Source/Author (year):: Keith Johnstone (1981)

This is one of my favorite books of all time. Below are some excerpts

Big points

Education

• Education is often a destructive force
  • “People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities. (I saw a teacher relax his students on the floor, and then test for relaxation by lifting their feet eighteen inches into the air and dropping their heels on the concrete.)”
  • Emphasis on the importance of intelligence is especially pernicious; it can sap creativity
    • I tried to be clever in everything I did. The damage was greatest in areas where my interests and the school’s seemed to coincide : in writing, for example (I wrote and rewrote, and lost all my fluency). I forgot that inspiration isn’t intellectual, that you don’t have to be perfect. In the end I was reluctant to attempt anything for fear of failure, and my first thoughts never seemed good enough. Everything had to be corrected and brought into line.
• Students will often develop strategies to escape having to directly solve a problem
  • “John Holt’s How Children Fail (Penguin, 1969; Pitman, 1970) gives examples of children learning to get round problems, rather than learning to find solutions to problems. If you screw your face up and bite on your pencil to show you’re ‘trying’, the teacher may write out the answer for you. (In my school, if you sat relaxed and thought, you were likely to get swiped on the back of the head.) I explain to the students the devices they’re using to avoid tackling the problems—however easy the problems are—and the release of tension is often amazing”
• Kids look to interpretation of actions to mimic. If they get smacked lightly but with a serious look, they will howl and cry. If they get hit hard but in a light laughing way, they will treat it as no big deal.
• Schools are often anti-therapeutic environments. By imposing censorship, teacher violate the guidelines laid out by nurses in creating safe spaces:
  • “Teachers are obliged to impose a censorship on their pupils, and in consequence schools provide an anti-therapeutic environment. In Interacting with Patients (Macmillan, New York, 1963), a work intended for nurses, Joyce Samhammer Hays and Kenneth Larson describe therapeutic and non-therapeutic ways of interacting.
  • Here are their first ten ‘therapeutic techniques’.”
    • Using silence
    • Accepting: “yes”, nodding
    • Giving recognition: “Good morning”
    • Offering self: I’ll sit with you for a bit. I’m here for you
    • Giving broad openings
    • Offering general leads
    • Making observations
    • Encouraging description of perceptions
    • Encouraging comparison: did you have similar situations?
    • Placing time in sequence
  • Non-therapeutic techniques
    • Reassuring
    • Giving approval
    • Disapproving
    • Agreeing
    • Disagreeing
    • Advising
    • Probing: Now tell me about …
    • Challenging
    • Testing

Status

• “Every movement, every inflection of the voice implies a status… Acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together.”
• An authentic scene on stage has the status of people quickly swapping back and forth. People are often awkward when they don’t know what status to play with each other.
• Players with high status keep their heads still when talking.
• Incompetent teacher that can’t control kids but whom they may like: low status player. Competent teacher controls but scares kids: high status player. Loving teacher who maintains control of the classroom while still having admiration of kids: status expert (able to raise and lower status on command)
• Status exercises
  • Try both lowering, both raising, one raises as other lowers, reverse
  • Try adding ’er’ at the beginning of each sentence. Then try adding it in the middle of the sentence.
  • Try noticing people in bars or coffee shops change their body language when someone leaves or arrives in a group

“Drama is not primarily a literary art. Shakespeare is a great writer even in translation… A great play is a virtuoso display of status transactions.”

Space

Space changes depending on the surroundings. For instance, notice an empty beach begin to be filled with families that arrive.

“Here’s Stanislavsky describing a performance by Salvini, an actor who obviously used space in the way I mean: ‘Salvini approached the platform of the Doges, thought a little while, concentrated himself and, unnoticed by any of us, took the entire audience of the great theatre into his hands. It seemed that he did this with a single gesture—that he stretched his hand without looking into the public, grasped all of us in his palm, and held us there as if we were ants or flies. He closed his fist, and we felt the breath of death; he opened it, and we felt the warmth of bliss. We were in his power, and we will remain in it all our lives …”

“a master-servant scene is one in which both parties act as if all the space belonged to the master. An extreme example would be… Cavendish, who is reported to have fired any servant he caught sight of!”

Desmond Morris, in The Human ZOO (Cape, 1969; Corgi, 1971) gives ‘ten golden rules’ for people who are Number Ones. He says, ‘They apply to all leaders, from baboons to modern presidents and prime ministers.’ They are:

1. You must clearly display the trappings, postures and gestures of dominance.
2. In moments of active rivalry you must threaten your subordinates aggressively.
3. In moments of physical challenge you (or your delegates) must be able forcibly to overpower your subordinates.
4. If a challenge involves brain rather than brawn you must be able to outwit your subordinates.
5. You must suppress squabbles that break out between your subordinates.
6. You must reward your immediate subordinates by permitting them to enjoy the benefits of their high ranks.
7. You must protect the weaker members of the group from undue persecution.
8. You must make decisions concerning the social activities of your group.
9. You must reassure your extreme subordinates from time to time.
10. You must take the initiative in repelling threats or attacks arising from outside your group.

Spontaneity

It is often helpful to think of ideas as flowing through us; as though we were the medium, channeling creative energy. “We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God.”

Schiller said that uncreative people are just afraid of the rush of creative insanity.

Johnstone believes imagining should be as effortless as perceiving. The brain constructs amazingly intricate universes in perceiving… perhaps perception and imagination are really not separate.

“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.”

“Sanity has nothing to do with the way you think. It’s a matter of presenting yourself as safe.”

Blocking and Accepting

Blocking is when the frame presented from one actor to another is rejected. Accepting is when it is embraced.

“Fred Karno understood this. When he interviewed aspiring actors he’d poke his pen into an empty inkwell and pretend to flick ink at them. If they mimed being hit in the eye, or whatever, he’d engage them. If they looked baffled, and ‘blocked’ him, then he wouldn’t. There is a link with status transactions here, since low-status players tend to accept, and high-status players to block. High-status players will block any action unless they feel they can control it. The high-status player is obviously afraid of being humiliated in front of an audience, but to block your partner’s ideas is to be like the drowning man who drags down his rescuer. There’s no reason why you can’t play high status and yield to the other person’s invention.”

• Games
  • Presents: “I divide people into pairs and call them A and B. A gives a present to B who receives it. B then gives a present back, and so on. At first each person thinks of giving an interesting present, but then I stop them and suggest that they can just hold their hands out, and see what the other person chooses to take. If you hold out both hands about three feet apart, then obviously it will be a larger present, but you don’t have to determine what your gift is. The trick is to make the thing you are given as interesting as possible. You want to ‘overaccepe the offer. Everything you are given delights you. Maybe you wind it up and let it walk about the floor, or you sit it on your arm and let it fly off after a small bird, or maybe you put it on and turn into a gorilla.”
  • Yes, but. The responder has to always begin sentence with ‘yes, but’. Alternatively, try ‘yes, and’. The former is ‘accept and block’, the latter is ‘accept and offer’
  • Try to guess my story. (You don’t have one, but just a mechanical rule for saying yes and no)