Keith Johnstone - A Critical Biography (Electronic book text)

Keith Johnstone is a theatre practitioner of lasting influence. His Impro System for actor training, which encapsulate's Johnstone's theories, pedagogy, techniques, exercises, games, and terminology, encourages spontaneous, collaborative creation using the intuitive, uncensored imaginative responses of the participants. The Impro System has influenced theatre education worldwide and is applied to fields as diverse as corporate training, creative therapy, and animation. The Impro system later became a best-selling book, Impro, with a cult and widespread following. Though his teachings are infamous, very little is documented about his life, until now. Keith Johnstone: In Search of the Ideal Classroom is the first critical, authorised biography to offer a rigorous examination of Johnstone's work from both an historical and theoretical perspective. It is the first book to utilize archival sources, participant-observation and original interviews with Johnstone, his colleagues and former students, to develop an argument about Johnstone's radical pedagogical approach to artistic work.It includes significant unpublished treasures, including: * original letters to Johnstone from Samuel Beckett, Del Close, and other notable playwrights, actors, and directors* documents about the development of Theatre Machine* Keith's earliest writings and diaries * production photos. Johnstone stands beside George Devine, Bill Gaskill, and Joan Littlewood in the history of British theatre and has had significant influence in Canadian theatre practice and across international borders. Until now, Johnstone's story has been told primarily from a third person perspective, in passing, and without a critical lens. Utilizing secondary and primary sources (personal interviews, archival documents, the author's own observations from six international Johnstone workshops) and theories of pedagogy such as Paulo Freire's problem-posing, this biography is a journey through the corporeal spaces that have served as Johnstone's transformative 'classroom' but also into the conceptual spaces which inform Johnstone's own radical pedagogy and approach to artistic work