Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

I first met Johnstone shortly after he had joined the Court as a los-a-script play-reader, and he struck me then as a revolutionary idealist looking around for a guillotine. He saw corruption everywhere.

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I’d lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age—just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn’t understand that clarity is in the mind. I’ve since found tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about fifteen seconds, and the effects last for hours. For example, 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 effected by such primitive means—and especially that the effects last so long.

One afternoon I was lying on my bed and investigating the effects of anxiety on the musculature (how do you spend your afternoons?).

At about the age of nine I decided never to believe anything because it was convenient. I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true. This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I’m doing it any more. As soon as you put a ‘not’ into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out—especially in drama, where everything is supposition anyway.

When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I’m amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school—hence the misbehaviour.

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?’

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. At this point they almost certainly start sliding off their chairs, because they don’t want to be higher than me. I have already changed the group profoundly, because failure is suddenly not so frightening any more. They’ll want to test me, of course; but I really will apologise to them when they fail, and ask them to be patient with me, and explain that I’m not perfect. 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.

‘Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s,’ I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal. The actors seemed to know exactly what I meant and the work was transformed. The scenes became ‘authentic’, and actors seemed marvellously observant. Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless’. It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming. All our secret manoeuvrings were exposed. If someone asked a question we didn’t bother to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. No one could make an ‘innocuous’ remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. Normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict. In reality status transactions continue all the time. In the park we’ll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not.

If he taught them to play status transactions as games then the feeling within the group would improve. A lot of laughter would have been released, and the group might have flipped over from acting as a competitive group into acting as a co-operative one. It’s worth noting how much talent is locked away inside these apparently banal people.

The pleasure attached to misbehaving comes partly from the status changes you make in your teacher. All those jokes on teacher are to make him drop in status. The third teacher could cope easily with any situation by changing his status first.

Audiences enjoy a contrast between the status played and the social status. We always like it when a tramp is mistaken for the boss, or the boss for a tramp. Hence plays like The Inspector General. Chaplin liked to play the person at the bottom of the hierarchy and then lower everyone.

I should really talk about dominance and submission, but I’d create a resistance. Students who will agree readily to raising or lowering their status may object if asked to ‘dominate’ or ‘submit’.

A further early discovery was that there was no way to be neutral. The ‘Good morning’ that might be experienced as lowering by the Manager, might be experienced as raising by the bank clerk. The messages are modified by the receivers. You can see people trying to be neutral in group photographs. They pose with arms folded or close to their sides as if to say ‘Look! I’m not claiming any more space than I’m entitled to’, and they hold themselves very straight as if saying ‘But I’m not submissive either!’ If someone points a camera at you you’re in danger of having your status exposed, so you either clown about, or become deliberately unexpressive. In formal group photographs it’s normal to see people guarding their status. You get quite different effects when people don’t know they’re being photographed.

If status can’t even be got rid of, then what happens between friends? Many people will maintain that we don’t play status transactions with our friends, and yet every movement, every inflection of the voice implies a status. My answer is that acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together. If I take an acquaintance an early morning cup of tea I might say ‘Did you have a good night?’ or something equally ‘neutral’, the status being established by voice and posture and eye contact and so on. If I take a cup of tea to a friend then I may say ‘Get up, you old cow’, or ‘Your Highness’s tea’, pretending to raise or lower status.

We soon discovered the ‘see-saw’ principle: ‘I go up and you go down’. Walk into a dressing-room and say ‘I got the part’ and everyone will congratulate you, but will feel lowered. Say ‘They said I was too old’ and people commiserate, but cheer up perceptibly. Kings and great lords used to surround themselves with dwarfs and cripples so that they could rise by the contrast. Some modern celebrities do the same. The exception to this see-saw principle comes when you identify with the person being raised or lowered, when you sit on his end of the see-saw, so to speak. If you claim status because you know some famous person, then you’ll feel raised when they are: similarly, an ardent royalist won’t want to see the Queen fall off her horse. When we tell people nice things about ourselves this is usually a little like kicking them. People really want to be told things to our discredit in such a way that they don’t have to feel sympathy. Low-status players save up little tit-bits involving their own discomfiture with which to amuse and placate other people.

In my view the man who falls on the banana skin is funny only if he loses status, and if we don’t have sympathy with him. If my poor old blind grandfather falls over I’ll rush up and help him to his feet. If he’s really hurt I may be appalled. If Nixon had slipped up on the Whit G House steps many people would have found it hysterical.

One might keep putting his hands near his face while he speaks, and the other might try keeping his hands away from his face.

These are just tricks in order to get the students to experience status changes. If I speak with a still head, then I’ll do many other high-status things quite automatically. I’ll speak in complete sentences, I’ll hold eye contact. I’ll move more smoothly, and occupy more ‘space’. If I talk with my toes pointing inwards I’m more likely to give a hesitant little ‘er’ before each sentence, and I’ll smile with my teeth covering my bottom lip, and I’ll sound a little breathless, and so on. We were amazed to find that apparently unrelated things could so strongly influence each other; it didn’t seem reasonable that the position of the feet could influence sentence structure and eye contact, but it is so.

One interesting complication in such a scene is that Smith will have to play low status to the space, even when playing high status to Sir, or it’ll look like his office. Conversely, Sir must play high status to the space, even when playing low status to Smith. If he doesn’t he’ll look like an intruder. ‘Move about,’ I say. ‘Answer the telephone. Walk over to the window.’ Status is played to anything, objects as well as people. If you enter an empty waiting-room you can play high or low status to the furniture. A king may play low status to a subject, but not to his palace

If you wish to teach status interactions, it’s necessary to understand that however wining the student is consciously, there may be very strong subconscious resistances. Making the student safe, and getting him to have confidence in you, are essential. You then have to work together with the student, as if you were both trying to alter the behaviour of some third person. It’s also important that the student who succeeds at playing a status he feels to be alien should be instantly rewarded, praised and admired.

The actors’ directory Spotlight used to have the high-status specialists at the front (called ‘straight’), followed by the low-status specialists (called ‘character actors’),

there are students who will report no change of sensation when they alter their eye-contact patterns. If you observe them closely you’ll see that the ones who always play low status in life won’t ever hold eye contact long enough to feel dominant. When high-status specialists break eye contact and glance back, they’ll be holding the glance back for at least a second, which is too long. You may have to precisely control the length of time that they look before they experience the change of sensation. Then they’ll say, Tut it feels wrong.’ This feeling of wrongness is the one they have to learn as being correct.

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.

Approach distances are related to space. If I approach someone on open moorland I have to raise an arm and shout ‘excuse me’ as soon as I’m within shouting distance. In a crowded street I can actually brush against people without having to interact.

When you watch a bustling crowd from above it’s amazing that they don’t all bump into each other. I think it’s because we’re all giving status signals, and exchanging subliminal status challenges all the time. The more submissive person steps aside.

Another way is to get the students, working in pairs, to identify strangers in the street as if they knew them. I get one student to do the recognising ‘Hi! How are you? How’s the family? Same old job then’, and so on, while the other student acts bored, and says ‘Come on, we’ll be late’, and generally expresses impatience. Most people find this approach very convincing, and sometimes extremely interesting scenes take place, but if the students are nervous, they will probably mistime the initial approach. Then it looks as if they are invisible. You can see them greeting people who sweep past as if they didn’t exist.

I ask students (for homework!) to watch groups of people in coffee bars, and to 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.

I teach that a master-servant scene is one in which both parties act as if all the space belonged to the master. (Johnstone’s law!) 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.) People who are not literally masters and servants may act out the roles, henpecked husbands and dominant wives for example.

When the masters are not present, then the servants can take full possession of the space, sprawl on the furniture, drink the brandy, and so on. You may have noticed how ‘shifty’ chauffeurs look when their masters are away. They can smoke, chat together and treat the cars as their ‘own’, but being in the street they feel ‘exposed’. They have to keep a ‘weather eye out’. When the master is present, the servant must take care at all times not to dominate the space. One might imagine that since the servants have work to do, everything possible should be done to see that they’re kept ‘fresh’ and at ease, but a servant is not a worker in this sense. You can work for someone without being ‘their servant’. A servant’s primary function is to elevate the status of the master. Footmen can’t lean against the wall, because it’s the master’s wall. Servants must make no unnecessary noise or movement, because it’s the master’s air they’re intruding on.

The preferred position for a servant is usually at the edge of the master’s ‘parabola of space’. This is so that at any moment the master can confront him and dominate him.

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.

The high-status effect of slow motion means that TV heroes who have the power of superhuman speed are shown slowed down! Logic would suggest that you should speed the film up, but then they’d be jerking about like the Keystone Cops, or the bionic chicken.

You have to be a very stubborn person to remain an artist in this culture. It’s easy to play the role of ‘artist’, but actually to create something means going against one’s education.

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.

It’s no wonder that our artists are aberrant characters. It’s not surprising that great African sculptors end up carving coffee tables, or that the talent of our children dies the moment we expect them to become adult. Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.

Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they’re a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role.

Sanity has nothing directly to do with the way you think. It’s a matter of presenting yourself as safe. Little old men wander around London hallucinating visibly, but no one gets upset. The same behaviour in a younger, more vigorous person would get him shut away. A Canadian study on attitudes to mental illness concluded that it was when someone’s behaviour was perceived as ‘unpredictable’ that the community rejected them.

There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes’, and there are people who prefer to say ‘No’. Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain. There are far more ‘No’ sayers around than ‘Yes’ sayers, but you can train one type to behave like the other.

There is a link with status transactions here, since low-status players tend to accept, and high-status players to block. High-status players will block any action unless they feel they can control it. The high-status player is obviously afraid of being humiliated in front of an audience, but to block your partner’s ideas is to be like the drowning man who drags down his rescuer. There’s no reason why you can’t play high status, and yet yield to other people’s invention.

I call anything that an actor does an ‘offer’. Each offer can either be accepted, or blocked. If you yawn, your partner can yawn too, and therefore accept your offer. A block is anything that prevents the action from developing, or that wipes out your partner’s premise. 5 If it develops the action it isn’t a block. For example: ‘Your name Smith?’ ‘What if it is, you horrible little man!’ This is not a block, even though the answer is antagonistic. Again: ‘I’ve had enough of your incompetence, Perkins! Please leave.’ ‘No, Sir!’ This isn’t a block either. The second speaker has accepted that he’s a servant, and he accepts the situation one of annoyance between himself and his employer. If a scene were to start with someone saying ‘Unhand me, Sir Jasper, let me go’, and her partner said ‘All right, do what you like, then’, this is probably a block. It would get a laugh but it would create bad feeling.

Once you learn to accept offers, then accidents can no longer interrupt the action. When someone’s chair collapsed Stanislavsky berated him for not continuing, for not apologising to the character whose house he was in. This attitude makes for something really amazing in the theatre. The actor who will accept anything that happens seems supernatural;

These ‘offer-block-accept’ games have a use quite apart from actor training. 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. A student objected to this view by saying, ‘But you don’t choose your life. Sometimes you are at the mercy of people who push you around.’ I said, ‘Do you avoid such people?’ Oh!’ she said,’ I see what you mean.’

Reading about spontaneity won’t make you more spontaneous, but it may at least stop you heading off in the opposite direction;

The stages I try to take students through involve the realisation (t) that we struggle against our imaginations, especially when we try to be imaginative; (2) that we are not responsible for the content of our imaginations; and (3) that we are not, as we are taught to think, our ‘personalities’, but that the imagination is our true self.

My decision was that content should be ignored. This wasn’t a conclusion I wished to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking. I hadn’t realised that every play makes a political statement, and that the artist only needs to worry about content if he’s trying to fake up a personality he doesn’t actually have, or to express views he really isn’t in accord with. I tell improvisers to follow the rules and see what happens, and not to feel in any way responsible for the material that emerges. If you improvise spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your innermost self will be revealed. The same is true of any artist. If you want to write a ‘working-class play’ then you’d better be working class. If you want your play to be religious, then be religious. An artist has to accept what his imagination gives him, or screw up his talent.

Alex Comfort once filmed some of my work, and he seemed surprised when I told him that my students never attacked me physically.

We used to play this game at parties, and people who claim to be unimaginative would think up the most astounding stories, so long as they remained convinced that they weren’t responsible for them. The great joke was to lure somebody into inventing a story about a midget dentist sexually assaulting Siamese twins, or whatever, wait until he accused you of having really perverted minds, and then explain triumphantly that he had created the story himself.

An improviser can study status transactions, and advancing, and ‘reincorporating’, and can learn to free-associate, and to generate narrative spontaneously, and yet still find it difficult to compose stories. This is really for aesthetic reasons, or conceptual reasons. He shouldn’t really think of making up stories, but of interrupting routines.

You have to trick students into believing that content isn’t important and that it looks after itself, or they never get anywhere. It’s the same kind of trick you use when you tell them that they are not their imaginations, that their imaginations have nothing to do with them, and that they’re in no way responsible for what their ‘mind’ gives them. In the end they learn how to abandon control while at the same time they exercise control. They begin to understand that everything is just a shell. You have to misdirect people to absolve them of responsibility. Then, much later, they become strong enough to resume the responsibility themselves. By that time they have a more truthful concept of what they are.

We find the Mask strange because we don’t understand how irrational our responses to the face are anyway, and we don’t realise that much of our lives is spent in some form of trance, i.e. absorbed. What we assume to be ‘normal consciousness’ is comparatively rare, it’s like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON but what’s happening when you don’t look in?

An improviser writes : . If a scene goes badly I remember it. If it goes well I forget very quickly.’ Orgasms are the same.

You don’t know you’re in a trance state because whenever you check up, there you are, playing table tennis, but you may have been in just as deep a trance as the bobsleigh rider who didn’t know he’d lost a thumb until he shook hands.

I see the ‘personality’ as a public-relations department for the real mind, which remains unknown. My personality always seems to be functioning, at some level, in terms of what other people think. If I am alone in a room and someone knocks on the door, then I ‘come back to myself’. I do this in order to check up that my social image is presentable : are my flies done up? Is my social face properly assembled? If someone enters, and I decide that I don’t have to guard myself, then I can get ‘lost in the conversation’. Normal consciousness is related to transactions, real or imagined, with other people. That’s how I experience it, and I note widespread reports of people in isolation, or totally rejected by other people, who experience ‘personality disintegration’.

Crowds are trance-inducing because the anonymity imposed by the crowd absolves you of the need to maintain your identity.

Many people regard ‘trance’ as a sign of madness, just as they presume that ‘madmen’ must be easy to hypnotise. The truth is that if madmen were capable of being under ‘social control’ they would never have revealed the behaviour that categorised them as insane. It’s a tautology to say that normal people are the most suggestible, since it’s because they’re the most suggestible that they’re the most normal!

One would expect the gods to be presented as supermen, but in all ‘trance’ cultures we find a mythology which describes the gods as acting in a childlike way. As Melville says, ‘The gods are like children and must be told what to do.’

I also have to establish that they will not be held responsible for their actions while in the Mask. I illustrate this with stories. We had a Mask that had a thick droopy nose and angry eyebrows. It was a deep, congested red in colour, and it liked to pick up sticks and hit people. It was quite safe so long as the teacher knew this and said ‘Take the Mask off!’ sharply at the critical moment. Someone borrowed it once—Pauline Melville, who had taken over my classes at Morley College. Next day she returned the Masks and said that someone had been hit on the arm. I had to explain that it was my fault for not warning her. (And I pointed to the Mask that hit people.)

When a student tries on a Mask for the second time I may say ‘When you look in the mirror let the Mask make a sound, and keep the sound going all through the scene.’ This is a meditation technique very effective in blocking verbalisation (like Tibetan monks chanting ‘Oooooommmmm’). I often say things like ‘Yes, that’s excellent’, or ‘Who is it?’ or ‘Amazing’ even before students have looked in the mirror, so that the feeling of being different, and hidden, is reinforced. The Masks begin to pant, and wheeze, and howl, which freaks out the people watching even more, and ‘pumps the atmosphere up’. In voodoo cults the drums throb for hours to call the gods across the ocean from Africa. Once one person is possessed, others usually follow almost immediately. In a beginners’ Mask class there is usually a ‘dead’ twenty minutes before the first Mask appears—if you’re lucky. My method is to ‘seed’ the class with a fully developed Mask. The presence of a ‘possessed’ Mask allows students to let go’, and alarms and reassures at the same time. The same phenomenon is reported in possession cults; and it’s easier to hypnotise someone who has just seen it done to someone else.

Getting him to hold his mouth in a fixed position, and having him make sounds helps to block verbalisation, and ‘finding a prop’ helps to tear the Mask away from the mirror

I set up a scene in which the Mask is to meet a ‘very nice voice teacher’. I collect the props that I think will interest the Mask, and I get someone to stay close to it with a mirror. ‘Come in’, I say. ‘Sit?’ ’It looks baffled. ‘Sit,’ I say, and I sit on a chair. If it ‘catches on’ it’ll imitate me and probably make some sort of sound. ‘Stand,’ I say, and we play ‘sitting and standing’ like two idiots. Then I give the Mask a present, perhaps a balloon. ‘Balloon,’ I say, and if it doesn’t want it, or won’t say the word, I don’t pressure it. If it likes the balloon, I say ‘Yellow balloon’ or whatever. Whenever the Mask begins to turn off, it gets a recharge from the mirror, and I keep well back, and hand it things at arm’s length. If I get too close to it I’ll probably turn it off. I have to be careful not to invade the Mask’s ‘space’, although proximity between Masks will deepen their trance.

Another student writes : ‘I always come away from a Mask class with a feeling of renewed freshness, a light feeling. ‘I like the Mask state very much—I guess you could say it acts on me the way some drugs would affect other people—an escape perhaps?

Meditation teachers in the East have asked their students to practise placing the mind in different parts of the body, or in the Universe, as a means of inducing trance. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes ‘Where do I want you to be? Nowhere!” 10 Michael Chekhov, a distinguished acting teacher (and friend of Vakhtangov) suggested that students should practise moving the mind around as an aid to character work. He suggested that they should invent ‘imaginary bodies’ and operate them from ‘imaginary centres’.

If you were to use Mask work literally as ‘therapy’, and to try and psychoanalyse the content of scenes, then I’ve no doubt you could produce some amazing conflicts, and really screw everyone up. Mask work, or any spontaneous acting, can be therapeutic because of the intense abreactions involved; but the teacher’s job is to keep the student safe, and to protect him so that he can regress. 12 This is the opposite of the Freudian view that people regress in search of greater security. In acting class, students only regress when they feel protected by a high-status teacher.