Yes! It's similar in singing, that skill I think of as 'reading the room', knowing which song will work; and then within the song itself, the more-automatic and less-automatic parts: the repeated or responded-to parts wherein you can sing and think at the same time, remembering what comes next, or sort of rearranging the song's structure on the fly sometimes. In the old way, song/stories were one and the same, and mostly they were made that way, in Ancient Greece, or in Ancient England. Bits that were known and bits that were improvised.
Loved reading this Dougald, and love that you've been reading Keith Johnstone - so much practical wisdom there! I did an improv course last year to help me get out of my own way at public events, I discovered that holding attention is more a craft than a natural talent. Thanks for putting this learning curve into words so well.
Thank you Dougald. I am trying to step on stage but find my background very much the opposite of yours.
As a young person I was off the chart hyperactive and spent much of my youth being too loud, too fast, too disruptive, too everything and constantly told to “sit down and be quiet”. Also my parents were hyper-introverted. As I’ve started writing poems or stepping up to a podium to speak at local events I tend to find myself encountering a barrier over and over again where I am overwhelmed by emotion, that somehow being the center of attention is wrong and I should just sit down.
Loved the part about witnessing those you admire and learning from how they do what they do, such great advice.
Also as with your story of Martin Shaw, in a memorial to Robert Bly, Michael Meade talked about how much he and Bly did that in the beginning of the Men’s Movement. That each day was an improvisation and they just learned how to channel the energy in the room together always risking failure but looking for opportunity in the mistakes.
That idea that you are on a journey with everyone in the room and you yourself have no idea where it will lead seems like such a valuable skill to learn and know is possible.
Really enjoyed reading this - those Keith Johnstone books were among my favourites at uni when I was doing my drama degree - and for a long time after and I still recommend them to new ministers that I am training (although I'm not sure anyone has taken up that suggestion)
Love the idea of comedians as shamans - when I first started giving talks I watched so much comedy - so much I learnt from their craft
Thanks for this, Dougald. I think the best writing is also like going on stage without a script. In fact, the more I wonder about this, the more it seems to apply to everything in life: our best selves are our free (of ego), interconnected, spiritually and emotionally aware selves?
I remember listening to you talk at Laurieston Hall all those years ago and being in awe of your relaxed manner, whilst I shook behind a lecturn! It's a wonderful gift you have.
Ah, thank you! When I think back, that event at Laurieston was a breakthrough for me, the first time I remember being able to speak in the way that I do now. Something I've learned in the years since is the importance of the vessel. The telling of Red Bead Woman that Martin gave at Base Camp went to another level because of the vessel that Charlotte and Dougie (and others) had made with that whole event, and I think the same is true of the vessel that you and Dougie made with that first Carrying the Fire: it made that talk of mine possible, and gave me a glimpse of how this side of my work could be.
This essay is perfect timing for me. I've been sitting with questions around the art and craft of being on stage - how generous it can be, how spontaneous, how precarious - and along comes your written reflections, naming so much of this so well. Thanks Dougald
I might push back a little. Firstly, the Ravenhill quote I think should never be taken as a general rule. So much great theatre would not exist if being "the most truthful person in the room" were the rule. It only applies to a particularly narrow modern, auto-fiction.
It is possible to become over-enamoured with oneself with this whole approach. It leaves no scope for being able to prepare better, and to do better; once you are signed up to this religion the only improvements can come from some intangible "connections" etc etc. This, I think, is the real issue with the Improv disease at the moment: Improv doesn't and should not work for everything. You don't get the Waste Land from Improv, for example. Go too far into Improv and craft is dead. Respect for Craft is over. You lose all Shakespeare.
And I think that it even weakens Improv itself. Because more broadly it should have a lot more heft to it: Jazz improvisation and the improvisation within Indian classical music all requires the type of thorough grounding in the basics that most "Improv theatre" people would absolutely not accept. You hear of legendary musicians who were not even allowed to play the Alap until they had been studying for 15 years or something.
And finally - the Rhapsodes. There is a link only in the flimsiest sense. Theirs was metred, structured poetry, and improvisational elements were held within a mastery of this form. Again, this mastery of base level form is not respected within modern Improv to the same degree. People want it to just be "yarning on and linking together different stories". Yeah, yeah. But there is more to the actual form and structure of the language, and we don't have that anymore.
Ha, well, thanks for the spirited response! Although I'm wondering if I've wandered into someone else's quarrel – or at least, if you are taking up arms against the "religion"(!) and "disease"(!!) of some version of Improv of which I'm barely aware?
It might be rewarding for someone to look at Johnstone's work through the lens of religion. It's clear from his books that he didn't set out to create a specialist performance skill, but that his techniques have their origin in the need (for himself and his pupils) to recover from the damage done to body, mind and soul by the mid-century English education system. His account of his early epiphanies merits comparison with the spiritual autobiographies of religious figures in other times and places. I'm tempted to suggest that Johnstone's Impro starts as a kind of independently derived western Tantra, and then lands within the container of the arts, because that's the one institutional setting in post-Enlightenment Europe with room for such practices.
From a distance, I got the impression that Johnstone was often irritated with his devotees, or at least with their tendency to get attached to particular techniques rather than stay in pursuit of what these were intended to achieve. What I value in his work is not the particular forms of TheatreSports, etc, but an approach which I've found rewarding in many settings. In a sense, the clearest parallel would be Brian Eno – most obviously in his Oblique Strategies, but more generally in the way he works with musicians and artists. I once quoted one of Johnstone's instructions to Brian and he said, "I thought that was one of mine."
About the Ravenhill quote: I guess that, if you apply a particularly prosaic understanding of "truth", then it would restrict you to modern auto-fiction, though I must admit it never occurred to me to read it this way. I've always put it together with the line attributed to Picasso, "Art is the lie that tells the truth", and the vein which Lewis Hyde is working in Trickster Makes This World. Also the sense the word has at the end of Alan Garner's Boneland, when the people who find the Watcher hear him tell his myth and one of them responds, "It is a True Story." Again, the language and experience of religion come into play.
At the point where you bring in Eliot and Shakespeare, I'm genuinely puzzled, as I don't know where you would get the idea that I would want to do away with either. Studying Shakespeare with A.D. Nuttall was another of the experiences that formed me, though beyond the scope of this piece. If there are Impro fundamentalists out there so devout that they are set on some Johnstonian Year Zero, I've yet to meet them – though perhaps you have?
Still, there's another sense in which I want to push back. Elsewhere in this thread, someone I know as a poet and novelist comments, "I think the best writing is also like going on stage without a script." As a writer, I know what she means. There's a moment in writing where something is coming through you, rather than from you, and this has everything in common with what Johnstone was getting at in his teaching. In the writing of the Waste Land, there were bursts of work that had that quality – I'm thinking of Matthew Hollis's account of its writing – and surely the same was true for Shakespeare.
There is no conflict here with craft. Your craft is what you put in service of these episodes of flow: it's what equips you to do justice to what wants to come through you. And yes, the written word allows for a further process of editing and rewriting that is a craft in itself. From my experience, both as writer and editor, I'd say much of the dance of that process is to hone a text without stifling the life in it, a life that is rooted in those periods of flow.
I'm fascinated that you could read this piece and conclude that I'm against or blind to the necessity of long training for the kind of practice that I'm writing about. I often tell the story which Garner once told me of his encounter with an Uzbek storyteller who had been picked out at the age of eight, alongside two other village boys, to go and live with the old storyteller; at eighteen, the other two were sent back to the ordinary path of village life, while this one carried on as the storyteller's apprentice, until, at around the age of forty, he was allowed to tell a story in front of an audience for the first time. We don't get picked out and trained like that, these days, but this piece was a record of a few of the many teachers and experiences from which I pieced together the training which allows me to do what I now do in my forties.
Finally, concerning Rhapsodes – yes, of course, we have no equivalent to the metred forms employed by a Homeric bard, or by the guslars Lord and Parry were recording in Yugoslavia in the '30s. The closest you'll get in modern English is a hiphop battle, which can be quite a thing to witness. But you'll note that I did not make a direct connection between TheatreSports (or whatever it is you have in mind when you write about "modern Improv") and rhapsodic performance. I doubt you've seen Martin Shaw take the floor, one man and his drum, and give an unscripted six-hour telling of Parzival over two nights, but if you had, you might not be so dismissive of the lack of mastery in contemporary performance.
Yes! It's similar in singing, that skill I think of as 'reading the room', knowing which song will work; and then within the song itself, the more-automatic and less-automatic parts: the repeated or responded-to parts wherein you can sing and think at the same time, remembering what comes next, or sort of rearranging the song's structure on the fly sometimes. In the old way, song/stories were one and the same, and mostly they were made that way, in Ancient Greece, or in Ancient England. Bits that were known and bits that were improvised.
Loved reading this Dougald, and love that you've been reading Keith Johnstone - so much practical wisdom there! I did an improv course last year to help me get out of my own way at public events, I discovered that holding attention is more a craft than a natural talent. Thanks for putting this learning curve into words so well.
I’ve still got the book
Well, there we go, I should never have doubted my mother! ;-)
Thank you Dougald. I am trying to step on stage but find my background very much the opposite of yours.
As a young person I was off the chart hyperactive and spent much of my youth being too loud, too fast, too disruptive, too everything and constantly told to “sit down and be quiet”. Also my parents were hyper-introverted. As I’ve started writing poems or stepping up to a podium to speak at local events I tend to find myself encountering a barrier over and over again where I am overwhelmed by emotion, that somehow being the center of attention is wrong and I should just sit down.
Loved the part about witnessing those you admire and learning from how they do what they do, such great advice.
Also as with your story of Martin Shaw, in a memorial to Robert Bly, Michael Meade talked about how much he and Bly did that in the beginning of the Men’s Movement. That each day was an improvisation and they just learned how to channel the energy in the room together always risking failure but looking for opportunity in the mistakes.
That idea that you are on a journey with everyone in the room and you yourself have no idea where it will lead seems like such a valuable skill to learn and know is possible.
Really enjoyed reading this - those Keith Johnstone books were among my favourites at uni when I was doing my drama degree - and for a long time after and I still recommend them to new ministers that I am training (although I'm not sure anyone has taken up that suggestion)
Love the idea of comedians as shamans - when I first started giving talks I watched so much comedy - so much I learnt from their craft
Thanks for this, Dougald. I think the best writing is also like going on stage without a script. In fact, the more I wonder about this, the more it seems to apply to everything in life: our best selves are our free (of ego), interconnected, spiritually and emotionally aware selves?
I remember listening to you talk at Laurieston Hall all those years ago and being in awe of your relaxed manner, whilst I shook behind a lecturn! It's a wonderful gift you have.
Ah, thank you! When I think back, that event at Laurieston was a breakthrough for me, the first time I remember being able to speak in the way that I do now. Something I've learned in the years since is the importance of the vessel. The telling of Red Bead Woman that Martin gave at Base Camp went to another level because of the vessel that Charlotte and Dougie (and others) had made with that whole event, and I think the same is true of the vessel that you and Dougie made with that first Carrying the Fire: it made that talk of mine possible, and gave me a glimpse of how this side of my work could be.
This essay is perfect timing for me. I've been sitting with questions around the art and craft of being on stage - how generous it can be, how spontaneous, how precarious - and along comes your written reflections, naming so much of this so well. Thanks Dougald
I might push back a little. Firstly, the Ravenhill quote I think should never be taken as a general rule. So much great theatre would not exist if being "the most truthful person in the room" were the rule. It only applies to a particularly narrow modern, auto-fiction.
It is possible to become over-enamoured with oneself with this whole approach. It leaves no scope for being able to prepare better, and to do better; once you are signed up to this religion the only improvements can come from some intangible "connections" etc etc. This, I think, is the real issue with the Improv disease at the moment: Improv doesn't and should not work for everything. You don't get the Waste Land from Improv, for example. Go too far into Improv and craft is dead. Respect for Craft is over. You lose all Shakespeare.
And I think that it even weakens Improv itself. Because more broadly it should have a lot more heft to it: Jazz improvisation and the improvisation within Indian classical music all requires the type of thorough grounding in the basics that most "Improv theatre" people would absolutely not accept. You hear of legendary musicians who were not even allowed to play the Alap until they had been studying for 15 years or something.
And finally - the Rhapsodes. There is a link only in the flimsiest sense. Theirs was metred, structured poetry, and improvisational elements were held within a mastery of this form. Again, this mastery of base level form is not respected within modern Improv to the same degree. People want it to just be "yarning on and linking together different stories". Yeah, yeah. But there is more to the actual form and structure of the language, and we don't have that anymore.
Ha, well, thanks for the spirited response! Although I'm wondering if I've wandered into someone else's quarrel – or at least, if you are taking up arms against the "religion"(!) and "disease"(!!) of some version of Improv of which I'm barely aware?
It might be rewarding for someone to look at Johnstone's work through the lens of religion. It's clear from his books that he didn't set out to create a specialist performance skill, but that his techniques have their origin in the need (for himself and his pupils) to recover from the damage done to body, mind and soul by the mid-century English education system. His account of his early epiphanies merits comparison with the spiritual autobiographies of religious figures in other times and places. I'm tempted to suggest that Johnstone's Impro starts as a kind of independently derived western Tantra, and then lands within the container of the arts, because that's the one institutional setting in post-Enlightenment Europe with room for such practices.
From a distance, I got the impression that Johnstone was often irritated with his devotees, or at least with their tendency to get attached to particular techniques rather than stay in pursuit of what these were intended to achieve. What I value in his work is not the particular forms of TheatreSports, etc, but an approach which I've found rewarding in many settings. In a sense, the clearest parallel would be Brian Eno – most obviously in his Oblique Strategies, but more generally in the way he works with musicians and artists. I once quoted one of Johnstone's instructions to Brian and he said, "I thought that was one of mine."
About the Ravenhill quote: I guess that, if you apply a particularly prosaic understanding of "truth", then it would restrict you to modern auto-fiction, though I must admit it never occurred to me to read it this way. I've always put it together with the line attributed to Picasso, "Art is the lie that tells the truth", and the vein which Lewis Hyde is working in Trickster Makes This World. Also the sense the word has at the end of Alan Garner's Boneland, when the people who find the Watcher hear him tell his myth and one of them responds, "It is a True Story." Again, the language and experience of religion come into play.
At the point where you bring in Eliot and Shakespeare, I'm genuinely puzzled, as I don't know where you would get the idea that I would want to do away with either. Studying Shakespeare with A.D. Nuttall was another of the experiences that formed me, though beyond the scope of this piece. If there are Impro fundamentalists out there so devout that they are set on some Johnstonian Year Zero, I've yet to meet them – though perhaps you have?
Still, there's another sense in which I want to push back. Elsewhere in this thread, someone I know as a poet and novelist comments, "I think the best writing is also like going on stage without a script." As a writer, I know what she means. There's a moment in writing where something is coming through you, rather than from you, and this has everything in common with what Johnstone was getting at in his teaching. In the writing of the Waste Land, there were bursts of work that had that quality – I'm thinking of Matthew Hollis's account of its writing – and surely the same was true for Shakespeare.
There is no conflict here with craft. Your craft is what you put in service of these episodes of flow: it's what equips you to do justice to what wants to come through you. And yes, the written word allows for a further process of editing and rewriting that is a craft in itself. From my experience, both as writer and editor, I'd say much of the dance of that process is to hone a text without stifling the life in it, a life that is rooted in those periods of flow.
I'm fascinated that you could read this piece and conclude that I'm against or blind to the necessity of long training for the kind of practice that I'm writing about. I often tell the story which Garner once told me of his encounter with an Uzbek storyteller who had been picked out at the age of eight, alongside two other village boys, to go and live with the old storyteller; at eighteen, the other two were sent back to the ordinary path of village life, while this one carried on as the storyteller's apprentice, until, at around the age of forty, he was allowed to tell a story in front of an audience for the first time. We don't get picked out and trained like that, these days, but this piece was a record of a few of the many teachers and experiences from which I pieced together the training which allows me to do what I now do in my forties.
Finally, concerning Rhapsodes – yes, of course, we have no equivalent to the metred forms employed by a Homeric bard, or by the guslars Lord and Parry were recording in Yugoslavia in the '30s. The closest you'll get in modern English is a hiphop battle, which can be quite a thing to witness. But you'll note that I did not make a direct connection between TheatreSports (or whatever it is you have in mind when you write about "modern Improv") and rhapsodic performance. I doubt you've seen Martin Shaw take the floor, one man and his drum, and give an unscripted six-hour telling of Parzival over two nights, but if you had, you might not be so dismissive of the lack of mastery in contemporary performance.