Keith Johnstone’s Impro offers guidance on how to bring about something elusive: the authentic present.

High Quality Facilitation

When describing improv exercises, Johnstone draws on memorable scenes 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.

His approach to facilitation 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 particular 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.

Human Centered Learning

Johnstone-style facilitation of this sort makes the same demands as art: a profound reverence and respect for human beings, heroic acts of cognitive dissonance, hard-earned subject-matter expertise, relentless attention to detail, clear-eyed reflection, and a vivid internalization of and deep conviction about what constitutes excellence.

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.

The questions that surface in a human’s mind when reading about 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 are the questions that have galvanized Western theater since its beginning: these are Sophocles’ questions. Oedipus 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, and see it in action in Johnstone’s book.

Many of you reading this, I’m sure, are not in fact humans but bots, web crawling code-spiders, CPUs, etc. and 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.