culture
We tend to think of “culture” as a thing and also a very big thing; hence, the smaller subcultures, microcultures, macrocultures. Culture expresses a dynamic process, not a thing, that manifests itself in similar ways regardless of size. Individuals can participate in a culture, as can couples, groups, "subcultures" and entire sectors of any given society. The phenomena of culture is also romanticized, mythologized and stratified into hierarchical spectrums between high and low culture. This thing called "culture" also arouses powerful investments of status, propriety and pride from those who identify with what they call their culture.
According to Dr. C.S. Hyatt’s anthropological theories, the impersonal (and unsentimental) basis of all human culture expresses no more and no less than genes interacting with geography. This mutual feeding process -- the earth feeds us, we feed the earth -- bonds human DNA with its immediate womb environment. We settle somewhere, figure out how to survive and develop relationships inside the power fields of the bioregion sustaining us. Culture is not something we "create" as much as participate in, augment, diminish, corrupt, subvert, develop with and otherwise act on and be acted upon by.
Over time -- decades, centuries, ages -- this genes/geography interaction slowly crystallizes into symbols, languages, and artifacts that encode, encrypt and transmit its characteristics as a distinct cultural identity. Cultures developing in mountainous regions differ from cultures stimulated along oceanic shorelines or in deserts or lush valleys or forests. Each unique bioregion influences its people in specific ways that inform their reilgions, art, mythologies, commerce, education, community and family life. The power and presence of the planet acts on people, just as the power and presence of people act on the planet. Any human culture achieves longevity by the success of its sustaining rituals and theatre is one of these rituals. The question this manifesto addresses and attempts to answer is: how can the sustaining ritual of theatre be renewed and sustained when it loses vitality and dies ?
paratheatre
As with any sustaining ritual, the nature and purpose of theatre must evolve and change over time to meet the emergent needs of its originating culture. Like a snake shedding old skin, any culture grows by outgrowing itself. Any theatre that does not outgrow itself ceases to function as a vital sustaining ritual. Dead theatre results. For theatre to remain vital, a kind of “paratheatre” must be developed and utilized to explore, nurture and challenge the performer’s innermost primordial interactions between his/her own vertical sources (via the DNA/Central Nervous System/Body feedback loop) and the immediate womb environment of the existing cultural zeitgesit.
Historically this dialogue has been achieved by various esoteric schools utilizing various methods of sense-deprivation (withdrawal of identification from external stimuli) towards realignment with vertical sources. Monastic orders, various Tantric and Vedic yogas, cosmologies and meditation practices have met this spiritual task towards the promise of salvation and/or enlightenment. Add to this, the numerous systems of psychotherapy and mysticism exploring this same process in the dialogue between Ego and the Unconscious through such examples as Carl Jung's Individuation, Dada Bhagwan's Self-realization, Dr. Abraham Mazlow's Self-Actualization, G.I. Gurdjieff's Self-Work and so forth.
However, rarely have any of these methods ever been used for the purpose of regenerating the sustaining ritual of theatre, its originating culture and/or the culture of the society at large. One strident exception to all of this arrived with the compelling work of the late visionary of the theatre, Jerzy Grotowski (Aug. 11, 1933 - Jan. 14, 1999). Grotowski coined the term 'paratheatre' to address a stage of work his group was doing between 1969 and 1977 in Poland. It should also be known that Grotowski claimed no actual 'legacy of paratheatre' due, in part, to the transmutations his work underwent over three decades (and beyond his death at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy) and also to his abhorence and avoidance of canonization.
With respect to Grotowski's seminal work and the current and future work of his protoges in Pontedera, the term "paratheatre" will be used hereafter to reflect my ongoing paratheatrical research here in Berkeley California USA since 1977. Generally speaking, I refer to paratheatre as any private, non-performance oriented process of group ritual dynamics involving rigorous physical and vocal techniques for accessing, embodying and expressing the internal landscape. Without an audience the focus shifts away from the external pressures to perform or play for an audience and towards the self-created pressures of executing songs and ritual actions with enough commitment, skill and talent to transform the instrument of the actor.
VERTICALITY and ASOCIAL INTENT
It can be healthy and natural for any group to meet, develop rapport and do things together to form bonds as a community-building social event. However if these same social bonds inhibit or frustrate the expression of true feelings and responses and/or in any way block our access to the internal landscape then, no paratheatre can result. When a group becomes preoccupied with the masks and games played to meet our social needs -- for friendship, courtship, belonging, approval, security, status and so forth -- we are diverted away from verticality, from those vital and asocial sources of energy and information flowing from above, within and below.
"With verticality the point is not to renounce part of our nature; all should retain its natural place: the body, the heart, the head, something that is "under our feet" and something that is "over the head." All like a vertical line, and this verticality should be held taut between organicity and the awareness. Awareness means the consciousness which is not linked to language (the machine for thinking), but to Presence." -- Jerzy Grotowski
One purpose of paratheatre is to increase the force of commitment to this verticality towards the transmission of its presence to the horizontal realms of the world. Paratheatre training must challenge and nurture an ongoing commitment to and dependence on vertical sources. To implement this shift from external to internal dependence, a certain asocial intent must be applied within the actual working climate where paratheatre occurs. Without this shift from the social to the asocial, the "default" conditioning of our local culture's socialization 'programs' tends to dominate the tone of all self-work and interpersonal interaction. When such a tone dominates, the quality of work suffers from social cliches and conditioned reactions, rather than being revitalized by the wellsprings of our most authentic, spontaneous responses.
Any asocial climate naturally frustrates social needs for seeking acceptance, approval, status, courting and flirting, belonging, and other needs for emotional and social support. An asocial intent and climate can temporarily suspend these external motivations by replacing them with a deepening internal dependence on our vertical sources for support. The initial stages of this shift necessitate a certain non-responsibility to others. Rather than depend on the audience and other performers for support and energy, we source ourselves. We learn to access what Carl Jung calls "the archetype of The Self.
"The Self is a quantity that is supra ordinate to the conscious ego. It embraces not only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche, and is therefore, so to speak, a personality which we also are. The Self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the center of consciousness." -- Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
In other words, the individual Ego emerges from the Self -- the Self does not emerge from the Ego -- and just as the Self gives birth to the Ego, the Ego gives birth to individual consciousness. This type of Self-sourcing, not to be confused with the pathology of deadend narcissism, consistently exposes the self (ego) to the Self. The purpose of this Self-sourcing is to find an ever-expanding Self-acceptance naturally blossoming towards greater acceptance of, and empathy, for others. To the performer this asocial process can release a greater presence of generosity through the act of a total offering of the Self.
Asocial intent can be established in several ways. One way occurs after each participant takes a pledge to become totally responsible for their own safety and creative states. This vow establishes self-accountibility for one's fears and frustrations in the midst of any creative process. It also sets up a non-responsibility to others in the social sense. Asocial is not antisocial; we do not create in a socially hostile environment. Commiting fully to this silent vow of self-responsibility opens the door to the vast spectrum of our Humanity within us as individuals via the energetic stratas and complexes of the internal landscape. We are looking to discover ways of being, relating and doing that embraces our verticality as a foundation for more scrupulous interaction with the world, i.e., how to interact with others and the world with verticality intact.
Asocial intent can also be discovered by any heightened value assigned to the property of space itself. Expanding spatial awareness can support an asocial climate. This process can be demonstrated by directing one's attention onto the space around, below and above oneself while physically moving through space and by relating to the space between others while moving through space. Imagine a large room with many individuals moving about without relating or looking at each other but rather, engaged in the moment-to-moment process of relating only to the space between each other. By keeping the attention on the space itself -- rather than the things and people in the space -- certain spatial pathways avail themselves, resulting in a more fluid group unity; picture a swarm of self-governing bodies in motion.
Any ongoing practice of spatial awareness can dramatically increase the sense of trust between people by the respect shown for each other's personal space. When we no longer relate out of fear or distrust, our more authentic selves can naturally emerge, come out to play and celebrate the freedom of being, a freedom from seeking acceptance, approval and other inhibiting social considerations.
More on paratheatre at:
Paratheatre F.A.Q.
the emotional plague
“The emotional plague” is a term initially proposed by Wilhelm Reich for the irrational insistence on beliefs and ideas that depend on dissociation of mind from body. Reich also refered to it as "the neurotic character in destructive action on the social scene". Though this body/mind dissociation has plagued humanity for centuries, it wasn’t until the “The Age of Reason” that intellect was exalted to god-like status thanks to the immense success of Newton’s theories and Descartes’ “Meditations”. Since then, the snowballing effect has gripped the collective psyche with overly-literalist thinking made even more dismal by the diminishing presence of Imagination in the culture at large. Imagination is a canary in the coal mine of the collective unconscious. Whether it’s on the personal or colllective levels, imagination death precedes the death of the soul.
In the current Hypermedia Era, the body/mind fissure has been dramatized via massive collective projection of vital physical, emotional, and sexual energy into mentally absorbant mediums such as the internet, VR technology, video games, mass media advertising, and too much television. If the emotional plague is maintained by constant disassociation of mind and body, we can expose the virus wherener we are mistaking the virtual for the real, or taking any image or any idea of a reality for the reality itself, where we are eating the menu instead of the meal, mistaking the map for the territory, etc.
Two modern-day symptoms of the emotional plague in the Hypermedia Era have surfaced as: 1) an increasing trend towards de-personalization, homogenization and gentrification and 2) a steadily decreasing capacity for direct experience. As we lose trust and faith in the legitimacy of firsthand experience, we can naturally become more vulnerable and compliant to the dictates of external sources of authority and its endless cycles of obedience and punishment.
Without enough trust in our own innate sensibilities, intuitions and instincts we suffer from an absence of vital information, leading to a growing incapacity to distinguish between the real from the illusory, the true from the false, and what's right from what's wrong. Without self-trust -- trust in our own direct experience -- we remain as timid children dependent on parental approval and guidance for the way we live, work, create and die.
What is real and what is an illusion ? Do you know ? Do you care ? If you don’t know and can say so, you are probably just waking up. If you don't know and/or don't care, don't bother; you are probably fast asleep. The emotional plague doesn’t care either and you will soon be assimilated, if you have not already been consumed. If you have come to know what’s real in life, dare to live by your vision, your truth; your example acts as a beacon to those lost at sea in their struggle to survive as living, awakening human beings.
MANIFESTO LINKS
Part Two: Integrity Loss and Recovery
the force of commitment, what feeds the being, the good fight
Part Three: The Performer/Audience Romance
talent and skill, the total act, the technique of No-Form
Part Four: Part Four: Self-Observation and Ego
figuring out ego, from being to playing, 3 stages of paratheatre
Part Five: Double Vision
on the first and second attentions
Part Six: Self-initiation
on the bridge between worlds, what drains the power of dreaming
