Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre PDF
Preview Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
This page intentionally left blank Impro 'Impro is the most dynamic, funny, wise, practical and provocative book on theatre craft that I have ever read' (James Roose-Evans). 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 in 1956. A few years later he was himself Associate Artistic Director, working as a play reader and director, in particular helping to run the Writers' Group. The improvisatory 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 both an ideas book and a fascinating explora tion of the nature of spontaneous creativity. 'The book's incredible achievement is its success in making improvisa tion re-live on the page ... Get Mr Johnstone's fascinating manual and I promise you that if you open at the first page and begin to read you will not put it down until the final page.' (Yorkshire Post) 'He suggests a hundred practical t~chniques for encouraging spon taneity and originality by catching the subconscious unawares. But what makes the book such fun is the teacher's wit. Here is an inexhaustible supply of zany suggestions for unfreezing the petrified imagination.' (Daily Telegraph) The front cover shows a moment from The Defeat of Giant Big Nose, an improvised children's play presented by Keith Johnstone's Loose Moose Theatre Company in Calgary, Alberta. Photo by Deborah A. Iozzi. This page intentionally left blank Also Available Eugenio Barba DICTIONARY OF THEATRE ANTHROPOLOGY: The Secret Art of the Performer Jean Benedetti STANISLAYSKI: AN INTRODUCTION Augusto Boal GAMES FOR ACTORS AND NON~ACTORS Richard Boleslavsky ACTING: THE FIRST SIX LESSONS Jean N ewlove LABAN FOR ACTORS AND DANCERS Constantin Stanislavski AN ACTOR PREPARES BUILDING A CHARACTER CREATING A ROLE MY LIFE IN ART STANISLAYSKI'S LEGACY This page intentionally left blank IMPRO Improvisation and the Theatre KEITH JOHNSTONE With an Introduction by IRVING WARDLE A THEATRE ARTS BOOK ROUTLEDGE New York Published by Routledge /Theatre Arts Books 27911W Tehstir3d5 AthvSentrueeet NNeeww YYoorrkk,, NNYY 1100000117 First published in paberback in 1981 byEyre Methuen Ltd Reprinted 1982, 1983, 1985, 1987 Reprinted in 1989by Methuen Drama, MichelinHouse, 81 FulhamRoad, LondonSW3 6RB Reprinted 1990, 1991, 1992 Originallypublished in hardback by Faberand Faber Ltd in 1979. Corrected for this edition by the author Copyright© 1979, 1981 by Keith Johnstone Introductioncopyright© 1979 by Irving Wardle Printed in the United States ofAmerica Library ofCongressCataloging-in-Publication Data availableon request All rights reserved. No partofthis bookmay be reprinted or reproduced orutilized inanyform orbyany electronic, mechanical, orothermeans, nowknownorhereafterinvented, includingphotocopyingandrecording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writingfrom the publishers. ISBN 13: 978-0-87830-117-1 Contents INTRODUCTION 9 NOTES ON MYSELF 13 STATUS 33 SPONT ANEITY 75 NARRATIVE SKILLS 109 MASKS AND TRANCE 143 APPENDIX 206 Introduction 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 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 19505. 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. What follows is the story of his escape. I first met Johnstone shortly after he had joined the Court as a Ios-a-script play-reader, and he struck me then as a revolutionary idealist looking around for a guillotine. He saw corruption every where. John Arden, a fellow play-reader at that time, recalls him as 'George Devine's subsidised extremist, or Keeper of the King's Conscience'. The Court then set up its Writers' Group and Actors' Studio, run by Johnstone and William Gaskill, and attended by Arden, Ann Jellicoe and other writers of the Court's first wave. This was the turning point. 'Keith', Gaskill says, 'started to teach his own particular style of improvisation, much of it based on fairy stories, word associations, free associations, intuitive responses, and later he taught mask work as well. All his work has been to encourage the rediscovery of the imaginative response in the adult; the refinding of the power of the child's creativity. Blake is his prophet and Edward Bond his pupil.' Johnstone's all-important first move was to banish aimless dis cussion and transform the meetings to enactment sessions; it was what happened that mattered, not what anybody said about it. 'It is hard now to remember how fresh this idea was in 1958,' Ann Jellicoe says, 'but it chimed in with my own way of thinking.' Other members were Arnold Wesker, Wole Soyinka, and David Cregan as well as
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