vin_dee’s Reviews > Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre > Status Update

"We all know instinctively what 'mad' thought is: mad thoughts are those which other people find unacceptable, and train us not to talk about, but which we go to the theatre to see expressed."

"It's horrible to be laughed at against your will. Either you suppress unwelcome laughter or you start controlling it. We suppress our spontaneous impulses, we censor our imaginations, we learn to present ourselves as 'ordinary', and we destroy our talent- then no one laughs at us."

"When I explain that sanity is a matter of interaction, rather than of one's mental processes, students are often hysterical with laughter. They agree that for years they have been suppressing all sorts of thinking because they classified it as insane."

"My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people-and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way. Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they're a little crazier than the average person."

"If you don't know what to do in a scene, just say something like, 'Oh my God! What's that?' This immediately jerks images into your partner's mind: 'Mother!' he says, or 'That dog's messed the floor again', or 'A secret staircase!' or whatever!"

"If an improviser is stuck for an idea, he shouldn't search for one, he should trigger his partner's ability to give 'unthought' answers. If someone starts a scene by saying 'What are you doing here?' then his partner can instantly say, without thinking, 'I just came down to get the milk, sir.' 'Didn't I tell you what I'd do if I caught you again?' 'Oh Sir, don't put me in the refrigerator, Sir'"

"...' A board creaked behind her...' I read, and for a split second I see a Frankenstein's monster holding a wet teddy bear. 'She turned to see a wizened old man...', instantly, the monster shrivels to Picasso with a beret, and the room darkens and fills with furniture. My imagination is working as hard as the writer's, but I have no sense of doing anything, or 'being creative'."

"Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be 'wrong', which is what our education encourages us to believe. Then we experience ourselves as 'imagining', as 'thinking up an idea', but what we're really doing is faking up the sort of imagination we think we ought to have."

"Two of my students said they couldn't grow, and I asked, 'Why?' One said her teacher had been sarcastic because she'd painted a blue snowman (every child's painting was pinned up on the walls except hers.) The other girl had drawn trees up the sides of her paintings (like Paul Klee), and the teacher drew a 'correct' tree on top of hers. She remembered thinking 'I'll never draw for you again!'

Many psychologists have noted how uncannily perceptive some schizophrenics are. I think that there madness must have opened their eyes to things that 'normal' people are trained to ignore.