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Keith Johnstone is a drama instructor who has taught in England and Canada and more recently around the world. His teachings and books have focused on improvisational theatre and have had a major influence on the dramatic arts.
Education
Born February 1933 in Devon, England, he hated his schooling, finding that it blunted his imagination and made him self-conscious and shy. As a play-reader, director and drama teacher at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1956-1966, he chose to reverse all of the things his teachers had told him, in an attempt to make his actors more spontaneous. For example, he would get them to make faces at each other, and be playfully nasty to each other, and would shout "Don't concentrate!" and "don't think!" and "Be obvious!" and "Don't be clever!". His techniques worked wonders in unfreezing people's imagination and spontaneity, and he went on to develop some important principles of acting and drama.
Teaching and Writing Career
In the 1970s he moved to Calgary, Canada to teach at the University of Calgary. There he co-founded the Loose Moose Theatre and invented Theatresports, which has become a staple of modern improvisational comedy. By a fairly convoluted route, Theatresports eventually gave rise to the popular TV show "Whose Line Is It Anyway?". Keith has subsequently invented further improvisation "formats" including "Gorilla Theatre", "Micetro" or "Maestro" and "Life Game" which has been seen at the National Theatre courtesy of Improbable Theatre and on US Cable television.
He has written two books about his work, "Impro" and "Impro For Storytellers". Keith still lives in Calgary and teaches all over the world.
Johnstone's Teachings
Whilst he was running the Writer's Group at the Royal Court, began to teach that drama is about dominance and submission, and about people being changed by each other, a subject that previously had not been taught in the dramatic arts . He made this realisation partly as a result of reading several books by Desmond Morris.
Johnstone was the first theatre professional to introduce the term "status transactions" into modern theatre, believing that an alarmingly high proportion of comedy comes from the infinite tiny ways that people try to raise their social status and lower the social status of others. His teaching exercizes included exercises where students would practice a low-status role by entering the classroom, and acting as though they were accidentally interrupting a very important meeting. The exercize was then repeated by the student. In Impro: Improvisation and the theatre, Johnston reports that the apoplexy and increased shows of deference that student acted out often triggered uproarious laughter in the class which he attributes to a deep-seated human interest in the acting out and renegotiation of status roles.
A major interest of Johnstone is the use of masks and costumes which represent different emotional states and social roles to improve students acting. He found these to be powerful learning devices, to the point where several fellow instructors reported that they were afraid to allow students to use them in class because some students got 'too much' into the parts of the masks. In Impro: Improvisation and the theatre, he spectulates that this effect occurs because masks allow students to let go of their day-to-day identity, especially after seeing and acting out their new identify before a mirror.
Bibliography
Johnstone, Keith (1979).Impro: improvisation and the theatre.New York: Theatre Arts Books. ISBN 878301631
Johnstone, Keith (1999).Impro for storytellers. New York : Routledge/Theatre Arts Books. ISBN 0878301054
External links
- Keith Johnstone, Keith's web page.
"Keith Johnstone"