The air is breathing you

“How do we enter trance states? I would prefer to ask ‘How do we stay out of them?’ In the middle of a dark night I wake up, how do I know I’m awake? I test for consciousness by moving a muscle. If I block this impulse to move I feel a tremendous anxiety. The control I exercise over the musculature reassures me that ‘I’m me’. By tensing muscles, by shifting position, by scratching, sighing, yawning, blinking, and so on, we maintain ‘normal consciousness’. Entranced subjects will sit quite motionless for hours. An audience ‘held’ by a theatrical performance suddenly find a need to move, to shift position, to cough, as the spell breaks.

If you lie down and make your body relax, going through it from feet to head, and loosening any points of tention that you find, then you easily float away into fantasy. The substance and shape of your body seem to change. You feel as if the air is breathing you, rather than you breathing the air, and the rhythm is slow and smooth like a great tide. It’s very easy to lose yourself, but if you feel the presence of a hostile person in the room you break this trance, seizing hold of the musculature, and becoming ‘yourself’ once more.”

(page 154)

From Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.

I read about this book in another book, then found it on the shelves of a house I was staying in in Seattle.

A public-relations department for the real mind

“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. If I am alone in a room and someone knocks on the door, then I ‘come back to myself’. I do this in order to check up that my social image is presentable: are my flies done up? Is my social face properly assembled? If someone enters, and I decide that I don’t have to guard myself, then I can get ‘lost in the conversation’. Normal consciousness is related to transactions, real or imagined, with other people. That’s how I experience it, and I note widespread reports of people in isolation, or totally rejected by other people, who experience ‘personality disintegration’.

When you’re worried about what other people might think, personality is always present. In life-or-death situations something else takes over. A friend scalded himself and his mind split immediately into two parts, one of which was a child screaming with pain, while the other was cold and detached and told him exactly what to do (he was alone at the time). If a cobra dropped out of the air vent into the middle of an acting class, the students might find themselves on the piano, or outside the door, with no memory of how they got there. In extremity the body takes over for us, pushing the personality aside as an unnecessary encumbrance.”

(pages 153-154)

From Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.

I read about this book in another book, then found it on the shelves of a house I was staying in in Seattle.

Trance states

“We don’t think of ourselves as moving in and out of trance because we’re trained not to. It’s impossible to be ‘in control’ all the time, but we convince ourselves that we are. Other people help to stop us drifting. They will laugh if we don’t seem immediately in possession of ourselves, and we’ll laugh too in acknowledgement of our inappropriate behaviour.

In ‘normal consciousness’ I am aware of myself as ‘thinking verbally’. In sports which leave no time for verbalisation, trance states are common. […]

Most people only recognise ‘trance’ when the subject looks confused – out of touch with the reality around him. We even think of hypnosis as ‘sleep’. In many trance states people are more in touch, more observant. […] In Mask work people report that perceptions are more intense, and that although they see differently, they see and sense more.“

(page 153)

From Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.

I read about this book in another book, then found it on the shelves of a house I was staying in in Seattle.

The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards

“The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them. Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn’t tell you why they applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure. Sometimes they even cheer! They admire the improvisor’s grasp, since he not only generates new material, but remembers and makes use of earlier events that the audience itself may have temporarily forgotten.”

(page 116)

From Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.

I read about this book in another book, then found it on the shelves of a house I was staying in in Seattle.

Your innermost self will be revealed

“My decision was that content should be ignored. This wasn’t a conclusion I wished to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking. I hadn’t realised that every play makes a political statement, and that the artist only needs to worry about content if he’s trying to fake up a personality he doesn’t actually have, or to express views he really isn’t in accord with. I tell improvisers to follow the rules and see what happens, and not to feel in any way responsible for the material that emerges. If you improvise spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your innermost self will be revealed. The same is true of any artist. If you want to write a ‘working-class play’ then you’d better be working class. If you want your play to be religious, then be religious. An artist has to accept what his imagination gives him, or screw up his talent.

[…]

Once you decide to ignore content it becomes possible to understand exactly what a narrative is, because you can concentrate on structure.”

(page 111)

From Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.

I read about this book in another book, then found it on the shelves of a house I was staying in in Seattle.

Imagining should be as effortless as perceiving

“Schiller wrote of a ‘watcher at the gates of the mind’, who examines ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind ‘the intellect has withdrawn its watcher from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.’ He said that uncreative people ‘are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators…regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps in collation with other ideas which seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.

[…]

I now feel that imagining should be as effortless as perceiving. In order to recognise someone my brain has to perform amazing feats of analysis: ‘Shape…dark…swelling…getting closer…human….nose type X15, eyes type E24B…characteristic way of walking…look under relative…’ and so on, in order to turn electromagnetic radiation into the image of my father, yet I don’t experience myself as ‘doing’ anything at all! My brain creates a whole universe without my having the least sense of effort. […] It’s only when I believe my perceptions to be in error that I have to ‘do’ anything. It’s the same with imagination. 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.”

(pages 79-80)

From Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.

I read about this book in another book, then found it on the shelves of a house I was staying in in Seattle.

Space flowed around the actors like a fluid

“When I was commissioned to write my first play I’d hardly been inside a theatre, so I watched rehearsals to get the feel of it. I was struck by the way space flowed around the actors like a fluid. As the actors moved I could feel imaginary iron filings marking out the force fields. This feeling of space was strongest when the stage was uncluttered, and during the coffee breaks, or when they were discussing some difficulty. When they weren’t acting, the bodies of the actors continually readjusted. As one changed position so all others altered their postures. Something seemed to flow between them. When they were ‘acting’ each actor would pretend to relate to the others, but his movements would stem from himself. They seemed ‘encapsulated’. In my view it’s only when the actor’s movements are related to the space he’s in, and to the other actors, that the audiences feels ‘at one’ with the play. The very best actors pump space out and suck it in, or at least that’s what it feels like. When the movements are not spontaneous but ‘intellectual’ the production may be admired, but you don’t see the whole audience responding in empathy with the movements of the actors.”

(pages 57)

From Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.

I read about this book in another book, then found it on the shelves of a house I was staying in in Seattle.

To attend to images without verbalising about them

“It’s not easy to observe hypnagogic images [the pictures that appear to many people at the threshold of sleep], because once you see one and think, ‘There!’ you wake up a little and the image disappears. You have to attend to the images without verbalising about them, so I learned to ‘hold the mind still’ like a hunter waiting in a forest.

When you ask people to think of an image, their eyes often move in a particular direction, often up and to the side. I was placing my mental images upwards and to the right – that’s the space in which I ‘thought’ of them. When I attended to them they moved into the ‘front’ of my mind. Obviously, at some time in my childhood my mental images had frightened me, and I’d displaced them, I’d trained myself not to look at them. When I had an image I knew what was there, so I didn’t need to look at it – that’s how I deluded myself that my creativity was under my own control.”

(pages 13-14)

From Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.

I read about this book in another book, then found it on the shelves of a house I was staying in in Seattle.