(2010-01-23) Rao Impro By Keith Johnstone

Venkatesh Rao on Improby Keith Johnstone. Here’s a quick survey of the contents.

Chapter 1, Notes on Myself, begins with an exercise designed to get you seeing the world differently. Literally. The exercise is to simply walk around looking at things and shouting out the wrong names for things you see (for example, look at your couch and yell “apple”). The effect he asserts, of doing this for a minutes, is that everything seems to come alive and acquire the intensity it held for you when you were a child.

the philosophical premise of the book, that adults are atrophied children, and that traditional education (schooling) accelerates rather than slows this process of atrophy

Chapter 2, Status, is particularly spectacular, and the most accessible chapter in the book. It is based on the idea that the only thing you really need to do, in preparing to improvise a scene, is to decide what status to play, high or low, in relation to the other actors on stage.

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which I saw in New York last fall.

Impro completely explained the play for me. The play’s appeal lies in the fact that it is a showcase for status dynamics

Chapter 3, Spontaneity, describes exercises and acting principles that seem like they would take you perilously close to madness if you tried them unsupervised.

he notes that the work described in this chapter is closer to intensive therapy than to learning a skill.

Chapter 4, Narrative Skills, is close to the best fiction-writing advice I’ve ever read, probably second only to Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer

Chapter 5, Masks and Trance, is easily the most intense, disturbing and rewarding chapter.

The Book, Take Two

What is surprising is the light it sheds on a variety of other topics. Here are just a few:

Body Language:

Interpersonal Relationships:

Psychology:

I’ve recommended the classic books on transactional analysis (TA)

I’ve always felt though, that TA, while useful as an analytical framework, isn’t very helpful if you are trying to figure out what to do. Impro is pretty much the “how to” manual for TA, and it works through a sort of experimental reductio ad absurdum

I suspect the reason there is so much to learn from the practice of theater is that the humanities and social sciences lack a strong culture of experimentation. Theater is, in a sense, the true laboratory for the humanities and social sciences.