Fourteen Pearls of Wisdom for Improvisational Actors

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We were in a beautiful garden where the teenager had just seen God and the teacher picked a flower and said: Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming 'Can't you see? She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expected to distort the per- ceptions of the child in this way.

Since then I've noticed such be- haviour constantly, but it took the mad girl to open my eyes to it. 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. Growing Up As I grew up I began to feel uncomfortable.

I had to use conscious effort to 'stand up straight'. I thought that adults were superior to children, and that the problems that worried me would gradually correct themselves. It was very upsetting to realise that if I was going to change for the better then I'd have to do it myself. I found I had some severe speech defects, worse than other people's I was eventually treated at a speech hospital. I began to understand that there really was something wrong with my body, I began to see myself as crippled in the use of myself just as a great violinist would play better on a cheap violin than I would on a Strad.

My breathing was inhibited, my voice and posture were wrecked, something was seriously wrong with my imagination— it was becoming difficult actu- ally to get ideas. How could this have happened when the state had spent so much money educating me? Other people seemed to have no insight into my problems.

All my teachers cared about was whether I was a winner. I wanted to stand like Gary Cooper, and to be confident, and to know how to send the soup back when it was cold without making the waiter feel obliged to spit in it. Could teaching have had a negative effect?

Emotion One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I'd had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I'd have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.

In some universities students unconsciously learn to copy the physical attitudes of their professors, leaning back away from the play or film they're watching, and crossing their arms tighdy, and tilting their heads back. Such postures help them to feel less 'involved', less 'subjective'. The response of untutored people is infinitely superior. Intelligence I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me.

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: 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. The spell broke when I was in my early twenties. I saw a perform- ance of Dovzhenko's Earth, a film which is a closed book for many people, but which threw me into a state of exaltation and confusion.

There is a sequence in which the hero, Vassily, walks alone in the twilight. We know he's in danger, and we have just seen him com- forting his wife, who rolled her eyes like a frightened animal. There are shots of mist moving eerily on water, and silent horses stretching their necks, and corn-stooks against the dusky sky. Then, amazingly, peasants lying side by side, the men with their hands inside the women's blouses and motionless, with idiotic smiles on their faces as they stare at the twilight.

Vassily, dressed in black, walks through the Chagall village, and the dust curls up in little clouds around his feet and he is dark against the moonlit road, and he is filled with the same ecstasy as the peasants. He walks and walks and the film cuts and cuts until he walks out of frame. Then the camera moves back, and we see stop.

Then Vassily walks again, but after a short time he begins to dance, and the dance is skilled, and like an act of thanksgiving. The dust swirls around his feet, so that he's like an Indian god, like Siva— and with the man dancing alone in the clouds of dust something unlocked in me. In one moment I knew that the valuing of men by their intelligence is crazy, that the peasants watching the night sky might feel more than I feel, that the man who dances might be superior to myself— word-bound and unable to dance.

From then on I noticed how warped many people of great intelligence are, and I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts. Anthony Stirling I felt crippled, and 'unfit' for life, so I decided to become a teacher. I wanted more time to sort myself out, and I was convinced that the training college would teach me to speak clearly, and to stand naturally, and to be confident, and how to improve my teaching skills. Common sense assured me of this, but I was quite wrong. It was only by luck that I had a brilliant art teacher called Anthony Stirling, and then all my work stemmed from his example.

It wasn't so much what he taught, as what he did. For the first time in my life I was in the hands of a great teacher. I'll describe the first lesson he gave us, which was unforgettable and completely disorientating. He treated us like a class of eight-year-olds, which I didn't like, but which I thought I understood— 'He's letting us know what it feels like to be on the receiving end,' I thought.

He made us mix up a thick 'jammy' black paint and asked us to imagine a clown on a one wheeled bicycle who pedals through the paint, and on to our sheets of paper.

This exercise annoyed me because how could I demonstrate my skill? I could paint the clown, but who cared about the tyre-marks? Stirling was scathing about my inability to mix up a black, which irritated me. When my paper was coloured I found that the blue had disappeared, so I repainted the outlines black.

I could see that everyone's paper was getting into a soggy mess, and that mine was no worse than anybody else's— but no better. The man seemed to be an idiot. Was he teasing us? There were about ten of us, all strangers to each other, and in the hands of this madman. I remember him asking us to think of our shapes as fields seen from the air if that helped, which it didn't. Somehow we finished the exercises, and wandered around looking at our daubs rather glumly, but Stirling seemed quite unperturbed. He went to a cupboard and took out armfuls of paintings and spread them around the floor, and it was the same exercise done by other students.

The colours were so beautiful, and the patterns were so inventive — clearly they had been done by some advanced class. Then I noticed that these little masterpieces were signed in very scrawly writing. It was just an exercise to encourage them to use the whole area of the paper, but they'd done it with such love and taste and care and sensitivity. Something happened to me in that moment from which I have never recovered.

It was the final confirmation that my education had been a destructive process. The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: Let him climb one. Let him touch it. The teacher's skill lay in presenting ex- periences in such a way that the student was bound to succeed. Stirling recommended that we read the Too te Ching.

It seems to me now that he was practically using it as his teaching manual.

Here are some extracts: The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words When his task is accomplished and his work done the people all say, "It happened to us naturally" I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves; I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves; I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves. I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block One who excels in employ- ing others humbles himself before them.

This is known as the virtue of non-contention; this is known as making use of the efforts of others To know yet to think that one does not know is best The sage does not hoard. Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer still. The way of heaven benefits and does not harm; the way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend. Being a Teacher I chose to teach in Battersea, a working-class area that most new teachers avoided— but I'd been a postman there, and I loved the place.

My new colleagues bewildered me. I'd believed that teachers were respected figures, but in Battersea they were likely to be feared or hated. I liked my colleagues, but they had a colonist's attitude to the children; they referred to them as 'poor stock', and they disliked exactly those children I found most inventive. If a child is creative he's likely to be more difficult to control, but that isn't a reason for disliking him. I came to see that their unhappiness, and lack of accept- ance in the community, came from a feeling that they were irrelevant, or rather that the school was something middle class being forcibly imposed on to the working-class culture.

Everyone seemed to accept that if you could educate one of these children you'd remove him away from his parents which is what my education had done for me. Educated people were snobs, and many parents didn't want their children alienated from them. Like most new teachers, I was given the class no one else wanted. Mine was a mix of twenty-six 'average' eight-year-olds, and twenty 'backward' ten-year-olds whom the school had written off as ineduc- able.

Some of the ten-year-olds couldn't write their names after five years of schooling. I'm sure Professor Skinner could teach even pigeons to type out their names in a couple of weeks, so I couldn't believe that these children were really dull: One astounding thing was the way cowed and dead-looking children would suddenly brighten up and look intelligent when they weren't being asked to learn. When they were cleaning out the fish tank, they looked fine.

When writing a sentence, they looked numb and defeated. Almost all teachers, even if they weren't very bright, got along reasonably well as schoolchildren, so presumably it's difficult for them to identify with the children who fail. My case was peculiar in that I'd apparently been exceptionally intelligent up to the age of eleven, winning all the prizes which embarrassed me, since I thought they should be given to the dull children as compensation and being teacher's pet, and so on.

Then, spectacularly, I'd suddenly come bottom of the class— 'down among the dregs', as my headmaster described it. He never forgave me. I was puzzled too, but gradually I realised that I wouldn't work for people I didn't like. Over the years my work gradually improved, but I never fulfilled my promise. When I liked a particular teacher and won a prize, the head would say: I was friends with boys who were failures, and nothing would induce me to write them off as 'useless' or 'ineducable'.

My 'failure' was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now. If you shove an inexperienced teacher into the toughest class, he either sinks or swims. However idealistic he is, he tends to clutch at traditional ways of enforcing discipline. My problem was to resist the pressures that would turn me into a conventional teacher.

I had to establish a quite different relationship before I could hope to release the creativity that was so apparent in the children when they weren't thinking of themselves as 'being educated'. I didn't see why Stirling's ideas shouldn't apply to all areas, and in particular to writing: I tried getting them to send secret notes to each other, and write rude comments about me, and so on, but the results were nil. One day I took my typewriter and my art books into the class, and said I'd type out anything they wanted to write about the pictures.

As an afterthought, I said I'd also type out their dreams— and suddenly they were actually wanting to write. I typed out everything exactly as they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me. Typing out spelling mistakes was a weird idea in the early fifties and probably now — but it worked.

The pressure to get things right was coming from the children, not the teacher. I was amazed at the in- tensity of feeling and outrage the children expressed, and their determination to be correct, because no one would have dreamt that they cared. Even the illiterates were getting their friends to spell out every word for them. I scrapped the time-table, and for a month they wrote for hours every day.

I had to force them out of the classroom to take breaks. When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I'm amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school- hence the misbehaviour. I was even more astounded by the quality of the things the children wrote. I'd never seen any examples of children's writing during my training; I thought it was a hoax one of my colleagues must have smuggled a book of modern verse in!

By far the best work came from the 'ineducable' ten-year-olds. At the end of my first year the Div- isional Officer refused to end my probation. He'd found my class doing arithmetic with masks over their faces— they'd made them in art class and I didn't see why they shouldn't wear them. I'd stuck all the art paper to- gether and pinned it along the back wall, and when a child got bored he'd leave what he was doing and stick some more leaves on the burn- ing forest.

My headmaster had discouraged my ambition to become a teacher: Fortunately the school was inspected, and Her Majesty's Inspector thought that my class were doing the most interesting work. I remember one incident that struck him as amazing: Then the children started scribbling furiously away, writing stories about chickens, and shouting out any words they wanted spelt on the blackboard. I shouldn't think half of them had ever seen a chicken, but it delighted the Inspector.

Stirling's 'non-interference' worked in every area where I applied it: I worked with Marc Wilkinson, the composer he became director of music at the National Theatre , and his tape recorder played the same sort of role that my typewriter had. He soon had a collection of tapes as surprising as the children's poems had been. I assembled a group of children by asking each teacher for the children he couldn't stand ; and although everyone was amazed at such a selection method, the group proved to be very talented, and they learned with amazing speed. After twenty minutes a boy hammered out a discordant march and the rest shouted, 'It's the Japanese soldiers from the film on Saturday!

We invented many games — like one child making sounds for water and another putting the 'fish' in it. Sometimes we got them to feel ob- jects with their eyes shut, and got them to play what it felt like so that the others could guess. Other teachers were amazed by the enthus- iasm and talent shown by these 'dull' children.

I'd had very bad experiences in the theatre, but there was one play I'd liked: I was trying to be a painter at the time, and my artist friends all agreed that Beckett must be a very young man, one of our contemporaries, since he understood our feel- ings so well. Because I didn't like the theatre— it seemed so much feebler than, say, the films of Kurosawa, or Keaton— I didn't at first accept the Royal Court's commission; but then I ran out of money, so I wrote a play strongly influenced by Beckett who once wrote to me, saying that 'a stage is an area of maximum verbal presence, and maxi- mum corporeal presence'— the word 'corporeal' really delighting me.

My play was called Brixkam Regatta, and I remember Devine thumb- ing through the notices and saying that it was sex that had been in- tolerable to the Victorians, and that 'whatever it is now, Keith is writing about it'. I was amazed that most critics were so hostile. I'd been illustrating a theme of Blake's: The time will come when a man's worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. Ten years later, when I directed the play at the Mermaid, it didn't seem at all shocking: I've been often told how weird and silent I seemed to many people, but Devine was amused by my ideas many of which came from Stir- ling.

I'd argue that a director should never demonstrate anything to an actor, that a director should allow the actor to make his own discoveries, that the actor should think he'd done all the work himself.

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I objected to the idea that the director should work out the moves before the production started. I said that if an actor forgot a move that had been decided on, then the move was probably wrong. Later I argued that moves weren't important, that with only a couple of actors on a stage, why did it matter where they moved anyway?

I explained that Hamlet in Russian can be just as impressive, so were the words really of first importance? I said that the set was no more important than the apparatus in the circus. I wasn't saying much that was new, but I didn't know that, and certainly such thoughts weren't fashionable at the rime. I remember Devine going round the theatre chuckling that 'Keith thinks King Lear should have a happy ending!

V They were surprised that someone so inexperienced as myself should have become their best play-reader. Tony Richardson, then Devine's Associate Director, once thanked me because I was taking such a load off them. I was successful precisely because I didn't exercise my taste.

I would first read plays as quickly as possible, and categorise them as pseudo-Pinter, fake-Osborne, phoney-Beckett, and so on. As ninety- nine per cent of the plays submitted were just cribs from other people, the job was easy. I had expected that there'd be a very gentle gradation from awful to excellent, and that I'd be involved in a lot of heart- searching.

Almost all were total failures — they couldn't have been put on in the village hall for the author's friends. It wasn't a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life. My play had been influenced by Beckett, but at least the content had been mine.

Sometimes I'd read a play I liked, but that no one else would think worth directing. Devine said that if I was really convinced they were good I should direct them myself on a Sunday night. I directed Edward Bond's first play in this way, but the very first play I directed was Kon Fraser's Eleven Plus which I still have a fondness for, although it hasn't prospered much. I was given advice by Ann Jellicoe— already an accomplished director— and I was successful. It really seemed that even if I couldn't write any more — and writing had become extremely laborious and unpleasant for me — at least I could earn a living as a director.

Obviously, I felt I ought to study my craft, but the more I understood how things ought to be done, the more boring my productions were. Then as now, when I'm inspired, every- thing is fine, but when I try to get things right it's a disaster. In a way I was successful — I ended up as an Associate Director of the theatre — but once again my talent had left me. When I considered the difference between myself, and other people, I thought of myself as a late developer.

Most people lose their talent at puberty. I lost mine in my early twenties. I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children. But when I said this to educationalists, they became angry. Writers' Group George Devine had announced that the Royal Court was to be a 'writers' theatre', but the writers weren't having much say m the policies of the theatre. George thought a discussion group would correct this, and he chaired three meetings, which were so tedious that he handed the job over to William Gaskill, one of his young directors.

Bill had directed my play Brixham Regatta, and he asked me how I would run the group. Bill agreed, and the group immediately began to function as an improvisation group. We learned that things invented on the spur of the moment could be as good or better than the texts we laboured over. We developed very practical attitudes to the theatre. As Edward Bond said, 'The writers' group taught me that drama was about relationships, not about characters. Carl Weber, writing about Brecht, says: My bias against discussion is something I've learned to see as very English.

I've known political theatre groups in Europe which would readily cancel a rehearsal, but never a discussion. My feeling is that the best argument may be a testimony to the skill of the presenter, rather than to the excellence of the solution advocated. Also the bulk of discussion time is visibly taken up with transactions of status which have nothing to do with the problem to be solved.

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My attitude is like Edison's, who found a solvent for rubber by putting bits of rubber in every solution he could think of, and beat all those scientists who were approaching the problem theoretically. Copeau had been an advocate of studio work, and George also wanted a studio. He started it with hardly any budget, and as I was on the staff, and full of theories, he asked me if I would teach there.

Actually William Gaskill was the director, and they agreed that I should teach there. I'd been advocating setting a studio up so I could hardly refuse; but I was embarrassed, and worried. I didn't know anything about training actors, and I was sure that the professionals— many from the Royal Shakespeare, and some who shortly afterwards went into the National Theatre Company— would know far more than I did. I decided to give classes in 'Narrative Skills' see page , hoping I'd be one jump ahead in this area.

Because of my dislike of discussion I insisted that everything should be acted out— as at the Writers' Group— and the work became very funny. It was also very different, because I was consciously reacting against Stanislavsky.

I thought his insistence on the 'given circumstances' was seriously limiting, and I didn't like the 'who, what, where' approach which my actors urged on me, and which I suppose was American in origin it's described, in Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theatre, Northwestern University Press, ; fortunately I didn't know about this book until , when a member of an audience lent it to me.

Lacking solutions, I had to find my own. What I did was to concentrate on relationships between strangers, and on ways of combining the imagination of two people which would be additive, rather than subtractive. I developed status transactions, and word-at-a-rime games, and almost all of the work described in this book. I hope this still seems fresh to some people, but actually it dates back to the early sixties and late fifties. My classes were hysterically funny, but I remembered Stirling's contempt for artists who form 'self-admiration groups' and wondered if we were deluding ourselves.

Could the work really be so funny? Wasn't it just that we all knew each other? Even considering the fact that I had some very talented and experienced actors, weren't we just entertaining each other? Was it right that every class should be like a party? I decided we'd have to perform in front of real audiences, and see if we were funny. I took about sixteen actors along to my contemporary theatre class at Morley College, and said we'd like to demonstrate some of the exercises we were developing.

I'd thought that I'd be the nervous one, but the actors huddled in the corner and looked terrified. Once I started giving the exercises, they relaxed; and to our amaze- ment we found that when the work was good, the audience laughed far more than we would have done! It wasn't so easy to do work of a high standard in public, but we were delighted at the enthusiasm of the spectators. I wrote to six London colleges and offered them free demonstration classes, and afterwards we received many invitations to perform elsewhere. I cut the number of performers down to four or five and, with strong support from the Ministry of Education, we started touring around schools and colleges.

There, we often found ourselves on a stage, and we automatically drifted into giving shows rather than demonstrations. Soon we were a very influential group, and the only pure improvisation group I knew, in that we prepared nothing, and everything was like a jazzed-up drama class. All day you can feel some part of your mind gathering power, and with luck there'll be no interruption to the flow, actors and audience will completely understand each other, and the high feeling lasts for days. At other times you feel a coldness in everyone's eyes, and deserts of time seem to lie ahead of you.

The actors don't seem to be able to see or hear properly any more— they feel so wretched that scene after scene is about vomiting. Even if the audience are pleased by the novelty, you feel you're swindling them. After a while a pattern is established in which each performance gets better and better until the audience is like a great beast rolling over to let you tickle it.

Then hubris gets you, you lose your humility, you expect to be loved, and you turn into Sisyphus. All comedians know these feelings. As I came to understand the techniques that release creativity in the improviser, so I began to apply them to my own work. What really got me started again was an advert for a play of mine in the paper, a play called The Martian. I had never written such a play, so I phoned up Bryan King, who directed the theatre. Since then I've deliberately put myself in this position.

I get myself engaged by a company and write the plays as I'm rehearsing the actors. For example, in eight weeks I did two street theatre plays lasting twenty minutes, plus a three-hour improvised play called Der Fisch, plus a children's play lasting an hour— this was for Salvatore Poddine's Tubingen theatre. I don't see that the plays created in this way are inferior to those I struggle over, sometimes for years.

I directed the Wakefield Mystery Cycle there, and I was so far away from any- one whose criticism I cared about that I felt free to do exactly what I felt like. Suddenly I was spontaneous again; and since then, I've always directed plays as if I was totally ignorant about directing; I simply approach each problem on a basis of common sense and try to find the most obvious solutions possible. Nowadays everything is very easy to me except writing didactic things like this book. If we need a cartoon for the programme, I'll draw one.

If we need a play I'll write it. I cut knots instead of labor- iously trying to untie them— that's how people see me; but they have no idea of the turgid state I used to be in, or the morass from which I'm still freeing myself. When I give workshops, I see people frantically scribbling down the exercises, but not noticing what it is I actually do as a teacher. My feeling is that a good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher can wreck any method. There seems no doubt that a group can make or break its members, and that it's more powerful than the individuals in it.

A great group can propel its members forward so that they achieve amazing things, Many teachers don't seem to think that manipulating a group is their responsibility at all. If they're working with a destructive, bored group, they just blame the students for being 'dull', or uninterested. It's essential for the teacher to blame himself if the group aren't in a good state.

Normal schooling is intensely competitive, and the students are supposed to try and outdo each other. If I explain to a group that they're to work for the other members, that each individual is to be interested in the progress of the other members, they're amazed, yet obviously if a group supports its own members strongly, it'll be a better group to work in. The first thing I do when I meet a group of new students is prob- ably to sit on the floor.

I play low status, and I'll explain that if the students fail they're to blame me. Then they laugh, and relax, and I explain that really it's obvious that they should blame me, since I'm supposed to be the expert; and if I give them the wrong material, they'll fail; and if I give them the right material, then they'll succeed. I play low status physically but my actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself. At this point they almost certainly start sliding off their chairs, because they don't want to be higher than me.

I have already changed the group profoundly, because failure is suddenly not so frightening any more. They'll want to test me, of course; but I really will apologise to them when they fail, and ask them to be patient with me, and explain that I'm not perfect. My methods are very effect- ive, and other things being equal, most students will succeed, but they won't be trying to win any more. The normal teacher-student relationship is dissolved. When I was teaching young children, I trained myself to share my eye contacts out among the group.

I've seen many teachers who concentrate their eye contacts on only a few students, and this does affect the feeling in a group. Certain students are disciples, but others feel separated, or experience themselves as less interesting, or as 'failures'. I've also trained myself to make positive comments, and to be as direct as possible.

I say 'Good' instead of 'That's enough'. I've actually heard teachers say 'Well, let's see who fails at this one', when intro- ducing an exercise. Some teachers get reassurance when their students fail. We must have all encountered the teacher who gives a self- satisfied smile when a student makes a mistake.

Such an attitude is not conducive to a good, warm feeling in the group. When in I read of Wolpe's work in curing phobias, I saw a clear relationship with the ideas I'd got from Stirling, and with the way I was developing them. Wolpe relaxed his phobic patients and then presented them with a very dilute form of the thing that scared them. Someone terrified of birds might be asked to imagine a bird, but one in Australia.

At the same time that the image was presented, the patient was relaxed, and the relaxation was maintained if it wasn't maintained, if the patient started to tremble, or sweat or whatever, then something even less alarming would be presented. Relaxation is incompatible with anxiety; and by maintaining the relaxed state, and presenting images that gradually neared the centre of the phobia, the state of alarm was soon dissipated— in most cases.

Wolpe taught his patients to relax, but soon other psychologists were using pentathol to assist the relaxation. However, there has to be an intention to relax muscle-relaxant drugs can be used as a torture! If we were all terrified of open spaces, then we would hardly recognise this as a phobia to be cured; but it could be cured. My view is that we have a universal phobia of being looked at on a stage, and that this responds very well to 'progressive desensitisation' of the type that Wolpe advocates. Many teachers seem to me to be trying to get their students to conceal fear, which always leaves some traces— a heaviness, an extra tension, a lack of spontaneity.

I try to dissipate the fear by a method analogous to Wolpe's, but which I really got from Anthony Stirling. The one finding of Wolpe which I immediately incorporated into my work was the discovery that if the healing pro- cess is interrupted by a recurrence of the total fear— maybe a patient being treated for a phobia of birds suddenly finds himself surrounded by fluttering pigeons— then the treatment has to be started again at the bottom of the hierarchy. Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic, and this completely changes the teacher's relationship with them. Students will arrive with many techniques for avoiding the pain of failure.

John Holt's How Children Fail Penguin, ; Pitman, 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.

Univer- sity students may roll about in hysterical laughter. I take it that the relief comes from understanding that other people use the same manoeuvres as they do. For example, many students will begin an improvisation, or a scene, in a rather feeble way. It's as if they're ill, and lacking in vitality.

They've learned to play for sympathy. However easy the problem, they'll use the same old trick of looking inadequate. This ploy is supposed to make the onlookers have sympathy with them if they 'fail' and it's expected to bring greater rewards if they 'win'. Actually this down-in-the-mouth attitude almost guarantees failure, and makes everyone fed up with them.

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No one has sympathy with an adult who takes such an attitude, but when they were children it probably worked. As adults they're still doing it. Once they've laughed at them- selves and understood how unproductive such an attitude is, students who look 'ill' suddenly look 'healthy'. The attitude of the group may instantly change. Another common ploy is to anticipate the problem, and to try and prepare solutions in advance. Almost all students do this — probably it started when they were learning to read. You anticipate which para- graph will be yours, and start trying to decipher it.

This has two great disadvantages: Most students haven't realised— till I show them— how inefficient such techniques are. The idea that a teacher should be interested in such things is, unfortunately, novel to them. I also explain strategies "ke sitting on the end of the row, and how it isolates you from the group, and body positions that prevent absorption like the 'lit-crit' Postures which keep the user 'detached' and 'objective'. I'm teaching spontaneity, and therefore I tell them that they mustn't try to control the future, or to 'win'; and that they're to have an empty head and just watch.

When it's their turn to take part they're to come out and just do what they're asked to, and see what happens. It's this decision not to try and control the future which allows the students to be spontaneous. If I'm playing with my three-year-old son and I smack him, he looks at me for signals that will turn the sensation into either warmth or pain. A very gentle smack that he perceives as 'serious' will have him howling in agony. A hard 'play' slap may make him laugh. When I want to work and he wants me to continue playing he will give very strong 'I am playing' signals in an attempt to pull me back into his game.

All people relate to each other in this way but most teachers are afraid to give 'I am playing' signals to their students. If they would, their work would become a constant pleasure. If you have trouble understanding this section, it may be because you're a conceptualiser, rather than a visualiser. William Grey Walter, in The Living Brain Penguin, calculated that one in six of us are conceptualisers actually in my view there is a far smaller proportion of conceptualisers among drama students.

I have a simple way of telling if people are visualisers. I ask them to describe the furniture in a room they're familiar with. Visualisers move their eyes as if 'seeing' each object as they name it. Conceptualisers look in one direction as if reading off a list. Galton investigated mental imagery at the beginning of the century, and found that the more educated the person, the more likely he was to say that mental imagery was unimportant, or even that it didn't exist. You can see what you're attending to, but actually your mind is assembling the object from relatively little infor- mation. Now look directly, and observe the difference.

This is one way of tricking the mind out of its habitual dulling of the world. They said 'Talky scenes are dull', but the conversations they acted out were nothing like those I overheard in life. For some weeks I experimented with scenes in which two 'strangers' met and interacted, and I tried saying 'No jokes', and 'Don't try to be clever', but the work remained unconvincing.

They had no way to mark time and allow situations to develop, they were forever striving to latch on to 'interesting' ideas. If casual conversations really were motiveless, and operated by chance, why was it impossible to reproduce them at the studio? Everyone on stage seemed to have chosen the strongest possible motives for each action—no doubt the production had been 'unproved' in the decades since Stanislavsky directed it.

I'm pretending I know everything about improv. I'm just writing this stuff as an outlet for my improv obsession in hopes that it will help me and any improvisors out there reading this. Feel free to disagree, or tell me what you think in the comments. Jason Mantzoukas in an interview with Splitsider via actuallylaurenlapkus. Nov 6, Nov 5, Hit the jump for the full stream. Oct 23, Oct 10, Why do you want to be on a UCB Harold team? Oct 9, Ah, shit that was an episode just for you man.

Oct 8, Who deserves to take center stage in her heart—Mr. Theatre Royalty whose attention and displays of affection make her pulse race, or a good friend whose steady support has helped steer her to success and fulfill her dream? Billed as The Lucky Chances, the sisters are the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day. At once ribald and sentimental, glittery and tender, this rambunctious family saga is Angela Carter at her bewitching best.

At once hilarious and reflective, Drama pulls back the curtain on the making of one of our most beloved actors. Written with delicious prose and considerable wit, Fifth Avenue, 5 A. The woman of a half-dozen comebacks, a hundred heartbreaks, and thousands of headlines. Yet much of what has been written about her is either inaccurate or incomplete, and the Garland the world thought it knew was merely a sketch for the astonishing woman Gerald Clarke portrays.

His brother was a crack dealer and petty thief. And his mother was overwhelmingly strict. The odds, in short, were stacked against our young hero. In , Tig Notaro was hospitalized for a debilitating intestinal disease called C. Diff, her mother unexpectedly died, she went through a breakup, and was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer. Now, the wildly popular star takes stock of that no good, very bad year—a difficult yet astonishing period in which tragedy turned into absurdity and despair into joy.

Born in the U. But ultimately A Life in Parts is a story about the joy, the necessity, and the transformative power of simple hard work. Miss Hepburn breaks her long-kept silence about her private life in this absorbing and provocative memoir. Poitier explores the nature of sacrifice and commitment, pride and humility, rage and forgiveness, and paying the price for artistic integrity.

Itzkoff also shows how Williams struggled mightily with addiction and depression…and with a debilitating condition at the end of his life that affected him in ways his fans never knew.

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