Quotes On Improvisation

“Joan [Littlewood]’s way involved constant effort to keep the production fresh. ‘It’s all very well putting a bubble up,’ she says; ‘but you have to keep it afloat’. Hedley remarks that ‘if something worked brilliantly, she’d change it, just to stop actors recreating it'; and Spinetti recalls how she plastered the walls of the green room and corridors of the theatre with notes, such as ‘Darling, you’ve got greasepaint on your heels, get off’, ‘Your performance is wonderful but your feet are waiting for a bus’, or ‘The purpose of getting on a stage is to get off, preferably in time for the pub’.” (Arditti, 1994).

“Creativeness must never cease, the only question being the choice of material on which to base it ... In our kind of acting we make frequent use of improvisations ... This kind of creativeness gives a freshness and an immediacy to performance.” (Stanislavski, 1947: 63-64)

“Great improvisers ‘go with the flow’, accepting that they’re in the hands of God, or the Great Moose. Their attitude is the opposite of those ‘beginners’ for whom improvisation is very difficult and who find the demons on the stage just as threatening as those in life. When a great improviser is inspired, all limits seem to disappear.” (Johnstone, 2014: 341)

“The ability to create a situation imaginatively and to play a role in it is a tremendous experience, a sort of vacation from one’s everyday self and the routine of every day living.” (Spolin, 1963: 2)

“We approach improvisation through psychological replay, which is silent. Replay involves reviving lived experience in the simplest possible way.” (Lecoq, 2014: 27)

“If it has not been programmed with a mass of material about the play, the situations, the characters and their interrelationships, it will only produce the material it has, which will naturally relate to the here and now, the situation in which the actor is actually present, along with a mass of cliche responses he has learned from other situations. This is not improvisation. This is ‘mugging’, ‘fooling about’, a totally self-indulgent activity.” (Barker, 1977: 90)

“In order to enter a room all you need to know is what status you are playing. The actor who understands this is free to improvise in front of an audience with no given circumstances at all.” (Johnstone, 1979: 47)

“We play people, elements, plants, trees, colours, lights, matter, sounds – going beyond their images, gaining knowledge of their space, their rhythm, their breath through improvisation.” (Lecoq in Frost and Yarrow, 2015: 184)

 “[Improvisation] is not a condition of relaxed awareness where one does not need to impose order on the external world or the imagination: order is found in the world and in the imaginative response to others.” (Frost and Yarrow, 2015: 223)

"Improvisational theater, with its requirement of both total attention and spontaneity, [and] Psychodrama, because it forces an awareness of roles and role-playing." (Ferguson, 1980: 90)

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References

Arditti, M. (1994) Joan Littlewood: Making a Scene. Available at: http://www.michaelarditti.com/non-fiction/joan-littlewood-making-a-scene/. (Accessed: 29 April, 2017)

Barker, C. (1977) Theatre Games: A New Approach to Drama Training. London: Meuthen.

Ferguson, M. (1980) The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Jeremy P Tarcher.

Frost, D. & Yarrow, R. (2015) Improvisation in Drama, Theatre and Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Johnstone, K. (1979) Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. London: Meuthen.

Johnstone, K. (2014) "Afterthoughts" in The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts [2014]. London: Routledge. pp. 65-68

Spolin, V. (1963) Improvisation for the Theatre. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Lecoq, J. (2014) "Improvisation" in The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts [2014]. London: Routledge. pp. 27-31.

Stanislavski, K. (1947) "Improvisation" in The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts [2014]. London: Routledge. pp. 63-64