(2019-05-09) Clear Book Summary Impro Improvisation And The Theatre By Keith Johnstone

James Clear: Book Summary: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone. The Book in Three Sentences. Many of our behaviors are driven by our desire to achieve a particular level of status relative to those around us. People are continually raising and lowering their status in conversation through body language and words. Say yes to more and stop blocking the opportunities that come your way.

As we learn creative principles like composition and balance, we start seeing the world as it ought to be rather than as it is. The problem is that the world as it is, is actually far more interesting than the version our educated minds wish it to be. We have to relearn how to attend to the world as it is rather than being disappointed for it not perfectly matching the rules we have been taught.

Whenever you hear something, you should reverse it and see if the opposite is also true. Never believe something merely because it is convenient.

Normal education is designed to reduce spontaneity and make things orderly and understood. Johnstone’s theater improvisation teaching techniques were designed to do exactly the opposite.

The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life.

I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children

We learned that things invented on the spur of the moment could be as good or better than the texts we laboured over.

combining the imagination of two people which would be additive, rather than subtractive.

What really got me started again was an advert for a play of mine in the paper, a play called The Martian. I had never written such a play, so I phoned up Bryan King, who directed the theatre. ‘We've been trying to find you,' he said. ‘We need a play for next week, does the title The Martian suit you?' I wrote the play, and it was well received. Since then I've deliberately put myself in this position.

The first thing I do when I meet a group of new students is (probably) to sit on the floor. I play low status, and I'll explain that if the students fail they're to blame me.

My methods are very effective, and other things being equal, most students will succeed, but they won't be trying to win any more. The normal teacher-student relationship is dissolved.

Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless'.

Status is a confusing term unless it's understood as something one does. You may be low in social status, but play high, and vice versa.

The messages are modified by the receivers

A comedian is someone paid to lower his own or other people's status

In animals the pattern of eye contacts often establishes dominance.

Dark glasses raise status because we can't see the submission of the eyes.

Moment by moment each person adjusts his status up or down a fraction.

We have a ‘fear-crouch' position in which the shoulders lift to protect the jugular and the body curls forward to protect the underbelly.

The opposite to this fear crouch is the ‘cherub posture', which opens all the planes of the body: the head turns and tilts to offer the neck

High-status people often adopt versions of the cherub posture. If they feel under attack they'll abandon it and straighten, but they won't adopt the fear crouch

A servant's primary function is to elevate the status of the master

Desmond Morris, in The Human Zqo (Cape, 1969; Corgi, 1971) gives ‘ten golden rules' for people who are Number Ones

It is the lack of pecking-order that makes most crowd scenes look unconvincing. The ‘extras' mill about trying to look ‘real',

In life, status gaps are often exaggerated to such an extent that they become comical

accomplished actors, directors, and playwrights are people with an intuitive understanding of the status transactions that govern human relationships.

A good play is one which ingeniously displays and reverses the status between the characters

Imagining should be as effortless as perceiving. Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong'

My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave

Sanity is a matter of interaction, rather than of one's mental processes

when someone's behaviour was perceived as ‘unpredictable'

the real avant-garde aren't imitating what other people are doing, or what they did forty years ago; they're solving the problems that need solving, like how to get a popular theatre with some worth-while content, and they may not look avant-garde at all!

I constantly point out how much the audience like someone who is direct, and how they always laugh with pleasure at a really ‘obvious' idea.

the more obvious an improviser is, the more himself he appears

Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.

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.

Reading about spontaneity won't make you more spontaneous, but it may at least stop you heading off in the opposite direction; and if you play the exercises with your friends in a good spirit, then soon all your thinking will be transformed.

If I say ‘Make up a story', then most people are paralysed. If I say ‘describe a routine and then interrupt it', people see no problem

It doesn't matter how stupidly you interrupt a routine, you will be automatically creating a narrative, and people will listen