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title:: Books / Impro author:: @Keith Johnson - Craft is essentially a study of human nature. So is this book. id:: 62a4f8c2-0f4f-4073-9f08-be9959db1aa8 - ## Progressive Summarizations - The presence trick collapsed:: true - I’ve since found ==**tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about fifteen seconds,**== and the effects last for hours. - For example, if I have a group of students who are feeling fairly safe and comfortable with each other, ==**I get them to pace about the room shouting out the wrong name for everything that their eyes light on.**== - Maybe there’s time to shout out ten wrong names before I stop them. - **Then I ask whether other people look larger or smaller**—almost everyone sees people as different sizes, mostly as smaller. - **‘Do the outlines look sharper or more blurred?’** I ask, and everyone agrees that the outlines are many times sharper. - **‘What about the colours?**’ Everyone agrees there’s far more colour. - **Often the size and shape of the room will seem to have changed, too.** - ==**I tell them that they only have to think about the exercise for the effects to appear again.**== - - Status id:: 62a52c03-e12c-4d4f-82b5-9eb06f70ded4 collapsed:: true - Status is a confusing term unless it’s understood as something one does. You may be low in social status, but play high, and vice versa. - The Sea-Saw collapsed:: true - I noticed that the actors couldn’t reproduce ‘ordinary’ conversation. - 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. - ==**If casual conversations really were motiveless, and operated by chance, why was it impossible to reproduce them at the studio?**== #omg #On [[Limiting Beliefs and Status]] id:: 62a4f96f-96d3-435e-a770-fb010b607aaf - ‘Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s,’ I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal. The actors seemed to know exactly what I meant and the work was transformed. - **Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless’.** id:: 62cc9dec-9107-4681-9c45-82111927edad - All our secret manoeuvrings were exposed. - If someone asked a question we didn’t bother to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. - No one could make an ‘innocuous’ remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. - Normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict. In reality status transactions continue all the time. #dominanceHierarchy #gamesPeoplePlay - pleasure attached to misbehaving comes partly from the status changes you make in your teacher. All those jokes on teacher are to make him drop in status. - ==**Audiences enjoy a contrast between the status played and the social status.**== collapsed:: true id:: 62a52c03-4602-46f6-8018-0edf1811df56 - Chaplin liked to play the person at the bottom of the hierarchy and then lower everyone. - I should really talk about dominance and submission, but I’d create a resistance. Students who will agree readily to raising or lowering their status may object if asked to ‘dominate’ or ‘submit’. #dominanceHierarchy id:: 62a5065e-eb75-457d-95ca-f94ab38f5c8c - In my own case I was astounded to find that when I thought I was being friendly, I was actually being hostile! - If someone had said ‘I like your play’, I would have said ‘Oh, it’s not up to much’, perceiving myself as ‘charmingly modest’. In reality I would have been implying that my admirer had bad taste. - @saie - Status Play and Correction Example id:: 62a500bb-8a00-4bd8-abb3-5315094a5bbe collapsed:: true - I ask a student to lower his status during a scene, and he enters and says: A: What are you reading? B: War and Peace. A: Ah! That’s my favourite book! The class laugh and A stops in amazement. - I ask him to try it again and suggest a different line of dialogue. A: What are you reading? B: War and Peace. A: I’ve always wanted to read that. - he was originally claiming ‘cultural superiority’ by implying that he had read this immense work many times. - If he’d understood this he could have corrected the error. A: Ah! That’s my favourite book. B: Really? A: Oh yes. Of course I only look at the pictures … - **If someone points a camera at you you’re in danger of having your status exposed, so you either clown about, or become deliberately unexpressive.** - Many people will maintain that we don’t play status transactions with our friends, and yet every movement, every inflection of the voice implies a status. - **My answer is that acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together.** - We soon discovered **the ‘see-saw’ principle: ‘I go up and you go down’.** - The exception to this see-saw principle comes when you identify with the person being raised or lowered, when you sit on his end of the see-saw, so to speak. #advaitya - If I’m trying to lower my end of the see-saw, and my mind blocks, **I can always switch to raising the other end.** id:: 62a514c0-bd55-420c-9347-d2fc40170bcd - That is, I can achieve a similar effect by saying ‘I smell beautiful’ as ‘You stink’. - Most comedy works on the see-saw principle. A comedian is someone paid to lower his own or other people’s status. - We want people to be very low-status, but we don’t want to feel sympathy for them—slaves are always supposed to sing at their work. id:: 62a51665-edf6-47ae-915b-434b8b03bf4f - CUSTOMER: ’Ere, there’s a cockroach in the loo! BARMAID: Well you’ll have to wait till he’s finished, won’t you? - A: Who’s that fat noisy old bag? B: That’s my wife. B: Oh, I’m sorry … A: You’re sorry! How do you think I feel? - Comedy and Tragedy collapsed:: true - Tragedy also works on the see-saw principle: its subject is the ousting of a high-status animal from the pack. - When a very high-status person is wiped out, everyone feels pleasure as they experience the feeling of moving up a step. #dominanceHierarchy - Terrible things can happen to the high-status animal, he can poke his eyes out with his wife’s brooch, but he must never look as if he could accept a position lower in the pecking order. He has to be ejected from it. id:: 62a51871-2418-406c-a049-c3772b50f943 - #badStories - - Teaching Status collapsed:: true - Social animals have inbuilt rules which prevent them killing each other for food, mates, and so on. Such animals confront each other, and sometimes fight, until a hierarchy is established, after which there is no fighting unless an attempt is being made to change the ‘pecking order’. This system is found in animals as diverse as human beings, chicken, and woodlice. id:: 62a519fe-9486-42de-834c-a2b37720a331 - Status, eye contact and wet shades are cool collapsed:: true - In animals the pattern of eye contacts often establishes dominance. - I suggest you try the opposite with zoo animals: break eye contact and then glance back for a moment. Polar bears may suddenly see you as ‘food’. Owls cheer up perceptibly. id:: 62c9dc26-1354-4c76-bc0a-db1e9c4f0705 - In my view, breaking eye contact can be high status so long as you don’t immediately glance back for a fraction of a second. - If you ignore someone your status rises, if you feel impelled to look back then it falls. - It’s only to be expected that **status is established not by staring, but by the reaction to staring.** #boom id:: 62c9dc26-e415-4571-b021-d5405af57c71 - Thus dark glasses raise status because we can’t see the submission of the eyes. - It’s **as if the proper state of human beings is high, but that we modify ourselves to avoid conflicts.** - Status Exercises collapsed:: true - I might ask them to say something nice to the person beside them, and then to say something nasty. This releases a lot of laughter, and they are surprised to find that they often achieve the wrong effect. (Some people never really say anything nice, and others never say anything really nasty, but they won’t realise this.) - I ask a group to mill about and say ‘hallo’ to each other. They feel very awkward, because the situation isn’t real. They don’t know what status they should be playing. I then get some of the group to hold all eye contacts for a couple of seconds, while the others try to make and then break eye contacts and then immediately glance back for a moment. The group suddenly looks more like a ‘real’ group, in that some people become dominant, and others submissive. - Those who hold eye contacts report that they feel powerful—and actually look powerful. Those who break eye contact and glance back ‘feel’ feeble, and look it. - I might then begin to insert a tentative ‘er’ at the beginning of each of my sentences, and ask the group if they detect any change in me. They say that I look ‘helpless’ and ‘weak’ but they can’t, interestingly enough, say what I’m doing that’s different. I don’t normally begin every sentence with ‘Cr’, so it should be very obvious. - Then I move the ‘er’ into the middle of sentences, and they say that they perceive me as becoming a little stronger. - If I make the ‘a’ longer, and move it back to the beginning of sentences, then they say I look more important, more confident. @Obama - The short ‘er’ is an invitation for people to interrupt you; the long ‘er’ says ‘Don’t interrupt me, even though I haven’t thought what to say yet.’ - Again I change my behaviour and become authoritative. Still Head Trick - Finally I explain that I’m keeping my head still whenever I speak, and that this produces great changes in the way I perceive myself and am perceived by others. I suggest you try it now with anyone you’re with. Some people find it impossible to speak with a still head, and more curiously, some students maintain that it’s still while they’re actually jerking it about. - Officers are trained not to move the head while issuing commands. - If I talk with my toes pointing inwards I’m more likely to give a hesitant little ‘er’ before each sentence, and I’ll smile with my teeth covering my bottom lip, and I’ll sound a little breathless, and so on. We were amazed to find that apparently unrelated things could so strongly influence each other; it didn’t seem reasonable that the position of the feet could influence sentence structure and eye contact, but it is so. - I reassure my students, and encourage them, and let them have conversations together, trying out different ways of changing their status. - I get them to play scenes in which: (I) both lower status; (2) both raise status; (3) one raises while the other lowers; (4) the status is reversed during the scene. - These status exercises reproduce on the stage exactly the effects of real life, in which moment by moment each person adjusts his status up or down a fraction. - ‘During that scene with Judith in which she at first touched her head all the time, and then gradually stopped doing it, I couldn’t define the change in her movements, and yet for some reason my attitude changed towards her. When she touched her head I tried to be more helpful, reassuring, whereas once she stopped, I felt more distant and businesslike—also a bit more challenged—whereas previously I’d felt nothing but sympathy.’ #sidAtWork - TODO ‘I felt the dominant figure in the conversation and proceeded to try and subjugate myself to her whims. I did this by the “touch the head and face” method. What happened here is that, while prior to this move I had done most of the talking and directed the conversation, after this … I was hard put to get a word in edgeways.’ - It’s a good idea to introduce a bystander into a status scene with instructions to ‘try not to get involved’. If you are a ‘customer’ in a ‘restaurant’, and someone at the same table quarrels with the ‘waiter’, then your very subtle status manoeuvrings are a delight to watch. - **If someone starts a scene by saying ‘Ah, another sinner! What’s it to be, the lake of fire or the river of excrement?’ then you can’t ‘think’ fast enough to know how to react. You have to understand that the scene is in Hell, and that the other person is some sort of devil, and that you’re dead all in a split second. ==If you know what status you’re playing the answers come automatically.==** - ‘Excrement’, you say, playing high status, without doing anything you experience as ‘thinking’ at all, but you speak in a cold voice, and you look around as if Hell was less impressive than you’d been led to believe. If you’re playing low status you say ‘Which ever you think best, Sir’, or whatever. Again with no hesitation, and with eyes full of terror, or wonder. - - One way to teach transitions of status is to get students to leave the class, and then come in through the real door and act ‘entering the wrong room’. collapsed:: true - It’s then quite normal to see students entering with head down, or walking backwards, or in some other way that will prevent them from seeing that it is the wrong room. They want time to really enter before they start ‘acting’. They will advance a couple of paces, act seeing the audience, and leave in a completely phoney way. - I remind the students that entering the wrong room is an experience we all have, and that we always know what to do, since we do ‘something’. I explain that I’m not asking the students to ‘act’, but just to do what they do in life. - We have a radar which scans every new space for dangers, an early-warning system programmed-in millions of years ago as a protection against sabre-tooth tigers, or bigger amoebas or whatever. It’s therefore very unusual to refuse to look into the space you are entering. As soon as the ‘wrong room’ exercise becomes ‘real’ they understand that a change of status is involved. #brilliant - You prepare a status for one situation, and have to alter it when suddenly confronted by the unexpected one. - I repeat all status exercises in gibberish, just to make it quite clear that the things said are not as important as the status played. - If I ask two actors to meet, with one playing high, and one playing low, and to reverse the status while talking an imaginary language, the audience laugh amazingly. - I get the actors to learn short fragments of text and play every possible status on them. For example, A is late, and B has been waiting for him. A: Hallo. B: Hallo. A: Been waiting long? B: Ages. - Status is played to anything, objects as well as people. If you enter an empty waiting-room you can play high or low status to the furniture. A king may play low status to a subject, but not to his palace - I call it ‘non-defence’, but really it’s one of the best of all defences. Imagine two siblings, one of whom (A) lives in the flat of the other (B). B enters and asks if any letters have arrived for him. A says that there is one on the sideboard. B picks it up and sees it’s been opened. A is always opening B’s letters which causes conflict between them. - B will probably start to push A about, and I’ll have to stop the scene for fear that they might hurt each other. I start the scene again, but tell A that he is to admit everything, while playing low status. - I’ve seen the low-status player leap about with joy and roll over and over on the floor after playing such a scene. - It’s exhilarating to be controlling the movements of the other person as if he were a puppet. When I explained that the more A accepted B’s dominance the more powerfully B was deflected, #jujutsu - Once non-defence has been mastered together with a low-status attitude, I teach it as a high-status exercise. - At first hardly anyone can carry off such a scene. - I make B’s position worse by setting him the problem of asking A for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Once A’s position is reinforced in this way he should be able to maintain his high status while making no verbal defence at all. A: You must be John … B: Er … yes. A: Cynthia tells me you want to marry her … B: That’s right. A: Oh, by the way, a letter came for you this morning. B: It’s been opened. A: I open everyone’s letters. B: But it was addressed to me. A: It’s from your mother. Some of it I thought most unsuitable. You’ll see I crossed some paragraphs out … (And so on.) - - - Preferred Status id:: 62a51ff9-95fb-429d-b922-6c968da4bcff collapsed:: true - My belief (at this moment) is that people have a preferred status; that they like to be low, or high, and that they try to manoeuvre themselves into the preferred positions. - A person who plays high status is saying ‘Don’t come near me, I bite.’ Someone who plays low status is saying ‘Don’t bite me, I’m not worth the trouble.’ In either case the status played is a defence, and it’ll usually work. - You become a status specialist, very good at playing one status, but not very happy or competent at playing the other. - Asked to play the ‘wrong’ status, you’ll feel ‘undefended’. - In order to enter a room all you need to know is what status you are playing. id:: 62a525ce-0853-4a54-b053-3c4b95d6940e - - - Random Highlights collapsed:: true - 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 was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I’d had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. - Beckett (who once wrote to me, saying that ‘a stage is an area of maximum verbal presence, and maximum corporeal presence’—the word ‘corporeal’ really delighting 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. - As Edward Bond said, ‘The writers’ group taught me that drama was about relationships, not about characters.’ - 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-time games, and almost all of the work described in this book. - I cut knots instead of laboriously trying to untie them - There seems no doubt that a group can make or break its members, and that it’s more powerful than the individuals in it. - The first thing I do when I meet a group of new students is (probably) 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, #wow - Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic, and this completely changes the teacher’s relationship with them. id:: 62a4f753-3f7c-4aae-afb3-0a2c71a43f9f - 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’. -