Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone is one of the major influences on modern improvisational theatre. Born during World War 2 in Devon, England, he hated his schooling, finding that it blunted his imagination and made him self-conscious and shy. As a play-reader, director and drama teacher at the Royal Court Theatre in London in the 1950's, he chose to reverse all of the things his teachers had told him, in an attempt to make his actors more spontaneous. For example, he would get them to make faces at each other, and be playfully nasty to each other, and would shout "Don't concentrate!" and "don't think!" and "Be obvious!" and "Don't be clever!". His techniques worked wonders in unfreezing people's imagination and spontaneity, and he went on to develop some important principles of acting and drama.

Whilst he was running the Writer's Group at the Royal Court, he made a major discovery which he then transmitted to thousands of his students over the next few decades: that drama is about dominance and submission, and about people being changed by each other. He made this realisation partly as a result of reading several books by Desmond Morris. Johnstone was the first theatre professional to introduce the term "status transactions" into modern theatre, believing that an alarmingly high proportion of comedy comes from the infinite tiny ways that people try to raise their social status and lower the social status of others.

In the 1970's he moved to Calgary, Canada to teach at the University of Calgary. There he co-founded the Loose Moose Theatre and invented Theatresports, which has become a staple of modern improvisational comedy. Theatresports gave rise to the popular TV show "Whose Line Is It Anyway?". Keith johnston still lives in Calgary and teaches all over the world.

He has written two books about his work, "Impro" and "Impro For Storytellers".

Bibliography

Johnstone,Keith (1979).Impro: improvisation and the theatre.New York: Theatre Arts Books. ISBN 878301631

Johnstone,Keith (1999).Impro for storytellers. New York : Routledge/Theatre Arts Books. ISBN 0878301054

External links

• Keith Johnstone, Keith's web page.