# Impro by Keith Johnstone These are my unstructured notes & highlighted sections from the book Impro by Keith Johnstone. - Notes on Myself: - The book starts with Keith talking about himself. It begins with him talking about how he felt so creative and inspired as a child, and was disappointed to see that everything seemed to become colorless and dull as he got older. This childlike state he calls "the visionary world". But then he dangles the carrot in front of the reader - he claims he has rediscovered this childlike emotional intensity. He even mentions a strategy he uses to induce this state in his students: - > If I have a group of students who are feeling fairly safe and comfortable with each other, I get them to pace about the room shouting out the wrong name for everything that their eyes light on. Maybe there's time to shout out ten wrong names before I stop them. Then I ask whether other people look larger or smaller-almost everyone sees people as different sizes, mostly as smaller. 'Do the outlines look sharper or more blurred?' I ask, and everyone agrees that the outlines are many times sharper. 'What about the colours?' Everyone agrees there's far more colour, and that the colours are more intense. Often the size and shape of the room will seem to have changed, too. The students are amazed that such a strong transformation can be affected by such primitive means-and especially that the effects last so long. I tell them that they only have to think about the exercise for the effects to appear again. - He also mentions that he has gets "hypnagogic images" - hallucinations that come to him as he's falling asleep. I have never experienced these. He says that you cannot really "observe" them like you would normally, or they will be gone. Instead you have to learn to "attend" them, which is to see them without thinking words and disturbing the images. - This is very reminiscent of the skill I have been practicing of observing my breathing without taking control of it or altering it. - He takes this in an interesting direction by saying that he can conjure a mental image in his mind, and then "attend it". When attending it, he can notice things in them that he didn't intend to imagine. - > I had recalled an eye operation I'd had under local anaesthetic, when suddenly I thought of _attending_ to my mental images just as I had to the hypnagogic ones. The effect was astounding. They had all sorts of detail that I hadn't known about, and that I certainly hadn't _chosen_ to be there. The surgeons' faces were distorted, their masks were thrusting out as if there were snouts beneath them! The effect was so interesting that I persisted. I thought of a house, and _attended_ to the image and saw the doors and windows bricked in, bllt the chimney still smoking (a symbol for my inhibited state at the time?). I thought of another house and saw a terrifying figure in the doorway. I looked in the windows and saw strange rooms in amazing detail. - After this, he tries "attending" reality. He claims that once he started doing this, he managed to enter the visionary world again. - This really really is making me think of the "consious/unconsious" mind division that Jessie Schell talks about in _The Art of Game Design_.. He says that you should conceptualize your creative mind as an entirely separate person who doesn't speak in words or operate with logic. He even goes on to say that you should try to respect your creative mind, seriously considering any ideas it gives you even if they seem ridiculous. He says that if you don't do that, you will discourage it and it won't be as willing to give you ideas in the future. I always thought of this as a useful conceptualization and not something reflected in reality. I should read _The Modular Mind_ to learn more about this subject. - From what he's said so far a natural hypothesis is clear to me. The child experiences a visionary world because of a dominance of the creative, wordless brain. The adult experiences a colorless world because of a dominance of the categorizing, systemetizing brain. - Already reading this far I've been hooked. In "Education as Substance" he even touches on my perception that poor teachers can actually damage students by stifling their natural curiosity and enthusiasm. He feels the same way that I do that school had damaged his brain. Here's a bit from "Emotion": - > One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I'd had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I'd have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me _not_ to respond. - He reiterates this with a touching story about him being in an art class and given a simple assignment. To paint the tracks that a clown would leave when riding on a unicycle. Then to fill in the shapes with colors, then to paint patterns on the colors. The whole class was afraid to fail and only was able to timidly paint what they thought the teacher would accept. Then the teacher pulled out some paintings done by another class. Keith was immediately struck by how masterful they were. He thought the teacher was showing them paintings performed by an advanced class, to humble them. But then he noticed the signatures, and realized they were painted by 8 year olds. This was the last proof he needed that his education had somehow damaged him. - > Almost all teachers, even if they weren't very bright, got along reasonably well as schoolchildren, so presumably it's difficult for them to identify with the children who fail. - Still in the "Notes on myself section" - I appreciate that the author has the same mentality that I've been coming to w.r.t. responsibility: - > Many teachers don't seem to think that manipulating a group is their responsibility at all. If they're working with a destructive, bored group, they just blame the students for being 'dull', or uninterested. It's essential for the teacher to blame himself if the group aren't in a good state. - He is very emphatic that lack of ability should never be seen as a student's fault. Here is what he says when discussing teaching students to overcome their stage fright - > Instead of seeing people as _untalented,_ we can see them as _phobic,_ and this completely changes the teacher's relationship with them. - He also has a clear command of signalling behaviour. He even mentions countersignalling (although not by name): - > 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. Then they laugh, and relax, and I explain that really it's obvious that they should blame me, since I'm supposed to be the expert; and if I give them the wrong material, they'll fail; and if I give them the right material, then they'll succeed. I play low status physically but my actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself. - status: - He says that one of the most important parts of being a teacher is to make sure your students see you as being of an unassailably high status. If your students see you as being lower status than them, Keith implies you are bound to have a disorderly classroom. He does not mean that you need to be dominant and controlling. A teacher who is an expert in status will have an orderly classroom and can be loved by his students. - And in some ways this makes sense. If the students see the teacher as someone who is smart and capable, someone who could impart on them some useful information if they tried to receive it, they will obviously be more motivated to try compared to the alternative. - And he has a very long example of a status game. He mentions that if you find your students are busy playing status games, you should give them an example of a status game and then force them to play it with each other. He says that normally these status transactions are not consciously recognized, only reacted to, but this can change by having the group play-act them. - The reason this is helpful is that "normal people are inhibited from seeing that no action, sound, or movement is innocent of purpose." If this is true, I wonder if it's a good idea to break this barrier. It sounds adaptive to me. - He also observes something he calls "the see-saw principle" (really, it's a zero-sum game). This is that there is no way to lower your own status without raising everyone else's, or raise your own without lowering others, etc. In essense, status is zero-sum. - > When a very high-status person is wiped out, everyone feels pleasure as they experience the feeling of moving up a step. This is why tragedy has always been concerned with kings and princes - He has interesting tidbits for how you can change your status if you want. - > I might then begin to insert a tentative 'er' at the beginning of each of my sentences, and ask the group if they detect any change in me. They say that I look 'helpless' and 'weak' but they can't, interestingly enough, say what I'm doing that's different. I don't normally begin every sentence with 'er', so it should be very obvious. Then I move the 'er' into the middle of sentences, and they say that they perceive me as becoming a little stronger. If I make the 'er' longer, and move it back to the beginning of sentences, then they say I look more important, more confident. - > I change my behaviour and become authoritative. I ask them what I've done to create this change in my relation with them, and whatever they guess to be the reason - 'You're holding eye contact', 'You're sitting straighter'-I stop doing, yet the effect continues. Finally I explain that I'm keeping my head still whenever I speak, and that this produces great changes in the way I perceive myself and am perceived by others. I suggest you try it now with anyone you're with. - social skills - **Takeaway: keep head still when speaking, don't use filler words, speak slowly** - status - The moral of this section can be described with this quote: - > I don't myself see that an educated man in this culture necessarily has to understand the second law of thermodynamics, but he certainly should understand that **we are pecking-order animals and that this affects the tiniest details of our behaviour**. - "Space" - He also has an interesting discussion on body language and mannerisms that I really don't understand much of. He calls it "Space". Space is something that flows in and out of people. - > Imagine a man sitting neutrally and symmetrically on a bench. If he crosses his left leg over his right then you'll see his space flowing over to the right as if his leg was an aerofoil. If he rests his right arm along the back of the bench you'll see his space flowing out more strongly. If he turns his head to the right, practically all his space will be flowing in this same direction. Someone who is sitting neutrally in the 'beam' will seem lower-status. Every movement of the body modifies its space. If a man who is sitting neutrally crosses his left wrist over his right the space flows to his right, and vice versa. It's very obvious that the top hand gives the direction, but the class are amazed. The difference seems so trivial, yet they can see it's a quite strong effect. - He also describes two different postures, the "fear-crouch" and the "cherub pose". With the fear-crouch you are hunched over and protecting your organs. With the cherub pose you are lifting your head high, exposing your neck and stomach - > 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. Challenge a low-status player and he'll show some tendency to slide into postures related to the fear crouch. - > People will travel a long way to visit a 'view'. The essential element of a good view is distance, and preferably with nothing human in the immediate foreground. When we stand on a hill and look across fifty miles of emptiness at the mountains, we are experiencing the pleasure of having our space flow out unhindered. As people come in sight of a view, it's normal for their posture to improve and for them to breathe better. You can see people remarking on the freshness of the air, and taking deep breaths, although it's the same air as it was just below the brow of the hill. Trips to the sea, and our admiration of mountains. are probably symptoms of overcrowding. - When someone is acknowledged as high-status, they push space around them. People step out of the way for them on the street. - > Old people in, say, Hamburg, often collide with young Britishers in the street, because they expect the young to step aside for them. Similarly, a high-status stripper will walk stark naked into a stagehand who stands in her way. - People are constantly exchanging status signals and this how people very rarely bump into each other, even in bustling crowds. This confusion of how people avoid bumping into each other in crowds is something that's long puzzled me and this seems like as good an explanation as any. - > Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made a hundred yards or more before it actually 'needs' to be. - Homework: **watch groups of people in coffee bars**, and notice how everyone's attitude changes when someone leaves or joins a group. If you watch two people talking, and then wait for one to leave, you can see how the person remaining has to alter his posture. He had arranged his movements to relate to his partner's, and now that he's alone he _has_ to change his position in order to express a relationship to the people around him. - A scene where one person is playing the role of the master and the other is the servant is one where the master has full control over all the space. - > An extreme example would be the eighteenth-century scientist Henry Cavendish, who is reported to have fired any servant he caught sight of! (Imagine the hysterical situations: servants scuttling like rabbits, hiding in grandfather clocks and ticking, getting stuck in huge vases.) - Under this understanding, the primary role of a servant is to elevate the status of the master. Footmen can't lean against the wall, because that would be showing dominance over the space, and it's the master's space. - writing advice: > I'd suggest that a good play is one which ingeniously displays and reverses the status between the characters. A great play is a virtuoso display of status transactions. - Spontaneity - Keith is kind of predictable. He says that school systematically crushes creativity out of students. He seems to even think that there's no benefit to any kind of art school at all. - > So-called 'primitive painters' in our own culture sometimes go to art school to improve themselves - and lose their talent. A critic told me of a film school where each new student made a short film unaided. These, he said, were always interesting, although technically crude. At the end of the course they made a longer, technically more pro- ficient film, which hardly anyone wanted to see. He seemed outraged when I suggested they should close the school (he lectured there); yet until recently our directors didn't get any training. Someone asked Kubrick if it was usual for a director to spend so much care on lighting each shot and he said, 'I don't know. I've never seen anyone else light a film.' - > Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many 'well adjusted' adults are bitter, uncreative frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that's what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing. - He also has the same idea I learned in my creative thinking class, which is that creativity should be conceptualized as coming from without. - This really really is making me think of the "consious/unconsious" mind division that Jessie Schell talks about in _The Art of Game Design_.. He says that you should conceptualize your creative mind as an entirely separate person who doesn't speak in words or operate with logic. He even goes on to say that you should try to respect your creative mind, seriously considering any ideas it gives you even if they seem ridiculous. He says that if you don't do that, you will discourage it and it won't be as willing to give you ideas in the future. I always thought of this as a useful conceptualization and not something reflected in reality. I should read _The Modular Mind_ to learn more about this subject. - And what Keith is saying lines up with this exactly. It almost makes me wonder if Jessie read this book. - He has an interesting little bit in here about creativity - > People maintain prejudices quite effortlessly. For example, in this conversation (R. B. Zajonc, Public Opinion Quarterly, Princeton, 1960, Vol. 24, 2, pp. 280-96): MR X: The trouble with Jews is that they only take care of their own group. MR Y: But the record of the community chest shows that they give more generously than non-Jews. MR X: That shows that they are always trying to buy favour and intrude in Christian affairs. They think of nothing but money; that's why there are so many Jewish bankers. MR Y: But a recent study shows that the per cent of Jews in banking is proportionally much smaller than the per cent of non-Jews. MR X: That's it. They don't go for respectable businesses. They would rather run nightclubs. In a way this bigot is being very creative. - He maintains as usual that everyone has the innate talent to be creative and spontaneous but that it is crushed by school/society/whatever. - > Students need a 'guru' who 'gives permission' to allow forbidden thoughts into their consciousness. A 'guru' doesn't necessarily teach at all. Some remain speechless for years, others communicate very cryptically. All reassure by example. They are people who have been into the forbidden areas and who have survived unscathed. I react playfully with my students, while showing them that there are just as many dead nuns or chocolate scorpions inside my head as there are in anybody's, yet I interact very smoothly and sanely. It's no good _telling_ the student that he isn't to be held responsible for the content of his imagination, he needs a teacher who is living proof that the monsters are not real, and that the imagination will not destroy you. Otherwise the student will have to go on _pretending_ to be dull. - > At one time I went from a class of mental patients in the morning to a class of drama students in the afternoon. The work of the drama students was far more bizarre, because they weren't so scared of what their minds might do. The mental patients mistook even the normal working of the imagination as proof of their insanity. - He also talks a bit how the our current environment shapes our reactions: - > People's tolerance of obscenity varies according to the group they're with, or the particular circumstances _('pas devant les enfants')._ People can laugh at jokes told at a party that they wouldn't find funny on a more formal occasion. It seems unfortunate to me that the classroom is often considered a 'formal' area in this sense. - He has absolutely no end to his hatred of the public school system: - > The most repressed, and damaged, and 'unteachable' students that I have to deal with are those who were the star performers at bad high schools. Instead of learning how to be warm and spontaneous and giving, they've become armoured and superficial, calculating and self-obsessed. I could show you many many examples where education has clearly been a destructive process. - He has a similar suggestion in his book to one from *Design by Concept* - that your creative decisions should always seem obvious to you, not original or creative - > An artist who is inspired is being _obvious._ He's not making any decisions, he's not weighing one idea against another. He's accepting his first thoughts. - > - Later in the same letter he says: 'Why my productions take from my hand that particular form and style that makes them _Mozartish,_ and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so large or so aquiline, or in short, makes it Mozart's, and different from those of other people. For I really do not study or aim at any originality.' Suppose Mozart _had_ tried to be original? It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre. - Design by Concept: Whenever a design decision is made from a set of possibilities that all seem equally plausible (or, none stands out as obviously better than the others), the designer runs the risk of making a non-optimal choice. So the presence of these options leads to a fragile design process, in which every step the designer is likely to make a mistake, following a path along which arbitrary decisions take the designer to a more idiosyncratic and incoherent design. - Another interesting bit of writing advice: - > Then we go to the theatre, and at all points where we would say 'No' in life, we want to see the actors yield, and say 'Yes'. Then the action we would suppress if it happened in life begins to develop on the stage. - > If you'll stop reading for a moment and think of something you wouldn't want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you'll have thought of something worth staging or filming. We don't want to walk into a restaurant and be hit in the face by a custard pie, and we don't want to suddenly glimpse Grannie's wheelchair racing towards the edge of the cliff, but we'll pay money to attend enactments of such events. In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very 'gifted' improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action: