Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone is a drama instructor whose teachings and books have focused on improvisational theatre and have had a major influence on the art of improvisation.

Education

Born February, 1933, in Devon, England, Johnstone grew up hating school, finding that it blunted his imagination and made him feel self-conscious and shy. In the late 1950s, as a play-reader, director and drama teacher at the Royal Court Theatre in London, he chose to reverse all that his teachers had told him in an attempt to create more spontaneous actors. For example, he would instruct them to make faces at each other and to be playfully nasty to each other. In the course of his instruction, he would tell his students, "Don't concentrate," "Don't think," "Be obvious," and "Don't be clever!" His unorthodox techniques opened his students' imagination and spontaneity. Even after leaving the Theatre in 1966, Johnstone continued to develop important principles for acting and drama.

Teaching and writing career

In the 1970s, Johnstone moved to Calgary, Alberta to teach at the University of Calgary. There, he co-founded the Loose Moose Theatre, and invented Theatresports, that 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?".^{[citation needed]} Johnstone has subsequently invented further improvisation "formats" including "Gorilla Theatre", "Micetro" or "Maestro", and "Life Game" that has been seen at the National Theatre courtesy of Improbable Theatre, and on U.S. cable television.

He has written two books about his work, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre and Impro For Storytellers. Johnstone still lives in Calgary, but teaches all over the world.

Johnstone's teachings

Whilst he was running the Writer's Group at the Royal Court, he began to teach that drama occurs from dynamic levels of status. He came to this realisation 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,^{[citation needed]} believing that a high proportion of drama comes from the multiple and tiny ways that people attempt to get what they want by raising or lowering their social status. His teaching included exercises in which students practiced a low-status role by entering the classroom, and acting as though they were accidentally interrupting a very important meeting. The exercise was then repeated by the student. In Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Johnstone reports that the increased shows of deference that students acted out often triggered uproarious laughter in the class. He attributes this to a deep-seated human interest in the acting out and renegotiation of status roles.

One of Johnstone's major interests is the use of masks and costumes which represent different emotional states and social roles. He found mask-work to be a powerful learning device. The student's ability to be "in the mask" became so powerful that several fellow instructors reported they were afraid to allow students to use masks in class because some students became overtaken by the mask character. In Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, he speculates that this effect occurs because masks allow students to let go of their day-to-day identity, especially after the effective exercise of seeing and acting out their new identities before a mirror.

Bibliography

• Johnstone, Keith (1979). Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1st ed.). Faber and Faber. ISBN 0571109896, 9780571109890. 
• Johnstone, Keith (1999-05-01). Impro For Storytellers. Faber And Faber Ltd.. ISBN 0571190995. 
• Reddick,Grant . "Keith Johnstone," Theatre 100. Calgary: Alberta Playwrights Network, 2006
• "Keith Johnstone" in Contemporary Dramatists, 6th ed. St. James Press, 1999.
• Berney, K.A. ed. (1994). "Johnstone, Keith". Contemporary British Dramatists. London: St. James Press. pp. 377.  ISBN 1558622136

External links

• Keith Johnstone, Keith's web page.
• Improvisation & Storytelling Workshops, Workshops based on Keith's works
• Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia entry
• "Unscripted", Chris Wiebe, Alberta Views magazine, September 2005.