 just not just this community, this organization, but the entire field of implied improvisation. So please help me welcome to the stage Joel Fenestra, of course Teresa Dudak with the legacies of Keith Johnson, the global improvisation initiative where we come from and where we come next. All right that's give him a round of applause. Good morning everyone. How are we doing? Hi, what are we doing first? This is Joel Fenestra, superhuman professor and the vice-chair of department at the Department of Drama, UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts. This year he was awarded with the 2023 Oscar Brockett outstanding teacher, teacher award by the Association of Theater and Higher Education. Huge! And he uses of my improvisation within theater creation, business, health care applications, as well as for building cultural bridges and for personal growth. And he's also my friend and my colleague. We founded the Johnstone Center. Tell you more about that in just a moment. This is Teresa Robin's student, if you're not familiar, she is Keith Johnstone's literary executor, biographer and co-director of the Doctoral Series on Keith, artist, speaker on Keith and Johnstone in the program. She's been co-editor of two excellent books that are available here at AIM as well at HopeStores Everywhere, where you buy books. She's considered the foremost teacher of the Johnstone's IMPRO theater and she teaches IMPRO, applied improvisation all around the world in academic professional settings. And she's also a very good collaborator and my friend. Thank you so much for being here and doing this with me. We want to share this time because Keith Johnstone passed away this year, right? March 11th, 2023. He was a trailblazer of improvisation. The author of IMPRO improvisation of theater was published in 1979, translated more than a dozen different languages as well as IMPRO for storytellers. And he and his legacy continues to serve as an unorthodox educational guide for anyone wanting to respell their imagined potential and bring more creative spontaneity and authenticity to their working lives. We have a special treat that was not originally planned as part of this, but at Keith's festive wake, which he requested to have a festive wake, is passing. There's a video that was created. We wanted to share that video with you. It's about ten minutes, but we felt that it would be an opportunity to reflect on his legacy and the things that he taught and shared. So let's take a look at that video now. Introduction to improvisation, because you may have enough to do nothing to offer. It's a fishing town. The night of the night, you've got a house that will be played around the harbour, because of the little fishing town very poor, because the fish had all died. Then as you've got a, then you've got maybe six or seven years old, you've got a further worry from the harbour. At that seven, right, you've made the chance. I decided when I was just before my last birthday not to believe anything that grown up said. And the next day I decided to obviously, if the author could be true, I think it changed my life having been doing it ever since, and it taught me to be looking for the obvious and not the clever. The obvious is really your true self. The clever is that invitation to somebody else for you. And I was so pleased to be born in that place, because it was beautiful. I was a total misfit as a teacher. I literally got rid of me. I used to because I expected to go to school and found my classroom to get some work. But don't think they like me for that. I wrote out a list of all the things my teacher stopped me from doing, and I started teaching those. And as my teacher's hate is found in me, it must be like a very good syllabus. I remember making faces was at the top. Making faces turned out to be really important, very useful game. In my opinion, many professors don't really want you to learn. They want to look like good professors. They teach you not to like failure, but you can't learn anything without a failure. So they have the teacher teach you a different attitude towards failure. They teach you to hate it. No. And yeah, failing, it means you... We can now teach you because you fail. You can't learn anything without failing. Therefore, we have to change your attitude to failure. Any idea you will do if it inspires a person, but most people turn into ideas because they've been through the stupid training have been searching for the best idea. In fact, you learned at school to tent yourself on that, aha, I did better. Give me another chance. You just spin yourself with tension and that causes fear. And in my opinion, doing your best is the same as stage fright. That this is terrible culture which everyone's taught to do their best when they see a mind cloud us. And the teacher's cross is like, no, no, no. Look at if you're walking in deep sand. I thought, I really say, hey, hey, and that's if you discover the mind for walking in deep sand. You'll be just the same. And there will be some negative. I was so naive, I thought, acting, whoever is afraid of the warrior, all actors are afraid, I didn't understand that. That's why they don't look like people. I don't see what we're trying people on stage. No one actually does not deal with fear. And he starts to hide it. It's like that Swedish guy who said that he was, he'd always known you were scared, but he didn't know the others were equally scared until either arrived and started exploring the fear. You can't teach spontaneity, but you can get people to not do the things and start them being spontaneous. Spontaneity, you don't teach spontaneity, you remove the obstacles. And of course the main obstacle is you, your social self, which is so concerned that the approved are enlightened or the rest of that. And it screws you up. The action is so simple, you can't grasp it. Is it one person it changed by another? As if one of the actors made wonderful changes, profound changes, and the great playwrights made profound and wonderful changes. But it's so simple, how could one not see that? When I began to teach improvisation, I was astounded at all the things the improvisers did to back themselves as they were sort of negative from the camera. They think there's a fire, it will start to rain. That's the problem, people wanting to be original, so they reject what their mind gives them because they've seen it before, they've been told not to cheat. You can't change improvisation. There are no new ideas if you've been long enough. If it's obvious, people will like it. We've been trained the opposite, we've been trained that we're not good enough and we have to do extra stuff. By ourselves, we're not going to make the world anything, so we use more effort. You can be a wonderful improviser, but you can better if you use less effort. Well, the improvisers have an inefficient way of doing it, I wonder, or be older. I teach people to be boring, but I'm not depressed. People are bad. I do see when people have interviewed me, Geltan, talking that I didn't want the scenes to be funny, but if they take my advice, they'll be a hell of a lot of fun going. You have to teach your improvisers to think inside the box, or you can't work with them. You say to a mask actor, you say make your mask at the mask, the scene in the mirror is going to find a sound. The scene in the mirror will make a sound. I haven't said you make a sound. That's devious. Weren't you an experienced improviser? It's ridiculous not to kill ideas because some guys deserve a crick there. If you don't kill any ideas, they'll all be like deflated sex dolls or salad or darling crocs. They'll be no guts to anything. I don't think we've lived them better. You have no resistance. Of course you have to kill ideas. All the things you said you shouldn't do when you start. In the end, of course you can do for pleasure, but nothing fear. A thing about improvisation is that it is not risky. It's not worth doing. Keith, what makes you a good improviser? And generosity and no fear. The audience connects things that the improvisers discriminate because they've been taught to be original, but the real knowledge isn't the audience. They don't want to laugh. They want to pay attention. If you direct a play, if you're not an idiot, couldn't you get the audience and watch the audience? Because you only guess and the audience know when it's really bad. But the idea that the audience might educate us instead of us as the model into educating the audience has some sort of heaviness in them. The audience wants to connect everything. The improvisers want to disconnect everything. So now you're a teacher and people think, oh, that cost. I had 20 years to find out. 39. Oh, this being able to wake up one day in a strange place and they say, ah, you were right. Mr. Johnstone, we were right. Quick, quick, you're just in time for the Theatre Sports Festival. They're going to be breaking 10,000 years and I now know I've gone to hell. You're off to Chicago to measure all things. Did you relate to somebody? Did you inspire the people on the stage of you? Did you go on a journey into somebody that we haven't been before? Do you have advice for the next generation of improvisers? Oh my God. Please try and be truthful and good natured for God's sake. Stop being so down-competitive. Be average, please, please. I want your best work in there. I can't get your best work from you trying to do your best. Try and do anything wonderfully well. Go on and watch the sunset and buy a great poem about it. No, go buy an average poem about it and you have some hope of getting something good. There is no hope in doing your best. It's a disaster. Wow, you were all, but stay set and stay set. If you read this book in pro or in pro for the Storytellers, go ahead and stand up or identify yourself with a handbook. That's amazing. If you in this room have done any sort of improvisation at all, go ahead and stand up. If you come back and keep John's songs made, everyone must know whether or not they've been touched by this again in his work and it's pretty remarkable. Thank you very much. Thank you. Go ahead and sit down. So, I'm a little teary-eyed. I wrote the press release of his death and after we posted that, it was just an amazing outpouring of grief from all over the world. I mean, it was incredible. I mean, from film, at least, the entire finish, the other traditions, based in key John Stones in pro. I mean, things like that, you know, genius, he changed, he saved my life. So, needless to say, it's been a strange few months for me and I imagine many of you have worked with him not having been in it as well, although I feel like he's with me all the time and teasing me still. I get that. Some strange things have been happening and I will say that's key. Anyway, so, like Jill said, his improvisational legacy has impacted us all, whether we know or not. He created, he started up, he had the first improvisational troupe in Britain called The Theatre Machine and they were actually performing in Britain when improvisation was illegal, illegal, until 1968 it was illegal. I'll talk more about that afterwards if you want, it's a really fascinating story. Of course, he created theatre sports, started at the Loose Moose, Vancouver, I believe the second theatre sports lead, which is called a mockery, started in and of course that inspired his life anyway. But I think of Keith as his legacy, which is what Jill and I are talking about and what is sort of our goal with the GII, part of our goal. He was an adult, laboratory educator and to use a bit of Paulo Freire's terminology, he decoded the coded dance and social behavior and created techniques so that we, his students, could truthfully recreate that behavior on the stage. Yes, he wanted us to experience and have those uncensored moments, but he was very clear throughout his life that we needed to understand why the experience mattered and that we understood the theories and everything he created was a solution to a problem, so we needed to understand that. So, here's the quote from Paulo Freire, that I really like and sort of, of course, Paulo Freire, if you don't know, wrote a pedagogy of the press, which inspired Paulo's theatre of the press. He was also a critical pedagogy educator for Brazil. But I really like this, this idea of understanding the whole, the whole system, I call Keith Johnstone's uvra of work, the improv system, because it is, it's a complete system of training and we only apprehended the fragments of it and we missed sort of the riches and depth of how the system works in its completeness. I'm going to switch over my nose, but I can't do it by hand. Anyway, so, so I think John and I are really clear that in our work as educators and scholars and many of you have this empirical evidence that you studied with Keith, right? You've been in the same space with him and I think it's our job, our duty to pass this law to the next generation, to know our historicity, right? And that should be our starting point. This is sort of my goal as a scholar, especially as Keith Johnstone's literary executive and passing on his legacy. But if we know our historicity, then we know our unique point of departure. We're not recreating the people, right? We're building on it, methodology. So Keith understood this. He never missed an opportunity to cite sources and people who inspired his work to share the theories that underpinned his improvisational exercise in the techniques. He even treated audiences like students. Every space was a classroom for him. He called the audience a large intelligent beast that needed to be tickled. And with audiences, this is, I mean, fear when she talks about it, they would have a thousand Germans out there, you know, or whatever they toured in Europe and he would explain in my new detail the techniques and theories that were underpinning the work that was unfolding on the stage. So he decoded, decoded, decoded him as even for the audience. So I call Keith's classrooms and spaces laboratories to investigate the nature of a spontaneous creation. And like scientists, Keith never stopped questioning the knowledge or changing the variables and the experiments always in pursuit of better knowledge, better methodology. And this is a quote that I often use. And it's really important, right? So not, not that you can't create your own thing, but we need to honor, like, our field, you know, our pioneers as, as other fields are studied to. So the essential thing is that we, being aware of where it exists in history, it's really essential for people to think about where my knowledge into the future. I mean, certainly you all have been inspired by this comprehensive, I've been inspired by this time, I've been to many of these, but he said pretty outstanding whether we grow from this together to be aware of our history, our shared roots. In terms of Keith's work, there's a couple of things that can stick out with me that I mentioned. The first thing that Keith Johnstone, when he was doing his original work, he also toured with the theater machine around Europe, didn't call it the girl work improvisation month, so let's go on and use that term, because no one knew what that was. It didn't exist before, at this time. They promoted by telling you that people was a mind group at any time they do. Also, what is the future? Come on, use our conceptualization of where we are at the time or our lives. And you think that things are just always as they are now, or only people are now, it's actually deep history that needs to go beyond into where we come from, unless it's to be learned. And you barely get out of the baseball? It's amazing. There's so much truth in mind through there. In addition, Keith generally is side coached and directed from the side. People think of Keith Johnstone, and sometimes they always improvise around stage, but he was actually more like a facilitator, like us, helping to guide people towards changing their acting with each other and giving each other a good time on stage. And the third thing, which I think is really tremendous that Keith, that Teresa, know it already, is the fact that he was doing his work illegally. Again, he was doing a legal practice because everything was sensitive that was on the greatest stage. And so he needs a professional mission, but he just went ahead and did it, and he was engaged, taking a risk, and we should do such a thing as well as he kind of inspired. And yet, this art form went on to directly inspire who signed us anyway, since you all were excited about Tom Acker last night. Tom Acker would not be able to help Keith Johnstone. It were all part of his legacy and his deep, rich background. And again, yeah, if you want to pause that, let's go to the next question. One more question, a sense of a standing tree or this long rift of history that you are adding to and developing and being a part of, and as we reimagine the picture, which is so important, we also want to make sure that we're out of the past and where the present work we are, and the important things that are going on. In light of that, Keith Schneider, the Goldwyn Promodation Mission in 2016, inspired by AIM actually, because this is a group of applied providers that are using this work to open up applied fields, we were like, what about the providers? People like just this naturally or other programs for entertainment, because we don't have time to be at a conference. We have a festival where you see entertainment. You have theaters and our homes for training, but you don't have a collective mindset to learn and think about the history. And in promodation, an art form is so femoral, right? Every opening night is also an closing night. And we often only reflect on it after, at the bar, that's about it. And so we're trying to document and be mindful of the art form. And so we've created a symposium where we come together and share the tactics and things that we utilize in both performance things and notice the whole spectrum of the actual application to document it, honor it. We had our first symposium in 2017 in Southern California. We had our next one in London in 2019. In 2021, there was something that happened in the world, so we had to do it online. And that was a primary assignment to thank people all over the world. This past year, we were back in Southern California in a smaller scale. And in 2020-25, we looked forward to going to the Senate General Cross for the next conference. But again, just in noting and being mindful of our history, and AIM and GII are both a part of sharing this with us, this organization that hopefully is fire and honor each other to let us see the way that we are all connected in this global sphere. So I was with Keith in the hospital, in the University, and in one of our last conversations with him, I was sitting by his side. And I asked him, and he was all there, right to the end. Very curious, still thinking, still, I was bringing quotes by William Lake that he was unpacking them for me. Anyway, such a gift. But I asked him, if you have one wish, that's really hard for Keith. Like, to narrow it down to one wish. I said, if a genie key, you only want a wish key. Please, listen, one wish. What would that be? And he said this, I want to stop people from being green, and make them understand to be happy, you have to do things for other people. That's what he said. At least work, and what we do is fighting for our educational educators and facilitators. We're using our knowledge and tools and time to make this world a better place. Even being here are part of that. You are integrating the DNA of what this experience is for everyone that's in this room. And if you weren't here, this would not be the same conversation today. And still, if you're all part of the intertwined experience of this history and legacy, and going forward, you can make decisions on how to engage with that world, and continue to inspire for each generation to come out of it. In addition, it's worked well. I heard this a lot of times, which was really exciting. It wasn't necessarily the case earlier. A lot of folks started to know where they heard things, where they learned different techniques of things. This doesn't undermine your authority for your brilliant, so-called caterers that collaborate, it actually connects you to a greater community, the knowledge base, the qualities of the community. So it's worked well as a signal. I learned something about improvisation matters. I learned something to keep yourself in. I learned something to do today. I learned something of this source or this source, which is 100 things that work, and it gives us more value, and value, and credibility. Benevolence. Benevolence. Kindness. Be good to one another, because that's how we change the world. Do it for this work, for these principles. I would imagine, for you, if you beg for more, if you listen to the client, if you have some mentor, some collaborator, somebody that's really made a big impact on you. I know many of us who are right now moving to the men's impact. I mean, he had a tremendous impact on me, and folks like Sue Baldwin, who's retired from a lot of work, and I love her, I love her. She's such a good model. She's a tremendous, tremendous impact on me. All these people change our lives, and yet so often we forget about a move forward, and just do the best of work, and don't remember that past. So I want to invite you to do two things. Three things. Talk about three things. Best things come first. First thing, on the company, if you could just take a moment and think about some mentor that's meant something to you. And on the company, when you say that mentor is made together, somebody has an impact on you. Ready? One, two, three. Next, after we had a session, we were finishing this in session, but I'm mindful of time, and so I'm going to invite you to that after this session, make sure to share a story about that mentor, or share a story about Keith who spent time with him, connect with somebody else and share a little bit of a life-saving experience. Every time we lose somebody, cruise so much knowledge and so much stories and so much connection, and the only way we can move that back up is by sharing a little bit of a point about that. So that's very important. And last but not least, if somebody in this room has had a positive impact on you, take the time while they're still alive to thank them for that positive impact. It's a gift that we don't have forever, and we want to make sure the encouragement of supporting them to put a point about that, and we've been able to put a point about that all the time we have together. And so going forward, we know that we've spent some time supporting each other. Thank you. Thank you.