Imagine, if you will, an audience-filled theatre. House lights dim, and all noise recedes to an anticipated, whispered rustling of clothing, handbags and programs. A deeper quiet descends.
Spotlight.
An actress enters, commanding centre-stage. Resting on the fingers of both hands she proudly bears a jewelled, silver box. Eloquently introducing us to the box, the actress describes it’s textures, it’s dimensions, until we are guided now, to see it there, so well-lit, so shiny and distinct. Her playfully insightful descriptions of the box are witty, scintillating, and, within the talented scope of her performance she reveals the very depths of this box’s soul to us. Effortlessly now, we recognise that the box is exactly what we are being directed to see, and we find congruence in both the performed presentation of a prized object, and in our own ability to comprehend exciting new concepts surrounding the box. We can only imagine how it would feel in our own fingers…
As we carefully process our impressions, positioning the memories of the dynamic new-box-performance deep within our minds, a new and different actor emerges from a shadowy zone upstage, shuffling out of an area we hadn’t noticed until now.
Surprisingly, and gradually, we become aware that this actor has not only arrived from somewhere previously hidden, (from some disquieting depth of darkness upon that mysterious stage), but by his very posture and his slow motion of progress, his arrival and especially his purpose is made more obscure, and we are confused now, confronted, bothered by the muted stage-lighting in which he is attempting to perform his part.
“He must be less important than the first performer.”
Muttering and ambling around the stage upon his restless limbs, words and gestures fluttering, his hands are hidden from our eyes, until suddenly we know, inexplicably that he is surely concealing from us the very item that we are now quite ready to see. “Isn’t he obligated to show it to us?”
His monologue is vague as he rambles in abstracted, distant ideas, all the while furtively moving some shadowy object around inside his coat-pocket, only to palm it rapidly into the other hand, that now lingers, drifting behind his back and well out of sight. If you look around now, you will see that all our necks are straining as we awkwardly stretch our bodies to be higher up in our seats.
“What is that thing?”
You can sense it now, our slow-dawning annoyance at the sudden realisation we have become his captive toys. Instinctively charged, we are utterly entranced, determined trackers on the scent. Enthralled by even the slightest shift in his posture, we lean forward, engaged, driven by a strangely physical hunger to discover the identity and the very nature of a valuable object that he has not yet, even once alluded to holding in his hands…
My aim in writing this paper is to link a few of my own practice-led findings with some emerging ideas about the implementation of creative methods in various learning applications, and in particular, developing unconventional teaching methods aimed at engaging marginalised or liminal identity.
Whilst reading anthropologist Victor Turner’s 1967 essay Betwixt and Between it dawned on me that the renowned director, Peter Brook is describing the very same void of ritual transformation and initiation as Turner describes, in his own 1968 treatise The Empty Space, albeit from a performing arts perspective. Brook’s reputation for evoking a powerful theatre of experimentation is predicated upon an unconventional approach to creative agency that he crafts in fusion with his highly disciplined troupe ‘to reject cliché imitations of reality and to search for something more real in himself’ (Brook p26, 1968).
In an analysis of Brook’s motivating rationale, Basserab Nicolescu commented that
A lot of the exercises elaborated by Peter Brook have as their precise aim the development of the state of unity between thought, body and feelings by liberating the actor from an over-cerebral approach. In this way, the actor can be organically linked with him/herself and act as a unified ‘whole’ being, rather than as a fragmented one.
Turner, intensely fascinated by an anthropological analysis of performance, focused much of his final years of research on Richard Schechner’s theatre methods, and sought to document the inherent power-potential of liminal identity in a transitional location of self-initiation.
Turner strove to interpret and understand the unlimited personal development opportunities that he perceived during his encounters within the ritual void of theatre performance. Turner said
Liminality is the realm of primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence. As in the works of Rabelais, there is a promiscuous intermingling and juxtaposing of the categories of event, experience, and knowledge, with a pedagogic intention.
As a thalidomide effected person, much of my early childhood was spent in learning how to adapt my own system to meet the one that digitally suited just about everyone else. The behavioural flexibility that I gained from considering and attempting to meet those challenges enabled me to develop a range of skills which I have subsequently used and refined in my current occupation as an artist and educator. Adaptivism, a term I devised to describe a range of the core, development concepts that are central to my arts practice, is best explained as a system of flexible attitudes, responses, and unconventional behaviours resulting from a tenacious desire to overcome physical, mental and emotional challenges caused by my pre-birth injuries.
In my life, and as a community artist working adaptively, I have observed that inside each of us dwells a hidden world of character fragments; multiple pieces of a complex, core identity formed by an incalculable variety of responses to life-exposure.
I have pondered the idea that our creative expressions were the extrapolated reverberations of our inner, personal meanings, projected as encoded, outer narratives, frequently read as archetypes, metaphors, symbols, semiotics and privately designed codes.
Anthropologist Georges Gusdorf articulates;
Every work of art is a projection from the interior realm into exterior space where in becoming incarnated it achieves consciousness of itself. Consequently there is need of a second critique that instead of verifying the literal accuracy of the narrative or demonstrating its artistic value would attempt to draw out its innermost, private significance by viewing it as a symbol, as it were, or the parable of a consciousness in quest of its own truth.
Such a fluid state of theoretical actualities that Gusdorf describes inhabits an inter-cultural flask of idiomatic languages with which we agree to assume a form of congruent, intellectual identity in the outer spaces of our social obligations and coherently projected outer selves. Yet, we must also wonder how we may powerfully resolve our personal and collectively wounded selves, attaining deeper levels of sensory acuity. How do we creatively enable ourselves and each other to encounter and provide greater states of connectedness, in positive conditions of social belonging? How may we grow from living an identity fortified by the infinitely creative strategies and resources of our extraordinary inner selves?
As a performance director, I have observed an infinite number of subtle, social dialects existing within any urban community of multicultured peoples. These tenacious cultural dialects, often non-verbally communicated, can form impenetrable barriers to social integration. Operating as social signals, cultural dialects commonly go unnoticed outside of the tribe, or are frequently perceived as dangerous codes, misinterpreted as the dysfunctional behaviour patterns of the other. This largely unacknowledged language realm presents, in its own way, a complex phenomenon, a kind of collective rejection that powerfully constructs a silent, hostile buffer, perpetuating issues of social alienation, disconnection, separateness.
Improvisation, as a creative learning method, unconditionally allows full acknowledgment and free expression of ‘the disturbing story’. Art making brings meaningful release of inner stress in the formulation of figurative or symbolic narratives of trauma; art speaks to, and of, our personal and our collective pain, art reflects our losses and disperses suffering in the deep recognitions that occur for both artist and beholder.
The film excerpt below is extracted from a short feature film I wrote and directed in 2008, titled Blue Colour, which was based on a true story that occurred during a therapeutic interaction I shared with a 12 year old boy with severe autism spectrum disorders in 2004. I wanted my film to show a powerful, non-verbal interaction resulting from a chance encounter, and I wanted this particular narrative to occur beyond the stereotypical, cultural locations of a clinical setting or in the urban residential landscape. The action takes place in the dense ambience of a rainforest, which is an unpredicatble platform in which to develop a film, yet one that provided a potent, theatrical canvas for my actor’s non-verbal dialogue to emerge. The performed version was largley a collaborated improvisation, shot in one long, continuous take, and the unspoken narrative beautifully interpreted my own original encounter. The actors show the timeless play of two people lost in a shared retreat, hidden from the tension of their internal and external social oppressions.
The actors perform an elaborate, non-verbal, non-traditional, male initiation ceremony that happens within the sheltering arms of a huge, yellow carrabeen tree in Boombana forest. Their initiation sequence utilises painted hands as a symbolic device for their turbulent expressions; whereby the actor’s very private interactions are recorded in blue handprints. The intercultural dialogue empowers both men to each hold strongly to a newly initiated self, one that overcomes oppressive manipulations from those that would otherwise seek to control and prohibit their carefully coded, private language of intuitive teaching and learning. Men’s business.
As a metaphor for marginalised people, Dark Horses may well live in silence, in states of pain, with illness, in isolation, rejected, culturally and socially excluded as different; sheltering their capacity for charisma; unseen, unheard, tremulous in the tension of their reigned-in, unexpressed power.
Figuratively, The Dark Horse is also a vibrant archetype of transformation, one whose emergence into light symbolically represents the products of an artist’s creative process flowing forth from an inner space of deeply personal mystery, out into the public world of interactivity, demonstrating the ephemeral beauty of the birth of an abstracted, hidden self out into the world.
The womb from which dark horses emerge is clearly Brooks’ Empty Space, it is Turner’s Ritual Void of Transformation, his Betwixt and Between, it is Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. It is a world where uncertain dreamers bide their time; watching and waiting for a coded signal, for a clarion call, awaiting an innate urge to leap forth, claiming and articulating all that was hidden in their assumed ineptitude, within their dark dormancy.
The creative engagement of improvised performance is a learning device that is always empowering, in that, by the end of the rehearsal phase, each performer has come to use, trust and totally claim their own voice in the performed story; previously imposed creative self-limits are shed; become fallen, discarded, naturally, effortlessly lost. Emerging as performers, (culturally supported, personally motivated and creatively engaged), the cast are suddenly, urgently ready to leap forth, in astonishing demonstrations of intuitive skill and raw, natural ability. The developmental benefits of such creative materialisation is palpable and breathtaking to observe. Culturally, and socially, the actor’s interactions begin to imbue and evoke a sort of collective, healing nutrition, a kind of creative identity ‘mana’ that ignites a wholesome new kind of pride to arise, surfacing first in the creative self, spreading out to family and beyond, feeding whole communities in all directions.
Peter Brook has said of his own experiemental methods during the ‘grand experiment’, of his visionary tour of North Africa, with the entire company of the International Centre for Theatre Research
Slowly we worked towards different wordless languages: we took an event, a fragment of experience and made exercises that turned them into forms that could be shared. We encouraged the actors to see themselves not only as improvisers, lending themselves blindly to their inner impulses, but as artists responsible for searching and selecting amongst form, so that a gesture or a cry becomes like an object that he discovers and even remoulds. We experimented with and came to reject the traditional language of masks and make-ups as no longer appropriate. We experimented with silence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brook, Peter 1968, The Empty Space Touchstone, NY
Daly, Owen, Source Material on Jerzy Grotowski from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, op. cit http://owendaly.com/jeff/grotowsm.htm sourced June, 2007
Deck, Alice A 1990 Autoethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Noni Jabavu and Cross-Disciplinary Discourse Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No 2, 20th Century Autobiography pp. 237 – 256 St Louis University Viewed 23. 3.2010 JSTOR
Geertz, Clifford 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books/Perseus, NY
Heilpern, John 1977, The Conference of the Birds, Faber and Faber, GB
Kaplan Frances, 2007 Studio Practice as Social Action Jessica Kingsley Publishers NY
Nicolescu, Basarab, translated by David Williams Peter Brook and Traditional Thought Gurdjieff International Review Viewed 20th August 2007 http://www.gurdjieff.org/nicolescu3.htm
Stanislavski, C. and Hobgood, Burnett M. Stanislavski’s Preface to An Actor Prepares Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 229-232 The Johns Hopkins University Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/3208219
Turner, V, 1974, Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society.
Williams, David, 1988 Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook, Methuen, UK
Dark horse is a term used to describe a little-known person or thing that emerges to prominence, especially in a competition of some sort.[1] Benjamin Disraeli provides the earliest known reference to the phrase in The Young Duke, 1831: The young Duke. Book i. Chap. v. Copyright © Gary Martin, 1996 – 2010 http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/108200.html
Definitions of Othering http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/rww03/othering.htm
