Keith Johnstone (1933-2023)

 

[When I read the New York Times obituary of Keith Johnstone, identified as the “Champion of Improvisational Theater,” in the issue of 17 April (Section D [“Business”/“Sports”]), I couldn’t remember having ever heard of him.  I looked in the indexes of all my acting, theater history, improvisation, and theater games books, and found only a couple of passing mentions. 

[I was curious, after reading about him in the obit. So I looked him up online.  His Wikipedia article is very skimpy and isn’t very informative, so I Googled him.  There were few hits as, it seems, he left very few digital footprints.  Indeed, the Times report of his death is perhaps the most inclusive summary of his life and accomplishments, so I’m running it here.]

“KEITH JOHNSTONE, 90, WHO CHAMPIONED ‘TRUTH ON THE STAGE’ VIA IMPROVISATION”

by Neil Genzlinger

The theatrical games and performance techniques Mr. Johnstone developed became a familiar part of the acting arsenal.

Early in what became a career in theater, Keith Johnstone was commissioned to write a play for a new company in England and studied up for the job by watching the troupe’s actors rehearse someone else’s play. What stood out to him was not the rehearsal techniques, but the fact that he found the sessions boring — “until the actors broke for coffee or stagehands began moving sets around the stage.”

“It was only at these times that there seemed to be moments of truth on the stage,” he told The Calgary Herald many years later, in 1982. “When they resumed acting, the performers abandoned their kinetic dance and entered separate glass cages.”

That realization helped fuel Mr. Johnstone’s determination that theater and the people who practiced it could benefit from more spontaneity and creativity, and from emphasizing the quest for truth over the mastery of actorly techniques.

He spent the rest of his career preaching the gospel of improvisation, developing games, exercises and live shows that were the opposite of tightly scripted theater. His 1979 book, “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre,” is among the most widely used texts in the world of improvisational theater, and the Loose Moose Theater Company, which he created in 1977 after relocating to Canada, became an institution in Calgary.

Mr. Johnstone died on March 11 in Calgary. He was 90.

Theresa Robbins Dudeck, his literary executor and the author of “Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography” (2013), confirmed the death.

Mr. Johnstone didn’t invent improv, and he wasn’t alone in promoting the technique; the actress and educator Viola Spolin published “Improvisation for the Theater” in 1963, and troupes like the Second City in Chicago, founded in 1959, were also working the territory. But his contributions were considerable. Among Mr. Johnstone’s liveliest innovations was Theatresports, an idea he began to develop in England when he and some colleagues at the Royal Court Theater took notice of the liveliness of audiences at professional wrestling matches.

“Our Royal Court audiences were like whipped dogs in comparison,” he wrote in an essay about Theatresports, “probably because once an event is categorized as ‘cultural,’ it becomes a minefield in which your opinion can damn you.”

So he began honing a sort of competitive event in which teams of improvisers would try to outdo each other, with audience howling and booing encouraged and judges rating the efforts.

“The judges award points by holding up cards that range from one to five,” he wrote in another book, “Impro for Storytellers” (1999). “Five means excellent, one means bad, and a honk from a rescue horn means ‘kindly leave the stage.’”

He introduced Theatresports once he had relocated to Canada, and the concept caught on; variations of the games were soon being performed all over the world.

“If the performance has gone well,” he wrote, “you’ll feel that you’ve been watching a bunch of good-natured people who are wonderfully cooperative, and who aren’t afraid to fail. It’s therapeutic to be in such company, and to yell and cheer, and perhaps even volunteer to improvise with them. With luck you’ll feel as if you’ve been at a wonderful party; great parties don’t depend on the amount of alcohol, but on positive interactions.”

Donald Keith Johnstone was born on Feb. 21, 1933, in Brixham, on England’s southwestern coast, to Richard and Linda (Carter) Johnstone. When he was 9 or so, he decided to stop taking things at face value.

“I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true,” he wrote in his 1979 book. “This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I’m doing it anymore. As soon as you put a ‘not’ into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out.”

He trained as a teacher at St. Luke’s College in Exeter and began teaching at a primary school in South London. When he won a prize in a short-story contest, the English Stage Company, a new troupe based at the Royal Court, invited him to write a play for it, which he did: “Brixham Regatta,” which Patrick Gibbs of The Daily Telegraph thought was, for a 25-year-old novice, “a creditable — and ambitious — first play.” More important, he joined a writers’ group at the Royal Court and found himself leading improvisational exercises for the group.

He spent 10 years at the Royal Court, leading classes and workshops, screening scripts and producing plays. In July 1959 Mr. Johnstone and William Gaskill produced a largely improvised one-night show called “Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp,” featuring Black actors ad-libbing scenes about an infamous 1959 massacre of detainees by British troops in Kenya. Alan Brien, reviewing the performance in The Spectator, was not on board with the concept, saying that it “shows the Royal Court in its most militant, inept, radical, ambitious and pretentious mood.”

“‘Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp’ was neither good rhetoric nor good theater,” Mr. Brien wrote. “But if it sent the audience home to study the facts, it will have been worthwhile. And if it sent the producers home reconvinced that acting discipline and writing economy are the heart of drama, then it will also have been worth while.”

It did not “reconvince” Mr. Johnstone of that. He continued to develop his improvisation exercises and in the mid-1960s formed an improvisational troupe, the Theater Machine, which performed all over England as well as abroad.

In 1972 Mr. Johnstone was offered a two-year visiting professorship at the University of Calgary in Alberta. He ended up staying at the university for 23 years, taking emeritus status in 1995.

An early performance by his Loose Moose company, in 1977, was a version of “Robinson Crusoe” that, from Louis B. Hobson’s enthusiastic review in The Calgary Albertan, sounds as if it came close to replicating that professional-wrestling excitement Mr. Johnstone had longed for.

“The audience, which is seated in a semicircle, becomes everything from shark-infested waters to offstage spirit voices,” he wrote. “It is a stormy, noisy sea that surrounds Crusoe’s island, and one that never calms down for the play’s 40 minutes.”

Mr. Johnstone’s marriage to Ingrid Von Darl ended in divorce in 1981. He is survived by a son from that marriage, Benjamin; a son from another relationship, Dan; and a grandson.

Mr. Johnstone’s books and methods have been used in high school classrooms and drama clubs, professional acting workshops and anyplace else where creativity needs to be unlocked and spontaneity encouraged. A passage in his 1979 book describes what set him on the improvisational path.

“I began to think of children not as immature adults,” he wrote, “but of adults as atrophied children.”

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the New York Times Obituaries desk.  Previously he was a television, film, and theater reviewer.]

*  *  *  *

[After I read Johnstone’s obituary and tried to look him up on the ’Net, I e-mailed my friend Kirk Woodward, known to ROTters as a prolific contributor to this blog, and he told me he had the same response to Johnstone’s name as I had: absence of recognition.  Except, Kirk discovered that he owned the man’s principal book, Impro.  You’ll read about that below because Kirk generously offered to (re)read the book and report on it.]

 

IMPRO
by Kirk Woodward 

When I saw the New York Times obituary of Keith Johnstone (1933-2023), my reaction was that I had never heard of him. There are many people, of course, of whom I haven’t heard, and who haven’t heard of me either for that matter, but in this case my ignorance turned out to be embarrassing, because I’ve worked in the field often called Creative Dramatics – exercises and games using theatrical techniques – for decades. (I will continue to use that term for this article. [See Kirk’s Rick On Theater post on the subject on 30 September 2013; also my own contribution to the topic, two parts of a post also called “Creative Dramatics,” with subtitles “Creating A Play,” 9 September 2009, and “Games,” 12 September 2009.])

Johnstone was British. The only British practitioner of Creative Dramatics I knew much about was Brian Way (1923-2006; Development through Drama, 1998, Humanities Press), who greatly influenced the way I taught the subject, as I’ve written about elsewhere in this blog [in the author’s above-referenced post]. If I had known about Johnstone along the way, I wouldn’t have changed my basic approach, but it would have been greatly enriched.

And then, looking on my bookshelves, I found that I actually own Johnstone’s best-known book, Impro (1979, Eyre Methuen, London; now published 2023 by Routledge). It must have belonged to my wife Pat, because I didn’t remember having read it. Having now made up for lost time, I can testify that it’s well worth the effort. Simply put, it’s detailed and occasionally technical; but Johnstone is a live wire, and his outlook is fun.

Reading reviews of Impro on Amazon, one is struck by a certain note of caution about the book, along with admiration. I think the reason for this caution is that Impro is not generally a “how to” book. It contains many specifics, but more at the forefront is Johnstone’s overall outlook.

By contrast, probably the most widely read book on the subject, Improvisation for the Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1999 [3rd ed.]) by Viola Spolin (1906-1994), is essentially a recipe book – a pinch of this, a sprinkling of that, mix well. She presents her exercises step by step, and they’re all, as it were, product tested. This is not a criticism; her book is popular for good reason.

However, if I had picked up Impro sometime along the way and glanced at it (I’m fairly certain now that I did and forgot about it), the reason I wouldn’t have gone further with it is that it wasn’t a book of recipes, and that was what I was looking for (and to an extent still am).

Johnstone is not primarily interested in telling people how to do Creative Dramatics. He is primarily interested in helping people become the kind of people who can do Creative Dramatics – almost instinctively.

Impro draws frequently from the countercultural ideals of the ’60’s and ’70’s, emphasizing the relative importance of the individual over society, of minimally structured education for children, and of valuing the marginalized (for example, the mentally ill) for the perspectives they bring to everyday life.

If these notions seem dated, that doesn’t mean they don’t have value today. It’s snobbery to assume that only our own decade offers anything worthwhile. Johnstone proposes:

The states I try to take students through involve the realization (1) that we struggle against our imaginations, especially when we try to be imaginative; (2) that we are not responsible for the content of our imaginations; and (3) that we are not, as we are taught to think, our ‘personalities’, but that the imagination is our true self.

Impro is divided into five chapters over 200 pages. In the first chapter Johnstone tells how school, in particular, did everything it could to drain his imagination out of him – “all my teachers cared about was whether I was a winner.”

He describes how he retrieved his powers of imagination through an imaginative teacher, through his own habit of “reversing every statement to see if the opposite was true,” and through doing his best to work with as little idea as possible of the “right way to do things.”

He first went into teaching, and found himself at odds with the typically authoritarian administrators of the schools of the time. He learned about himself, he says, that “I wouldn’t [do] work for people I didn’t like.”

As he moved into theater, he had a related thought: “The more I understood  how things ought to be done, the more boring my productions were.” He found himself particularly uninterested in discussion during rehearsals – better just to try it out, he felt, whatever it is.

I’ve always directed plays as if I was a totally ignorant about directing; I simply approach each problem on a basis of common sense and try to find the most obvious solutions available.

The second chapter his book is titled “Status,” an element that he sees as crucial to improvisation, to acting, and most definitely to living. It’s a thorough and sometimes technical chapter, and it’s by far the best I’ve read on the subject.

One takeaway from this chapter for me is the extent to which every interaction among people – with the emphasis on “every” – is a series of status transactions, with higher and lower status switching sometimes moment by moment between the participants. He explains in detail how this works, and for me his explanations are revelatory. He also applies them to theater, with great insight:

The pauses [in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989, a play first produced in 1953 in French and 1955 in Englsh] are part of the pattern of dominance and submission. Godot earns its reputation as a boring play only when directors try to make it ‘significant,’ and ignore the status implications.

I would have thought that “Spontaneity,” the subject of the next chapter of Impro, would have come first in sequence because it’s so central to Johnstone’s life and practice, but I see that he considers “status” as even more foundational – status, after all, hugely determines the extent to which one can be spontaneous, since status is often a synonym for intimidation. The heavier the hand of status, the heavier it falls on the imagination.

But Johnstone is not pessimistic. “It’s possible to turn unimaginative people into imaginative people at a moment’s notice,” he says, although “You have to be a very stubborn person to remain an artist in this culture.”

The next chapter, titled “Narrative Skills,” contains some breathtaking insights for improvisors, actors, and writers, most of them having to do with allowing the creative process to work, without worrying about the product. This idea makes sense if, as Johnstone says, “The improvisor has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future.”

The enemy is fear – “The student hesitates not because he doesn’t have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that appear uninvited. . . . Unless you can continually wipe your ideas out of your mind you’re paralyzed.” To get past these obstacles, Johnstone describes a number of approaches, one of which is so brilliant that it left me gasping. He tells the student:

‘Suppose I think of [a story], and you tell me what it is.’ At once she relaxes, and it’s obvious how tense she was. ‘I’ve thought of one,’ I say, ‘but I’ll only answer “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe.”’ She likes this idea and agrees, having no idea that I’m planning to say ‘Yes’ to any question that ends in a vowel, ‘No’ to any question that ends in a consonant, and ‘Maybe’ to any question that ends with the letter ‘Y.’

The result is that the student invents an entire story out of her own imagination, with no idea at all that she’s doing it. Because the leader’s responses have nothing to do with the content, the story is the student’s own.

“A game can stare you in the face for years before you ‘see’ it,” Johnstone says, and that’s certainly been my experience with Creative Dramatics, an activity in which you never learn everything, or I don’t, anyway. That particular exercise knocked me out.

The “Narrative Skills” chapter is the closest in the book to the “recipe” approach mentioned above, and it contains wonderful insights. For example: “I used to ask the audience for titles first, and I usually combined two titles to make one.” This idea revitalizes the familiar approach of asking audiences for suggestions – combine two or more into one proposal.

And: the improvisor “shouldn’t really think of making up stories, but of interrupting routines.” As soon as an improviser grasps that idea – and it shouldn’t take long – then they will never be at a loss for an idea in a scene if they can grasp the familiar activity the other person is proposing, and send it off in a new direction.

The fourth chapter, “Masks and Trance,” for me brings back the ’70’s with a rush, and I won’t try to describe it, but the title points to its content, and I recommend it for those interested in advanced work.  (See also Rick’s post on ROT, “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011, which touches on some of the same issues.)

Impro proposes an answer to a question that has puzzled me for a long time. We teach and facilitate Creative Dramatics in order to move the students from point A to point B or, if things go well, further, possibly to point E or F on a good day. Why? Once people are (as I laid out my goals for my own work) confident, competent, and creative – what’s the purpose, what’s the aim?

Johnstone’s answer is that people are their imaginations, and that little that’s useful happens unless the imagination is first unlocked. He believes that if a person’s imagination is working freely, then whatever is important will come out – not because the person wants it to (they may very well not), but because it has to, once the imagination is freed. Johnstone says:

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 realized that every play makes a political statement . . ., 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.

Imagination, then, for Johnstone is not a path to a value, but the value itself. Is this so? Johnstone would say, “Don’t discuss it – try it, do it. Find out for yourself.” For me, if art is a continuing study of who we are, then Johnstone certainly provides a significant piece of the puzzle.

[On 10 January 2017, I posted a report on Will Hines’s book, How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth (Pretty Great Publishing Co., 2016), which is related to Johnstone’s field.  Hines worked with improvisational comedy companies like the Compass Players, Second City, Chicago City Limits, The Committee, ImprovOlympic (iO), the Groundlings, and the Upright Citizens Brigade and has taught improvisation as a form of performance.

[Readers who are interested in Johnstone’s use of improvisation in theater or Hines’s techniques of comic improvisation should check out my report and then perhaps read Hines’s book as a kind of companion to Impro.  I also suggest reading Viola Spolin’s seminal text, Improvisation for the Theatre, mentioned above.]