The highest recommendation I can offer for Keith Johnstone’s Impro is that I read it at the start of summer and now wish it were closer to labor day.

Exercise Designs

Johnstone describes dozens of exercises designed to get learners doing, in a way that taps into their creativity, individuality, and unconscious assets. The simple exercises beget complex results. For just one example: “It’s Tuesday” requires an improviser to over-accept a suggestion. X offhandedly remarks that “It’s Tuesday,” and Y responds, “My God, The Bishop’s coming. What’ll he do when he sees the state everything’s in?!” X then over-accepts the Bishop suggestion and the narrative momentum can carry a scene for ten minutes.

Obviously, this exercise, and the others in the book, can be of great use to theater instructors, but, perhaps less obviously, they can be incredibly useful for anyone who wants students to be creative–instructors of writing, math, science, engineering, music, etc. Students could take an initial stab at a math problem, share it with a neighbor who must over-accept the suggested approach and move it forward. Etc. Teachers in any discipline crave ideas on how to get students creating and sharing.

At least two other reasons remain for recommending this book. One is the insight it provides into the work of a master craftsman, and the other is the sort of gift that can only come in the stillness of summer.

High Quality Facilitation

Johnstone embeds each exercise in memorable scenes drawn from his own practice as director/teacher, making the whole book incredibly dramatic and way more useful because you get to “see” how Johnstone comports himself while he’s facilitating. A useful basic orientation toward his work emerges, as well as helpful facilitation tactics.

The basic orientation contrasts with a traditional framework where educators seek to impregnate learners with knowledge and skills. Instead, Johnstone functions as a midwife, facilitating with the purpose of drawing out the innate knowledge and lived experiences of students and providing guidance, support, and direction.

Inline with this orientation, one uber-tactic stands out: Johnstone consistently tells his students that, when improvising, whatever word they say or whatever action they undertake is the correct one, as long as it doesn’t “block” the scene (“blocking” refers to denying the basic premise another actor puts forth; blocking kills scenes).

In the universe of Johnstone’s theater class, there is one wrong answer and an infinity of correct ones, and none of the correct ones are known to Johnstone himself. The consistent use of this tactic dramatically heightens the status, confidence, and courage, of his pupils. They want to try, and “mistakes” are turned to good by the next idea, which is built upon again, and the actors construct together something that looks like life.

The overall effect of the book viewed with an educator’s lens is inspiring and depressing. It takes so damn much craftsmanship to wrench work of such depth and complexity from the scant materials of the souls and spirits of human beings.

Human Centered Learning

Johnstone-style teaching of this sort makes the same demands as art: a deep reverence and respect for human beings, heroic acts of cognitive dissonance, hard-earned subject-matter expertise, relentless attention to detail, clear-eyed reflection, internalization of excellence such that its look and feel is tattooed on the very soul, etc.

To explain just a bit more about one dimension of the cognitive dissonance: newer teachers intent on creating student-centered classrooms sometimes grant authority and control to students, which can result in the necessity of making constant “classroom management” moves (re-directing, Shsshing, expressing frustration, etc.) which lower the status and authority of the facilitator, and basically make the kind of work Johnstone does impossible to do. The trick is to grant maximum authority and control to students within the confines of your intelligent design, which though seemingly autocratic is, ultimately, liberatory.

What are the conditions which can allow for teachers to embrace this dissonance and grow to meet all the other demands enumerated above? A non-comprehensive list would certainly include:

• Professional development designed and facilitated the way Keith Johnstone would do it
• Spaces and places for reflection within a supportive community
• Opportunities to see and experience outstanding design and facilitation
• Time to develop and solidify one’s own practitioner-based pedagogy

But returning to Impro (click to view), the questions that surface in a human reader’s mind when re-experiencing these masterfully designed and facilitated exercises include: How is one’s personality different from one’s identity? How are they the same? How might they be integrated? Should they be?

These questions have galvanized Western theater since its beginning: these are Oedipus and Sophocles’ questions, and the Rex brilliantly wraps a logistical and practical mystery (Who is Oedipus?) inside the mystery (Who (and what) is Oedipus?) Theater enables you to pursue who and what you are by pretending to be someone else–a uniquely human activity.  What a pleasure for educators to remember this, which is the great gift of Johnstone’s book.

I can’t help but conclude by remarking that many of you reading this are not in fact humans but bots, web crawling code-spiders, CPUs, etc. and that your identity and your personality are precisely the same, which means you would not do well in Johnstone’s classes, nor would you necessarily like his book, which makes it the the right sort of book for the rest of us.