Notes on Impro: Improvisation & The Theatre

a mind-altering book

This newsletter will be taking a two-week break while I visit my family in Georgia and attend a meditation retreat in Colorado. I’ll see you on the other side.

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Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979) begins:

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I’d lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age—just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn’t understand that clarity is in the mind.

This passage made my pulse jump. I’d expected a book about improv to connect itself broadly with ways of being and living, because surely they all do that, but I didn’t expect to be confronted right away with such a brutal, artless, childlike statement of a great truth of modern life—a motion the world knows, and assumes, and largely resigns itself to, and (for that reason) doesn’t like to name directly.

The book kept doing this. I had chills repeatedly as I read it, and a few times I had to put it down because I was suddenly overtaken with grief, or joy, or recognition of things I had always known but had never looked at.

Johnstone (who’s still alive, and you can watch recent interviews with him) was a British theatre director, playwright, and actor, but he seems to be mostly known today as a teacher and for his development of the Impro approach. He was offered a writing commission by the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 (on the basis of his inexperience), but he didn’t accept it because he didn’t like theatre: “it seemed so much feebler than, say, the films of Kurosawa, or Keaton.” Then he ran out of money, wrote a play inspired by Samuel Beckett, became one of the Royal Court Theatre’s play-readers, and was in the theatre world ever after.

On its surface, this book is a series of essays aimed at theatre teachers. Johnstone spends the bulk of it sharing exercises he’s found or developed and describing patterns of learning (and unlearning) he observed in his students—the ways new students will “block” their natural impulses and those of their collaborators, the defensive nature of their inhibitions, and how he would help them relocate spontaneity through games and masks.

I feel a lot of affinity with Johnstone. Like me, he grew up in a school system whose overall effect was to leave him more inhibited, anxious, and unfeeling. Like me, he gradually discovered that this had happened, and starting seeing education as a destructive dominance-submission game (if you can call something a game when the roles never change) in which unhappy teachers inculcate students into their own habituated fear of learning. (This is, of course, not everyone’s experience, but it does seem like most people’s experience.) Like me, as an adult he began a project of undoing these effects in himself, largely through investigations of his own perception. Like me, he seems to have struggled to teach in institutions he saw as stultifying (he worked as a schoolteacher before entering the theatre world); unlike me, he seems to have found workable solutions to those tensions.

Johnstone tells an anecdote about being nine, and deciding to reverse every statement he heard to see if the opposite was true, and then never stopping the practice. One could read this book as a complete reversal of educational principles, written by a kind British man morally disgusted by modern life. As my friend Jonah put it, the book seems to fit into the same tradition of “homegrown, down-to-earth British arts mysticism” as Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own, another of my favorite books, also about someone working out the process of awakening through messy experimentation instead of relying on an authority or a predetermined path.

What follows isn’t an evaluation or even a sypnopsis—just a smattering of notes, quotes, and related thinking. The headings follow Johnstone’s essay titles.

Status

Johnstone has a lot to say about status. One of his main claims about it is that status transactions are always happening. Every conversation between humans (he’s more unstinting than I think he needs to be on this score) involves, and is often structured by, an ongoing negotiation in status. As an example, he quotes a conversation transcribed by W. R. Bion, and adds commentary on the status interactions in it:

MRS X:

I had a nasty turn last week. I was standing in a queue waiting for my turn to go into the cinema when I felt ever so queer. Really, I thought I should faint or something.

[Mrs X is attempting to raise her status by having an interesting medical problem. Mrs Y immediately outdoes her.]

MRS Y:

You’re lucky to have been going to a cinema. If I thought I could go to a cinema I should think I had nothing to complain of at all.

[Mrs Z now blocks Mrs Y.]

MRS Z:

I know what Mrs X means. I feel just like that myself, only I should have had to leave the queue.

[Mrs Z is very talented in that she supports Mrs X against Mrs Y while at the same time claiming to be more worthy of interest, her condition more severe. Mr A now intervenes to lower them all by making their condition seem very ordinary.]

MR A:

Have you tried stooping down? That makes the blood come back to your head. I expect you were feeling faint.

[Mrs X defends herself.]

MRS X:

It’s not really faint.

And so on. And these subtexts are everywhere, if you start to look for them. Disturbing, maybe? Johnstone said in an interview that when he teaches students how to notice status interactions, they often spend a few weeks feeling shocked and finding conversations uglier. But then they discover that seeing status transactions with clarity allows for new arenas of play—which is a basis for greater intimacy. "[A]cquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together.” (It’s true that most of my close friends are people I found myself playing status games with shortly after meeting them.) Social skills largely boil down to status-mediating skills. Johnstone implies that a large cause of social friction is believing we’re playing one status while actually playing another—like when someone refuses a compliment, thinking they’re being “modest,” but in fact implying they have more refined taste than the compliment-giver.

He also says that almost all his students start out feeling comfortable with being either low- or high-status, and get scared and “block” when asked to play the opposite.

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.’ In either case the status played is a defence, and it’ll usually work. It’s very likely that you will increasingly be conditioned into playing the status that you’ve found an effective defence. You become a status specialist, very good at playing one status, but not very happy or competent at playing the other. Asked to play the ‘wrong’ status, you’ll feel ‘undefended’.

I found myself wondering about people who are anti-small-talk—I used to be one of them—and whether this has to do with blindness to the rich undercurrents of status signaling, or discomfort with them.

Johnstone shares a lot of interesting stuff about how status is signaled—much of it surprising, like how holding one’s head completely still is a powerful high-status move that many people find impossible to maintain. (Try it and see if it doesn’t make you feel weirdly strong.) Breaking eye contact can play high or low, depending on circumstances—it can mean that you’re scared to hold eye contact or that you don’t have time for it. Breaking contact and then glancing back is status suicide, and triggers a flush of shame and embarrassment in the one who glances. Johnstone describes how merely pointing out his students’ status plays would regularly induce epiphanies, as students saw how they were regularly cutting off any impulse that would bring them into the “wrong” status.

(File this under Highly Speculative, but I started wondering whether some meditations might also count as status play. When I do opening-awareness meditation, I often find my head bobbing left and right as the sensations become more intense, as if, in this frame, the status of reality has just been raised and I’m afraid to signal high-status in the face of it. And face metaphors do come up sometimes in meditation instructions, like in Ngakpa Chogyam Rinpoche’s “Stare space in the face.” Meekness, submission, and surrender are also often-suggested attitudes in some traditions, perhaps to correct a habit of dominance toward the nonconceptual, “animal” side of the bodymind. If there’s anything to this, it would be interesting evidence that our interactions with general sensory experience are not as asocial as we tend to think.)

Spontaneity

Johnstone’s hatred of education really comes out in this chapter.

You have to be a very stubborn person to remain an artist in this culture. It’s easy to play the role of ‘artist’, but actually to create something means going against one’s education.

Pavlov found that there were some dogs that he couldn’t ‘brainwash’ until he’d castrated them, and starved them for three weeks. If teachers could do that to us, then maybe they’d achieve Plato’s dream of a republic in which there are no artists left at all.

Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many ‘well adjusted’ adults are bitter, uncreative, frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that’s what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing.

One of the core things people fear in improvising, he says, is losing their sanity, or revealing themselves to be insane by revealing the uncensored contents of their imaginations. One of a number of responses he gives to this is that sanity is mainly a matter of seeming safe, not of what’s in your head.

When I explain that sanity is a matter of interaction, rather than of one’s mental processes, students are often hysterical with laughter. They agree that for years they have been suppressing all sorts of thinking because they classified it as insane.

I was reminded how Alexander Lowen’s book Joy discusses the fear of insanity, from a different but related angle. The fear of going crazy, he said, would almost always come up when people started to fully feel long-repressed emotions—especially in the case of anger. Consider, for instance, the common childhood experience of being laughed at by the grown-ups. It’s a potentially humiliating circumstance, you can’t control it, and it comes about when you act “off-script”—so we learn to keep it from happening by suppressing our weirder impulses, along with the anger we feel at having them rejected (first by adults, later by ourselves).

People also block their mental contents because they want to be (or sometimes not be) original, and because they’re afraid of what might happen if they spout obscenities. To address all these fears, Johnstone says it’s necessary for him to reveal to students his own insane, unoriginal, obscene mental contents, in order to “grant permission” and show that it’s just all normal human stuff. (For me, it’s been useful to type as fast as possible into my journal while repeatedly renewing an intention to relax all quality filters—which over time revealed that many of my thought-rejections weren’t about “quality” so much as which ideas and phrases and sentiments felt safe to have in my head.)

One of the real gems of this section is the “offer-block-accept” framework. One conceives everything their improvising partner does as an offer that can either be blocked or accepted. Novice improvisers will very often get irritated and block when they sense that their partners have made a poor decision. Good improvisers take every invitation as good, and see everything as an invitation.

Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made—which is something no ‘normal’ person would do. Also they may accept offers which weren’t really intended. I tell my actors never to think up an offer, but instead to assume that one has already been made. Groucho Marx understood this : a contestant at his quiz game ‘froze’ so he took the man’s pulse and said, ‘Either this man’s dead or my watch has stopped.’

He gives an angle that sounds like certain (more perception-oriented) conceptions of karma:

These ‘offer-block-accept’ games have a use quite apart from actor training. People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding. A student objected to this view by saying, ‘But you don’t choose your life. Sometimes you are at the mercy of people who push you around.’ I said, ‘Do you avoid such people?’ Oh!’ she said, ’I see what you mean.’

Johnstone shares lots of games for practicing giving and receiving offers, but for those you’ll have to read the book.

Narrative Skills

I wish I’d read this book before—instead of?—getting an M.F.A. in fiction. Here in fact is pretty much a description of the approach used in most of my creative writing classes, and nearly all my literature classes going back to middle school:

I started my work on narrative by trying to make the improvisers conscious of the implications of the scenes they played. I felt that an artist ought to be ‘committed’, and that he should be held responsible for the effects of his work—it seemed only common sense. I got my students to analyse the content of Red Riding Hood and The Sleeping Beauty and Moby Dick and The Birthday Party, but this made them even more inhibited. I didn’t realise that if the people who thought up Red Riding Hood had been aware of the implications, then they might never have written the story. This was at a time when I had no inspiration as a writer at all, but I didn’t twig that the more I tried to understand the ‘real’ meaning, the less I wrote. When Pinter directs his own plays he may say ‘We may assume that what the author intended here is …’—and this is a sensible attitude: the playwright is one person and the director another, even when they share the same skull.

I used this same approach basically the whole time I was teaching writing, and I felt some regret reading this because what he says feels true. How many students did I unwittingly convince, when we interpreted and praised Kafka or Beckett or Jamaica Kincaid (writers who certainly weren’t preoccupied with clear meanings), that they could never write like that?

In my defense it was the only method I’d been taught, and I don’t remember any of my own teachers ever seriously questioning whether interpretation skills were actually much connected with artistic ability. I find myself wondering if the hidden sentiment behind the truism that “writing can’t be taught” might not be something more like, “Your inhibitions are private and gross and I’m as uncomfortable with them as you are, so I’d rather teach you that some writers (like me) are inherently great than help you find out how you’re blocking yourself.”

As you might expect at this point, Johnstone chooses a radical solution to this problem:

My decision was that content should be ignored. This wasn’t a conclusion I wished to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking. I hadn’t realised that every play makes a political statement, and that the artist only needs to worry about content if he’s trying to fake up a personality he doesn’t actually have, or to express views he really isn’t in accord with. I tell improvisers to follow the rules and see what happens, and not to feel in any way responsible for the material that emerges. If you improvise spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your innermost self will be revealed. The same is true of any artist. If you want to write a ‘working-class play’ then you’d better be working class. If you want your play to be religious, then be religious. An artist has to accept what his imagination gives him, or screw up his talent.

What rules is he talking about? Here he gives what I found to be a very useful basic theory of what a story is. (He’s talking about live improvisation, but it seems applicable across mediums.) The theory is that a story is free-associating combined with reincorporation.

I’ll quickly make up a story with only free association:

I went to the airport to catch my flight. The taxi driver was smoking a fat cigar in the car and swerved erratically. I didn’t give him a tip. When I got there, the line was endless and snaked all through the building. In desperation I began asking people in front of me if I could pass them by. Three sympathetic people and one couple let me go, but a man in a Hawaiian shirt put up his hand. “Please,” I said, “I have a baby to deliver.” He looked confused and I rushed past.

We would all know, if the story ended here, that it wasn’t over. This is because none of the loops I’ve opened have been closed. I haven’t reincorporated anything. Now I’ll pick up where I stopped, and reincorporate. (I don’t say it’s a good story, only that it reincorporates.)

I rushed past, only to find myself coughing in a plume of smoke. It was the taxi driver who’d brought me! “No way,” he said as I tried to push past. “Not for a lousy tip-skipper like you.” “You didn’t tip?” said the man in the Hawaiian shirt behind me. “And now you’re cutting in line? Buddy, are you morally underdeveloped? Do you not comprehend that you live in a society?” “But he was smoking in the car,” I said. “And swerving like mad. Look, he’s still doing it!” The taxi driver was zooming between the turnstiles, and dropping a lot of ash on the carpet. But by now the crowd had turned against me, and a sea of hands jerked me back to the beginning of the line. I had to wait to catch the next flight, and the bride had to wait to catch the next baby.

Here, it’s obvious that the story is over. As for what it means, who knows? Maybe it’s an expression of class anxieties, or unmet responsibility, or my tendency to get carsick in cabs.

I find it sort of remarkable that no one explained this simple free-associate/reincorporate principle to me in my years of “studying literature.” I definitely sensed when my stories were missing reincorporation, but I didn’t really know that that was what they were missing—I thought pulling off a story was just hard and required a great deal of luck—and so sometimes I would reincorporate things, and sometimes I wouldn’t, and sometimes I would even actively resist it in an attempt to be original. I was occasionally taught to appreciate reincorporations as a cool effect, but no one ever suggested they might be elemental. Maybe this will seem too obvious for anyone to need to explain, but, almost every writer I had classes with failed to do it, most producing technically accomplished stories that fizzled at the end.

No surprise, Johnstone’s belief is that children know this perfectly well, and it’s education that blinds us to the obvious.

Two further reasons reincorporation could be useful for a writer, according to J.:

First of all it encourages you to write whatever you feel like; it also means that you look back when you get stuck, instead of searching forwards. You look for things you’ve shelved, and then reinclude them.

While writing this I found out that Johnstone wrote a second book called Impro for Storytellers, which is now on my list.

[Update: I’ve skimmed it, and it seems to be mostly a set of improv games, not obviously useful for writing but, maybe with some analogical effort.]

Mask & Trance

Johnstone and his groups went deep into exploring the capacity of Masks (he uppercases the word) to produce trance states and circumvent self-consciousness. The basic method he used was to have an actor put on a mask and then show them their reflection, with an instruction to make their facial expression match what they saw. (There are lots of adjustments and cues beyond that, depending how well the mask “takes” and how willing the actor is to embrace its personality.) In ideal circumstances, the Mask then “takes over,” the actor’s everyday personality recedes into the background (or goes completely dormant), and they become that character until someone tells them to take off the mask.

Here are just a few of the bizarre things Johnstone says about Masks:

• Mask work often leaves holes in an actor’s memory—especially when the trance is particularly deep.

• A newly inhabited Mask begins as a child of about four or five—curious, intense, “like a baby that knows nothing about the world”—but will develop as the Mask is inhabited over time. For instance—

• New Masks don’t know any words, but can be taught them. Whatever words a Mask is taught, they will have access to those words the next time the Mask is inhabited—but no others. (He describes a student who did some Mask work, left the theatre for two years, and when he returned put the Mask on and knew the same words he’d been taught.) It is possible to “transfer” words from the everyday personality to the Mask, but Johnstone doesn’t go into detail about this.

• Masks have stable qualities—meaning, one Mask worn by different people will act similarly each time, even when those people have not seen previous renditions of the Mask. For example, one Mask Johnstone worked with, which had “a thick droopy nose with angry eyebrows,” liked to pick up sticks and hit people with them. A teacher at a different institution borrowed it along with a set of other Masks, but returned them the next day, saying someone had been hit on the arm. Johnstone apologized for not warning her and pointed, correctly, to the Mask that had done the damage. He admits this kind of information transfer “really makes no sense.”

It is hard to know what to make of all this. Johnstone draws on anthropological accounts of possession cults and group rituals in Haiti and Bali and a few other places, as well as accounts of hypnosis, all of which he believes are tapping into the same phenomenon. In one passage he claims that Charlie Chaplin’s “The Tramp” persona was really a Mask possession, quoting Chaplin’s own words:

...I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and make-up made me feel the kind of person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on the stage he was fully born.

If all this is true, why doesn’t anyone know about it? Johnstone’s stance is that Western culture has been at war with trance states for a few hundred years, in connection with its addiction to reason and things that can be explained. “Education itself might be seen as primarily an anti-trance activity.”

Perhaps his most interesting claim about Masks is that they may represent roads not taken in the formation of a personality—emotional personas never encouraged in childhood, or pushed aside by others that received more reinforcement. The argument reminded me of this excellent essay by Drew Schorno, who practiced a variety of Mask work in clown school and says it had odd, seemingly integrative effects on his psyche.

It would seem we are doing children a greater disservice than we know, when we police their expressions, or tell them a funny face will get stuck that way if they hold it too long. They’re more apt to get stuck in a safe, inhibited, unspontaneous, status-limited persona in which, as they grow up, “everything start[s] getting grey and dull.”

It’s fortunate, then, that most Masks can be removed.

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