The censor without, the censor within: the resistance of Johnstone’s improv to the social and political pressures of 1950s Britain

Keith Johnstone's improv, popularly known through the Theatresports format, was forged in the cultural and historical context of 1950s Britain. In this paper I will argue that Johnstone's incarnation of theatrical improvisation was defined by its reaction to the normalising forces exerted by the social elite upon the broader population and by civilised society upon the individual. Johnstone's improv was a reaction against the Lord Chamberlain’s power to censor the British stage and a challenge to the internalised 'censor' British society of the time implanted in the minds of his students, stunting their creative imaginations. Johnstone borrowed elements of professional wrestling to break down the regimented conventions of the theatre space and enliven the spectator-performer relationship. As well as echoing Roland Barthes’ idealistic analysis of professional wrestling (Barthes, 1984: n.p.), Johnstone’s improv shares Barthes’ critique of the authority of the author and allows meaning to be generated out of the encounter between performers and spectators in the instant of the performance’s emergence. Through these processes, Johnstone’s improv defies the censor without (The Lord Chamberlain) by rooting out the censor within (the socially learnt inhibitions to the creative imagination). By delineating the political and social pressures at play in the historical context of 1950s Britain and the ways that the stylistic conventions of Johnstone's improv resist and subvert these forces, I will demonstrate the emancipatory power latent in this mode of popular performance. This is a particularly timely analysis given the increasing authority of free market economics to dictate what appears on contemporary British stages, and the internalised censor that panoptical CCTV and social media is implanting within the minds of British citizens today

The spontaneity drain: the social pressures that shaped and then exiled Keith Johnstone's improvisation

Keith Johnstone’s Improvisation had an oppositional relationship to the social and historical conditions of 1950s Britain under which it developed. Its structure and performative dynamic were protests against the normalising forces exerted by the social elite upon the broader population and by civilised society upon the individual. Within this context, the Royal Court Theatre acted as an incubator that allowed Johnstone to develop his subversive theories of performance, drawing on elements of professional wrestling to break down the regimented conventions of the theatre space and enliven the spectator-performer relationship. Eventually Johnstone entered a self-imposed exile from the society that shaped this form of performance and established The Loose Moose Theatre in Calgary, Canada. This paper will analyse three relationships vital to this narrative: The oppositional reaction of Johnstone's improvisation to the social pressures of 1950's Britain, the creative glasshouse that The Royal Court Theatre provided for Johnstone within this broader cultural context, and the effects that the new social situation of Calgary, Canada had on Johnstone's practice. At the conclusion of the paper I will draw out the consequences of these analyses for contemporary British society and attempt to identify the normalising forces at work within this context, how our arts institutions and creative incubators might foster novel reactions to these pressures, and how public policy might be shaped in order to encourage artists to remain in Britain so that we might benefit from their continued contribution to our cultural discourses

Teaching occupational information in the social studies program.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

On the periodicity of linear and nonlinear oscillatory reconnection

(Abridged for ArXiv) An injection of energy towards a magnetic null point can drive reversals of current sheet polarity leading to time-dependent Oscillatory Reconnection, which is a possible explanation of how periodic phenomena can be generated when reconnection occurs in the solar atmosphere. However, the details of what controls the period of these oscillations is poorly understood, despite being crucial in assessing whether OR can account for observed periodic behaviour. This paper aims to highlight that different types of reconnection reversal are supported about null points, and that these are distinct from the oscillation on the closed-boundary, linear systems considered in the 1990s. In particular, we explore the features of a nonlinear oscillation local to the null point, and examine the effect of resistivity and perturbation energy on the period, contrasting it to the linear case. It is found that in the linear systems, the inverse Lundquist number dictates the period, provided the perturbation energy is small relative to the inverse Lundquist number defined on the boundary, regardless of the broadband structure of the initial perturbation. However, when the perturbation energy exceeds the threshold required for 'nonlinear' null collapse to occur, a complex oscillation of the magnetic field is produced which is, at best, only weakly-dependent on the resistivity. The resultant periodicity is strongly influenced by the amount of free energy, with more energetic perturbations producing higher-frequency oscillations. Crucially, with regards to typical solar-based and astrophysical-based input energies, we demonstrate that the majority far exceed the threshold for nonlinearity to develop. This substantially alters the properties and periodicity of both null collapse and subsequent OR. Therefore, nonlinear regimes of OR should be considered in solar and astrophysical contexts.Comment: Accepted in A&A, 5 Figures (1 animated