Improvisational Theatre - Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone’s work at the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s is seen as an important framework for contemporary improvisational theatre today. Heavily influenced by the teaching methods of Anthony Stirling, Johnstone set out to rediscover the imaginative world of childhood, the origins of creativity and spontaneity, and the ability to tell stories in an attempt to shift what he saw as the ‘pretentiousness’ of theatre to something much less dependent on intellect.

Thoughts on Education Johnstone’s work highly criticized what he saw as the negative impact the education system has on the creative mind. He felt the classroom suppressed spontaneity, as the child who was spontaneous was often more difficult to control and to mould. Schools taught children to respond intellectually to poetry (for example) and not emotionally, we are taught to believe that great ideas come from those who are intelligent, and we forget that inspiration is not intellectual. Thus his teaching methods often seem paradoxical – Johnstone is often famous for asking his students to ‘be boring’, ‘be obvious’. Johnstone therefore tried to develop and rediscover the creativity that had been suppressed at school.

Status Status is central to Johnstone’s theories on what constitutes ‘ordinary conversation’. After seeing Stanislavsky’s production of “The Cherry Orchard”, his conclusion was that the actors were naturalistic in a theatrical way but not like in real life. He emphasized the character’s status relationship over character motives, when creating an ‘authentic’ conversation on stage. He concludes that every inflection and movement implies a status and the audience gains pleasure when they see the status of each character on stage constantly being switched or “ejected”.

Spontaneity Johnstone felt that the intellectual mind, or the process of thinking and rationalization, was one of the main reasons why an individual is unable to be spontaneous or creative on stage. He believes that many students block their imaginations through ‘editing’ and the fear of being ‘un-original’. The attempt to be original, through thinking, creates a less interesting idea. He thus encourages the obvious idea or the first thing that comes to mind as the key to effective improvisation.

Games Johnstone’s exercises for developing spontaneity and the overall the improving of improvisation skills are used in almost every teaching institute for improvisational theatre. Here are two well known games:

Blind Offers This game is designed encourage students to justify their (or in this case, someone else’s) actions after they have done it, as opposed to thinking about something and then acting on the thought. Person A strikes a pose, then Person B photographs him. Person B lies on the ground, Person A mimes shoveling earth onto him. Person A jumps up and down, Person B says “I can’t believe your mother gave you those skittles”. And the cycle continues.

Word At A Time Students stand in a circle, and proceed to tell a story one word at a time. This game develops the ability to speak the first word that comes into your head. Johnstone states that this game makes it seem like some other force is telling the story. In order, the dialogue come out like this as an example - “There” – spoken by the first person, “was” – said by second person,“once” - third person,“a” - fourth person,“child” - fifth “named” – sixth, “biff” - seventh person … and in this way the story continues, being created by the whole group together.

The term "game" in improv can also refer to the Upright Citizen Brigade Theatre's concept of the "game of the scene" as a teaching technique and strategy for improv and sketch comedy.