Impro for Storytellers (Theatre Arts (Routledge Paperback)) by Keith Johnstone

Author:Keith Johnstone [Johnstone, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-01-20T14:00:00+00:00

Freeze Games

The players start an activity – directing traffic, perhaps – and then someone shouts, ‘Freeze!’ and runs into the scene to change ‘directing traffic’ into some unrelated but visually similar activity.

These visual puns are among the most popular of all improvisation games because they almost always get a laugh, and there’s no risk that anything might happen. They are claimed to develop the players’ imaginations (and I saw excellent examples when I gave workshops at Chicago’s Second City) but so do many less destructive games. They teach the players to be original, and to sidetrack and cancel They were never played in my classes at the Studio (and never by the Theatre Machine), but you might get challenged to one, and any game can be a straw to grab at when you’re desperate.

Perhaps we see two people who are pushing a boulder, but someone else shouts freeze and rushes in to change the activity into three sailors tossing about in a storm. Perhaps the next freeze changes them into four downhill skiers. People laugh, because they like transformations, but why train students to kill stories? Morph from ‘playing the accordion’ to ‘stretching chest-expanders’, to ‘firing an arrow’, to being ‘nailed on a cross’ and you’ll be admired, but it’s like warming yourself by burning the floorboards. We need coherent sequences like ‘firing an arrow’, and ‘killing an animal’, and ‘discovering a collar around its neck that says “Property of the Emperor”’.

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