The ideas presented here have been distilled from direct experience in group paratheatre processes since 1977. Comments, questions and critiques welcomed. -- Antero Alli, director; ParaTheatrical ReSearch. e-mail to: [email protected]
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 tends to be romanticized, mythologized and stratified into hierarchical niches between "high" and "low" culture. This thing called "culture" also arouses powerful investments of pride and status from those who falsely assume that the culture they live in is their own. Nobody owns culture; we are more likely owned by it.
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 own or create as much as participate in, augment, diminish, corrupt, subvert, and develop with. We act on culture and are acted on by culture.
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 the nature of their religions, art, mythologies, commerce, education, community rituals, and family values. The power and presence of the planet acts on people, just as the power and presence of people act on the planet in a mutual feeding ceremony. Any human culture achieves longevity by the success of its sustaining rituals and theatre is one of these rituals.
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 instrument. Specifically, we must discover processes that expose interactions between the internal landscape and our immediate womb environment within its existing cultural zeitgeist. In context to paratheatre, this involves gaining access to our internal vertical sources -- what can be experienced as energy/information flowing through us from above, within us and below us -- and the expression of its Presence to the external horizontal world of others.
Historically this interaction 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, Tantric and Vedic yogas, cosmologies and meditation practices have met this spiritual task to salvation, redemption, and/or enlightenment. Add to this, the numerous systems of psychotherapy and mysticism exploring this same process involving dialogue between conscious 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 arrived with the compelling work of the late visionary of the theatre, Jerzy Grotowski (Aug. 11, 1933 - Jan. 14, 1999) who coined the term 'paratheatre' to address a stage of work his group was doing between 1969 and 1977 in the forests of 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).
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 impress an audience. Instead, paratheatre involves the self-created pressures of executing songs and ritual actions with enough commitment, skill and talent to transform the instrument of the doer.
VERTICALITY and ASOCIAL INTENT
It can be 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 spontaneous responses, or in any way impedes our access to the internal landscape, then no paratheatre work can occur. When any given group becomes preoccupied with the social personas and games played to meet our social needs -- for wanting friendship, courtship, a sense of belonging, approval, security, status, etc -- we are diverted away from our verticality and begin feeding on more horizontal energies and sources. This does not imply any wrong-doing but simply a distraction from initiating paratheatre work.
"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 function of paratheatre is to increase commitment to verticality and the transmission of its presence in the horizontal realms of the world. Since paratheatre challenges and nurtures an ongoing commitment to vertical sources, the initial training processes requires a shift from depending on external "horizontal" sources of energy (other people, external music, etc) to a increasing degrees of internal dependence. This shift demands the realisation of a certain non-responsibility to others so we can increase the force of our commitment to whatever state, condition, or action we find ourselves in -- free of whatever social considerations we may have about what others think, feel or say about it.
This shift towards greater self-accountability expresses a necessary and preliminary stage of paratheatre work characterized by an asocial intent. Asocial is neither social nor anti-social; paratheatre cannot occur in a socially sanctioned climate nor a socially hostile climate. An asocial climate supports experiences and interactions that bypass social considerations in lieu of more honest, spontaneous, and truthful responses. Without this asocial shift, the "default" conditioning of our local culture's socialization 'programs' tends to dominate the tone of interpersonal interaction corrupting the quality of work with cliches and conditioned reactions.
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. Rather than depend on the audience and other performers for support and energy, we learn to source ourselves by accessing 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
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. This Self-sourcing opens up the playing fields for an ever-expanding Self-acceptance, a process that naturally blossoms in a greater acceptance of, and empathy for, others. This empathy born of Self-acceptance allows us to bypass the trap of narcissism.
Asocial intent can be established in several ways. When each participant vows to become responsible for their own safety and creative states, the group as a whole can relax the conditioned parent/child concerns for helping, saving, guiding, and/or judging others. This vow also establishes self-accountibility for one's personal fears and frustrations in the midst of any creative process, a critical step towards developing self-discipline. Overall, in paratheatre we are looking to discover new ways of being, relating and doing that embraces our verticality as a foundation for more scrupulous interactions with the world, i.e., how to interact with the world without losing touch with our verticality.
Asocial intent can also be discovered by assigning value to space itself. Expanding our spatial awareness can support an asocial climate. When we can direct our attention off of ourselves and onto the space around, below and above us, we can begin physically moving through space with more awareness and receptivity. This spatial-awareness ritual develops as we honor the spaces between other individuals in the room. Imagine 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 and moving throughout these spaces. By keeping the attention on the space itself -- rather than the things and people in the space -- spatial pathways avail themselves, resulting in a more fluid group unity; picture a swarm of self-governing bodies in motion.
This kind of dynamic spatial awareness can dramatically increase the sense of trust between participants by the respect shown for everyone's personal space. When our personal space is honored, we naturally feel more safe to open up, play and celebrate the freedom of our being -- a freedom from seeking acceptance, approval and other inhibiting social considerations about how we should behave or appear.
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 refereed 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 due 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 and the diminishing presence of Imagination in the cultural mind at large -- Imagination, the canary in the coal mine of the collective unconscious. In both personal and collective realms, 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 absorbent 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 actual, or taking any image or any idea of a reality for the reality itself. It's where we are eating the menu instead of the meal and 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, procreate, domesticate, 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
sacrifice and increasing the force of commitment
Part Three: The Performer/Audience Romance
talent and skill, the total act, love, the No-Form technique
Part Four: Self-Observation and Ego
on playing contraries, 3 stages of paratheatre
Part Five: Double Vision
on the first and second attentions
Part Six: Self-initiation
bridge between worlds, what drains the power of dreaming
Part Seven: A Cultural Overview
the war in heaven and a society gone mad
