The book Impro by Keith Johnstone is described as a ‘landmark work’ by the blurb on the back of my copy. It describes techniques and exercises he developed for theatrical improvisation classes he ran.
Notes
There’s a lot in this book, too much to summarise easily. But some of the points that stood out most to me were:
- Many people who want to become professional actors are unwilling to take risks when they start improvisation classes, perhaps out of fear of revealing too much about themselves.
- Johnstone defines an “offer” as anything that an improvising actor does. Offers can be either accepted or blocked by another actor in the scene, where “blocking” means stopping the development of the scene’s action or negating the offer. (However, situations where one of the characters is opposing another don’t count as blocking if this opposition is consistent with the scene and leads to relevant actions.)
- It’s common for beginning improvisers to block instinctively. Johnstone describes a series of exercises designed to combat this instinct and help the actors to recognise blocking more easily when it happens. For example, there’s one exercise in which the first actor is instructed to offer and accept while the second actor offers and blocks. In another exercise, one actor makes offers and the other actor “overaccepts” them, which means making a very dramatic response to an everyday question or action.
- Sometimes, people trying to maintain a sense of their own status will block all offers unless they think they can control the action that follows.
- Johnstone advises improvisers not to try to be “original” – instead, they should say the first thing or take the first action that comes to mind, even if it seems boring. This will actually make the performance more engaging for audiences, because striving for originality often makes the scene feel contrived and less likely to lead to interesting situations as the action develops.
- To me, this quote from the chapter on spontaneity is memorable: “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made – which is something no ‘normal’ person would do.”
- In the chapter on narrative skills, Johnstone advises improvisers to focus on structure rather than content. A particularly important method is “reincorporation” – bringing back earlier elements from the action in some meaningful way, to make the sequence of events feel more like a story.
Reflections
I was struck by how experimental Johnstone’s classes seemed to be. He doesn’t present theories about why certain exercises work and others don’t. Instead, all his recommendations seem to come from experimentation. But he clearly observed carefully and analysed how each of the exercises turned out in practice. He wasn’t the only person running improvisation classes at the time – I suspect his analysis of the results was the reason why his classes were so successful and why this book is regarded as a classic.