Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone ( born February 1933, Devon ) is a British playwright, a founder of modern improvisational theater and drama teacher.

Life

Keith Johnstone worked from 1956 to 1966 as a playwright, director and studio director at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Here he led a writer 's workshop, which included the playwright John Arden, Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker. In addition, Johnstone taught at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art Because of negative experiences during his own training, he tried to animate his actors to more spontaneity by negated all the rules he had learned in his training. For example, he encouraged them to cut on stage grimaces and to annoy playful; He instructed them to heckle, not to concentrate not to think and to do the obvious. When he saw that these techniques had success - the actors played more freely and with more pleasure - he developed from theater basic rules.

Inspired by the theories of the British ethologist Desmond Morris, Johnstone developed the theory that stories of dominance and submission act and that the characters in the story have to change each other. He believes that much of comedic material is fed from the many small ways in which people try to increase their own social status and reduce the their counterpart. In the following years, this view spread rapidly and is now widely used in the theater world.

In the seventies, Johnstone moved to Calgary. In a basement at the University of Calgary he went with his self-developed theater sports in Secret Impro Theatre to the public. Together with the vet Mel Tonken Johnstone founded the Loose Moose Theatre Company, whose venue is located at the southern end of the airport Calgary. As a form of modern improvisational theater, the term theater sports, is legally protected by the copyright symbol ©. Johnstone teaches as a professor at the University of Calgary.

Publications

• Impro - Improvisation and the Theatre. Methuen Publishing, London 1979, ISBN 0-413-46430- X German edition: improvisation and theater. Translated from English by Petra Schreyer. Afterword by George Tabori. Alexander, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-923854-67-6