wasn't bothered again.
+I didn't see why Stirling's ideas shouldn't apply to all areas. I said I'd also type out their dreams—and suddenly they were actually wanting to write.
-Stirling's 'non-interference' worked in every area where I applied it: piano teaching for example. I worked with Marc Wilkinson, the composer (he became director of music at the National Theatre), and his tape recorder played the same sort of role that my typewriter had. He soon had a collection of tapes as surprising as the children's poems had been. I assembled a group of children by asking each teacher for the children he couldn't stand; and although everyone was amazed at such a selection method, the group proved to be very talented, and they learned with amazing speed. After twenty minutes a boy hammered out a discordant march and the rest shouted, 'It's the Japanese soldiers from the film on Saturday!' Which it was. We invented many games—like one child making sounds for water and another putting the 'fish' in it. Sometimes we got them to feel objects with their eyes shut, and got them to play what it felt like so that the others could guess. Other teachers were amazed by the enthusiasm and talent shown by these 'dull' children.
+The pressure to get things right was coming from the children, not the teacher.
 ==The Royal Court Theatre==

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 ==Anthony Stirling==
-	I felt crippled, and 'unfit' for life, so I decided to become a teacher. I wanted more time to sort myself out, and I was convinced that the training college would teach me to speak clearly, and to stand naturally, and to be confident, and how to improve my teaching skills. Common sense assured me of this, but I was quite wrong. It was only by luck that 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. For the first time in my life I was in the hands of a great teacher.
+In the hands of a great teacher.
-I'll describe the first lesson he gave us, which was unforgettable and completely disorientating.
+The adults could barely complete a painting exercise that kids had done fantastically.
-He treated us like a class of eight-year-olds, which I didn't like, but which I thought I understood-'He's letting us know what it feels like to be on the receiving end,' I thought.
+Something happened to me in that moment from which I have never recovered.
-He made us mix up a thick 'jammy' black paint and asked us to imagine a clown on a one wheeled bicycle who pedals through the paint, and on to our sheets of paper. 'Don't paint the clown,' he said, 'paint the mark he leaves on your paper!'
+It was the final confirmation that my education had been a destructive process.
-I was wanting to demonstrate my skill, because I'd always been 'good at art', and I wanted him to know that I was a worthy student. This exercise annoyed me because how could I demonstrate my skill? I could paint the clown, but who cared about the tyre-marks?
+Stirling believed that the art was 'in' the child, and that it wasn't something to be imposed by an adult.
-'He cycles on and off your paper.' said Stirling, 'and he does all sorts of tricks, so the lines he leaves on your paper are very interesting ...' Everyone's paper was covered with a mess of black lines—except mine, since I'd tried to be original by mixing up a blue. Stirling was scathing about my inability to mix up a black, which irritated me.
+The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: 'This is good, this is bad ...'
-Then he asked us to put colours in all the shapes the clown had made.
+The student should never experience failure.
-'What kind of colours?
+The teacher's skill lay in presenting experiences in such a way that the student was bound to succeed.
-'Any colours.'
+Stirling recommended that we read the Tao te Ching.
-'Yeah ... but ... er ... we don't know what colours to choose.'
+It seems to me now that he was practically using it as his teaching manual.
 ==Being a Teacher==

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 Effect of school:
 Despite fancy state education:
 damaging speech, breathing, posture, imagination, thought.
 Realized school wasn't teaching proper use of body/mind, possibly damaging it.
 Teachers only cared about success, and students must self-correct.
 thought that adults were superior to children
 Could teaching have had a negative effect?

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 ==Contrariness==
-	At about the age of nine I decided never to believe anything because it was convenient. I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true. This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I'm doing it any more. As soon as you put a 'not' into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out—especially in drama, where everything is supposition anyway. When I began teaching, it was very natural for me to reverse everything my own teachers had done. I got my actors to make faces, insult each other, always to leap before they looked, to scream and shout and misbehave in all sorts of ingenious ways. It was like having a whole tradition of improvisation teaching behind me. In a normal education everything is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop it.
+Never believe anything just because it is convenient.
 ==Cripples==

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 ==Growing Up==
-	As I grew up I began to feel uncomfortable. I had to use conscious effort to 'stand up straight'. I thought that adults were superior to children, and that the problems that worried me would gradually correct themselves. It was very upsetting to realise that if I was going to change for the better then I'd have to do it myself.
+Effect of school:
+Despite fancy state education:
-I found I had some severe speech defects, worse than other people's (I was eventually treated at a speech hospital). I began to understand that there really was something wrong with my body, I began to see myself as crippled in the use of myself (just as a great violinist would play better on a cheap violin than I would on a Strad). My breathing was inhibited, my voice and posture were wrecked, something was seriously wrong with my imagination—it was becoming difficult actually to get ideas. How could this have happened when the state had spent so much money educating me?
+damaging speech, breathing, posture, imagination, thought.
+Realized school wasn't teaching proper use of body/mind, possibly damaging it.
-Other people seemed to have no insight into my problems. All my teachers cared about was whether I was a winner. I wanted to stand like Gary Cooper, and to be confident, and to know how to send the soup back when it was cold without making the waiter feel obliged to spit in it. I'd left school with worse posture, and a worse voice, with worse movement and far less spontaneity than when I'd entered it. Could teaching have had a negative effect?
+Teachers only cared about success, and students must self-correct.
 ==Emotion==

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 =='Education' as a Substance==
-	People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities. (I saw a teacher relax his students on the floor, and then test for relaxation by lifting their feet eighteen inches into the air and dropping their heels on the concrete.)
+Education is not a substance, where bad teachers supply a little and good teachers supply a lot.
 ==Growing Up==