Impro Quotes

“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 a lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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. 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. Its a matter of presenting yourself as safe.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“...the teacher picked a flower and said: ‘Look at the pretty flower, Betty.’

Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’

‘Ah,’ said the teacher, blocking her, ‘but this flower is especially beautiful.’

Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!’

In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“In a normal education everything
is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop it.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“The mime must first of all be aware of this boundless contact with things. There is no insulating layer of air between the man and the outside world. Any man who moves causes ripples in the ambient word in the same way a fish does when it moves in the water.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“Almost all were total failures-they couldn't have been put on in the village hall for the author's friends. It wasn't a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life. My play had been influenced by Beckett, but at least the content had been mine.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“My ‘failure’ was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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 then ‘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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organised manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“Thus he who looks away first is the more dominant. In my view, breaking eye contact can be high status so long as you don’t immediately glance back for a fraction of a second. If you ignore someone your status rises, if you feel impelled to look back then it falls. Thus dark glasses raise status because we can’t see the submission of the eyes.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“It was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. I'd learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I'd learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so I saw what OUGHT to be there, which of course is much inferior to what IS there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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! There are exceptions, but in most cases the very best Masks start off knowing the least.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“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.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“If you have to confront the master in order to adjust his tie you stand back as far as possible, and you may incline your head. Crossing in front of the master the servant may ‘shrink’ a little, and he’ll try to keep a distance. Working behind the master, brushing his coat, he can be as close as he likes, and visibly higher, but he mustn’t stay out of sight of the master unless his duties require it (or unless he is very low status). Other things being equal, the servant should be near a door so that he can be instantly dismissed without having to walk round the master. You can see servants edging surreptitiously into this position.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“The short ‘er’ is an invitation for people to interrupt you; the long ‘er’ says ‘Don’t interrupt me, even though I haven’t thought what to say yet.’ Some people find it impossible to speak with a still head, and more curiously, some students maintain that it’s still while they’re actually jerking it about.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“Low-status players save up little tit-bits involving their own discomfiture with which to amuse and placate other people. We want people to be very low-status, but we don’t want to feel sympathy for them—slaves are always supposed to sing at their work. 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. This is why tragedy has always been concerned with kings and princes, and why we have a special high-status style for playing tragedy. A sacrifice has to be endowed with high status or the magic doesn’t work.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“This ploy is supposed to make the onlookers have sympathy with them if they ‘fail’ and it’s expected to bring greater rewards if they ‘win’. Actually this down-in-the-mouth attitude almost guarantees failure, and makes everyone fed up with them. No one has sympathy with an adult who takes such as attitude, but when they are children it probably worked.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“I’ve seen many teachers who concentrate their eye contacts on only a few students, and this does affect the feeling in a group. Certain students are disciples, but others feel separated, or experience themselves as less interesting, or as ‘failures’.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre