Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

Psychotic Thought
My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don’t want to be rejected by other people—and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way.

We adults have learned to be opaque. We live among hard surfaces that reflect sound back to us, so we’re constantly telling our children to be quiet. Our lives are surrounded with precious objects—glass, chi

In my own case I was astounded to find that when I thought I was being friendly, I was actually being hostile! If someone had said ‘I like your play’, I would have said ‘Oh, it’s not up to much’, perceiving myself as ‘charmingly modest’. In reality I would have been implying that my admirer had bad tast

It was the final confirmation that my education had been a destructive process.

decided never to believe anything because it was convenient. I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true.

Status is played to anything, objects as well as people.

My view is that we have a universal phobia of being looked at on a stage, and that this responds very well to ‘progressive desensitisation’ of the type that Wolpe advocates.

What I did was to concentrate on relationships between strangers, and on ways of combining the imagination of two people which would be additive, rather than subtractive.

Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s,’ I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal

The third was a status expert, raising and lowering his status with great skill