I signed up for Johnstone Inspired Intensive by Lindsay Mullan this last weekend & it didn’t disappoint. Part of me thought I should share what I learned in that 4 hour class that literally flew by.

For those unfamiliar, Keith Johnstone was a world renowned improvisational theatre instructor & the creator of Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre.

Keith’s style is a tad bit different from what gets taught at schools like iO and Second City, and it definitely had me intrigued about this school of thought when it comes to improv. I took some rough notes on my phone during the class and will try to share a few high-level ideas I took away from it.

The workshop started with some introductions, and Lindsay gave us a brief history of Keith’s style of improv. Apparently, his style of improv is much less common here in North America and more popular in other countries.

After that, we moved on to doing some warm up games - the usual like - clay game, word association, word disassociation etc. As always these games were fun.

One of the big tenets of Keith’s teaching is, “Don’t try so hard. BE AVERAGE!” It’s a human tendency to want to be great at something, and this applies to improvisers too. This is a tricky lesson to learn. When she was telling us about this quote, for some reason, it actually reminded me of a Japanese folk tale from the book Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovitch. I love that story for some reason. By the way, I am still trying to finish that book, so if you have read it already—no spoilers, please!

Another thing Keith emphasizes is looking for the obvious and not being clever. We played a very interesting game in class where the person on the pretend stage would ask for suggestions and improvise using that suggestion for about 3–4 seconds tops. Here’s the fun part—if they don’t like the suggestion, they can say, “Nope!” The idea is to be inspired. When you’re inspired, you do the obvious with that suggestion, and the audience laughs at the pleasure of the obvious.

You can also call it the “circle of expectation”—if you do something obvious with the suggestion the audience gives you, it will turn into something magical. If you don’t, the scene feels weird, and the audience is confused. You don’t want that.

I actually found his style of improv very narrative-focused and logical—something I always wish I saw in more improv scenes. In Johnstone-style narrative, a platform tilt results in a change of status or relationship, and a character might have a change of heart, status, or philosophy.

I did a scene where my partner and I were roommates. He came into the living room while I was watching TV. The interaction started with me complimenting him, and then he did the same to me. It went on. Then, he did something with his physicality that irked me—it changed the whole scene from that point forward. We started having a fight.

At the end of the day, you can still start normal and positively but introduce conflict later in the scene.

All in all, we really felt that four hours was not enough time for us to learn everything, but we still ended up with a few good nuggets. I also looked up Keith and stumbled upon one of his TED Talks—he’s very funny! Definitely give it a watch if you can. I also plan to buy one of his books to learn more about his way of looking at improv.