“Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they’re a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role.”

this is one of those rare books that’s supposedly about a niche subject few care about (“improvisation and the theatre”), but below the surface it’s actually a skeleton key for unlocking hidden truths of the universe. there’s a reason this book of all things is required reading at peter thiel’s evil defense company palantir, which makes billions of dollars but nobody’s really quite sure what they do. however, i do think it could be easy to read this book and not understand what the hell everyone’s talking about. it helps that a lot of johnstone’s thinking tracks with ideas i’ve developed independently, i’ve always believed that the best philosophical writing should be “obvious” in a sense, putting into words what you already know but can’t articulate.

fundamentally, impro is about how to unleash spontaneous creativity, the essence of improv. why do most people have so much trouble being creative? according to johnstone, it’s because everyone has been muzzled by Society. people have forgotten what true creativity even looks like, to them it appears undesirable, scary, perceived as madness or insanity.

The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal. My best known play—a one-acter called Moby Dick—is about a servant who keeps his master’s one remaining sperm in a goldfish bowl. It escapes, grows to monstrous size, and has to be hunted down on the high seas. This is certainly a rather obscene idea to many people, and if I hadn’t thrown away everything that my teachers taught me, I could never have written it

Society teaches us to censor ourselves; to become truly creative and spontaneous you must somehow undo this restraint. i’ve seen similar ideas repeated in a lot of writing advice: stop censoring yourself, stop holding back, or as denis johnson puts it, “write naked”. i don’t think johnstone’s methods are the only method of throwing off the chains, there are other ways like using drugs or alcohol, or you can simply be genuinely psychotic.

johnstone’s work seems focused on finding ways to regress to a child-like state of unbridled creativity, seeking a kind of re-enchantment. he observes that children routinely create works of staggering genius and originality (can concur) before the creative spark is pounded out of them by Society (education, mostly). he also notes that artists from “primitive” cultures are able to retain access to that primal creativity into adulthood (unless they come into too much contact with the west, that is). the implication is that creativity is something innate, natural, anyone can access it if they’re able to break through all the restraints that have been placed over it.

Children can operate in a creative way until they’re eleven or twelve, when suddenly they lose their spontaneity, and produce imitations of ‘adult art’. When other races come into contact with our culture something similar happens. The great Nigerian sculptor Bamboya was set up as principal of an art school by some philanthropic Americans in the 1920s. Not only did he fail to hand on his talents, but his own inspiration failed him. He and his students could still carve coffee tables for the whites, but they weren’t inspired any more.

So-called ‘primitive painters’ in our own culture sometimes go to art school to improve themselves—and lose their talent. A critic told me of a film school where each new student made a short film unaided. These, he said, were always interesting, although technically crude. At the end of the course they made a longer, technically more proficient film, which hardly anyone wanted to see. He seemed outraged when I suggested they should close the school (he lectured there); yet until recently our directors didn’t get any training. Someone asked Kubrick if it was usual for a director to spend so much care on lighting each shot and he said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone else light a film.’

We see the artist as a wild and aberrant figure. Maybe our artists are the people who have been constitutionally unable to conform to the demands of the teachers. Pavlov found that there were some dogs that he couldn’t ‘brainwash’ until he’d castrated them, and starved them for three weeks. If teachers could do that to us, then maybe they’d achieve Plato’s dream of a republic in which there are no artists left at all.

Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many ‘well adjusted’ adults are bitter, uncreative, frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that’s what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing.

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’m going to skip over the chapter on status here, though it could certainly be useful to anyone with autism looking for a guidebook for understanding what’s going on under the surface in some types of interactions. incidentally, it also seems to be the most influential chapter over at palantir.

the chapter on narrative skills is where many readers have breakthroughs, i’ve seen people who say that reading it instantly cured chronic lifelong writer’s block. johnstone’s key insight when it comes to constructing compelling stories is as follows:

My decision was that content should be ignored. This wasn’t a conclusion I wished to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking. I hadn’t realised that every play makes a political statement, and that the artist only needs to worry about content if he’s trying to fake up a personality he doesn’t actually have, or to express views he really isn’t in accord with. I tell improvisers to follow the rules and see what happens, and not to feel in any way responsible for the material that emerges. If you improvise spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your innermost self will be revealed. The same is true of any artist. If you want to write a ‘working-class play’ then you’d better be working class. If you want your play to be religious, then be religious. An artist has to accept what his imagination gives him, or screw up his talent.

instead of content, what johnstone says the storysteller should focus on is story structure. it doesn’t have to be complicated, in fact according to johnstone there’s just one thing that’s absolutely necessary, what could be called the fundamental essence of storytelling: reincorporation, that is to say bringing things back into a story from earlier. without reincorporation a narrative is ephemeral, meaningless, it can meander forever in the same fashion without ending, never becoming a story. having an ending is critical, you must tie things up by tying them together, and when you do that the ending will come along almost naturally, other people can even sense it. i’ve sometimes considered this myself, the unreasonable effectiveness of callbacks, the magic that inexplicably transforms what could be a mere sequence of random characters and events into something interesting, something meaningful.

The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them. Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn’t tell you why they applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure. Sometimes they even cheer! They admire the improviser’s grasp, since he not only generates new material, but remembers and makes use of earlier events that the audience itself may have temporarily forgotten.

one other narrative technique johnstone has for the especially stuck is something called “interrupting routines”, taking an ordinary sequence and introducing some kind of unexpected twist. the meaning of “routine” in this context is quite wide - it also includes subverting cliché story structures and tropes. i frequently play a little game while watching movies, i try to “call” plot points in advance, predict what’s going to happen next. there’s a bit of pride in getting it right, gloating and saying things like “i could have written this movie”, but ultimately i’m left disappointed by the movie, if i already know what’s going to happen then why bother watching in the first place, where’s the excitement of being surprised? it’s more satisfying when i get it wrong, the delight in the unexpected is satisfying in a similar way to a reincorporation. with “reincorporation” and “interrupting routines” alone you can go quite far indeed when it comes to telling satisfying stories, in fact i wonder if those alone are all that is strictly required…

where things get really weird is the final section, “Masks and Trance”. it’s ominously foreshadowed through brief mentions in the preceding portions, and you start wondering why johnstone is always capitalizing “Mask”.

It’s difficult to understand the power of the Mask if you’ve only seen it in illustrations, or in museums. The Mask in the showcase may have been intended as an ornament on the top of a vibrating, swishing haystack. Exhibited without its costume, and without a film, or even photograph, of the Mask in use, we respond to it only as an aesthetic object. Many Masks are beautiful or striking, but that’s not the point. A Mask is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take possession of it. A very beautiful Mask may be completely dead, while a piece of old sacking with a mouth and eye-holes torn in it may have tremendous vitality.

In its original culture nothing had more power than the Mask. It was used as an oracle, a judge, an arbitrator. Some were so sacred that any outsider who caught a glimpse of them was executed. They cured diseases, they made women sterile. Some tribes were so scared of their power that they carved the eye-holes so that the wearers could see only the ground. Some Masks were led on chains to keep them from attacking the onlookers. One African Mask had a staff, the touch of which was believed to cause leprosy. In some cultures dead people are reincarnated as Masks —the back of the skull is sliced off, a stick rammed in from ear to ear, and someone dances, gripping the stick with his teeth. It’s difficult to imagine the intensity of that experience.

on the surface “Mask work” doesn’t seem to have much to do with theatre or acting, it’s a rediscovery of a long tradition of communal possession rituals that flare up across the world throughout history, resurgences eventually stamped out by the Establishment (the church, the government). johnstone notes similarities to voodoo rituals (though he says the US army suppressed them and most are now fake performances for tourists), the student of anthropology can probably come up with many examples of similar group “spirit medium” practices, e.g. umbanda or candomblé in brazil.

i do see one connection to the rest of johnstone’s work - the “Masks” do appear to be one more way to help regress to a childlike creative state - when a new Mask is born/summoned/inhabited for the first time, the Mask persona starts out in a state of childlike ignorance, not quite newborn but more like a toddler or young child. for the most part they do not even know how to talk, and have to learn over time. a technique johnstone uses to “introduce” new Masks to the world is to leave them at a table with some ordinary household objects spread out and just let them handle them for a while with a sense of wonder as if they’re seeing them for the first time.

the “theatre” part comes in, i suppose, after johnstone has his students do a lot of work developing their Masks in classes. then, he’ll have his students do a sort of performance while posessed by Masks, going out on stage for an audience to marvel at, sort of like a hypnotist’s demonstration. i have to wonder, though, what part of that is really theatre, or even acting? after all, those people are supposedly being possessed by these Mask spirits, who are then just doing their thing. even freakier, the same Mask on different people will usually summon the same Mask character, as if the wearers are channeling the same spirit living within the Mask…

We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God’s. When Eskimos believed that each piece of bone only had one shape inside it, then the artist didn’t have to ‘think up’ an idea. He had to wait until he knew what was in there—and this is crucial. When he’d finished carving his friends couldn’t say ‘I’m a bit worried about that Nanook at the third igloo’, but only, ‘He made a mess getting that out!’ or ‘There are some very odd bits of bone about these days.’ These days of course the Eskimos get booklets giving illustrations of what will sell, but before we infected them, they were in contact with a source of inspiration that we are not. It’s no wonder that our artists are aberrant characters. It’s not surprising that great African sculptors end up carving coffee tables, or that the talent of our children dies the moment we expect them to become adult. Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.

sure, there are plenty of so-called “artists” who buy into the “art as self-expression” theory, they go to art school and produce florid artist’s statements accompanying their work explaining exactly what past trauma their work represents, and they’re almost universally hacks. i don’t blame them personally, they had bad teachers and the misfortune of being born into a society which only the top 0.1% genuinely crazy can overcome to make true art.

beyond the usual “what is art?”, this book has me questioning what creativity even is, this fearsome primal power Society has worked so hard to suppress… is it done out of fear of the unknown and the incomprehensible, by accident, or due to very good reasons? why does drawing upon it most effectively require a state of ignorance or unconsciousness? what ultimately is the mysterious source of inspiration? is it universal, some simply better attuned to channel it, or is it individual? is it the homeland of the Masks, is it the domain of dreams? is it the unconscious mind, or is it Divine Inspiration?