First Day

This is the first day of a year long project to research and develop the basis for a book about Sensory Labyrinth Theatre. Whether it will end up being specifically about this form of Theatre I'm not so sure. Perhaps there are not enough instances of this kind of theatre happening to
generate enough material for or warrant such a publication.

Sensory Labyrinth Theatre was invented by Theatre Anthropologist, Enrique Vargas with his work in Bogota University in the 80's. His international tour of a production called 'Ariadne's Thread' came to Wales in 1994 and it is there I caught and was inspired by this incredible performance mode.

I started a company called 'Cynefin' in 2000 with Community Artist Mike Hotson and together we developed a kind of hybrid Sensory Labyrinth Theatre (or mongrol) where we worked with communities to discover their collective sense memories and then worked with local artists and volunteers to incorporate these into a Sensory Labyrinth Theatre production.

Since then we have created project/performances in Ireland, Wales and Portugal and have played with the format -

• using it for community research and participation projects for festivals and events ('Cynefin 2000', Fishguard 2000; Eigse Festival, Carlow 2001)

• creating a kind of cross cultural 'Rites of Passage.' Bringing young people together to create labyrinths in wildreness environments (e.g. 'Sharing Youth Exchange'; 'Rites of Passage Training', Llanrwst, Wales 2005) and in indoor instillations. ('Energy' Labyrinth, Newport Wales 2001)

• working with people with disabilities to make a Labyrinth immersing people in environments and scenes that represented what the makers experienced every day ('O Labirinto', Porto, Portugal 2003)

• developed training in Immersive Arts using the kind of concepts and methods realized through the Sensory Labyrinth work ('Art to Heart', St. David's, Wales 2003)

• developed training leading to public 'thread' labyrinth performances ('Dedalus', Vairão, Portugal 2005)

• made the biggest Labyrinth in the world! A mile long path cut in the classical Cretan design through a dense pine plantation which is a semi permanent community garden, sculpture path and performance space for our annual Sensory Labyrinth Theatre performances for North Wales Stage (Caerdroia, 2005)

and some other experiments too.

Through all this one of the constant factors has been the incredible reaction of participants and audiences alike. I can't pretend to be suprised, having experienced the original 'Ariadne's Thread' but I am sometimes still overwhelmed by the obvious depth of feeling felt by audience members. A feeling they are often unable to articulate - "Words are not enough." being a common comment. Also common is something along the lines of "I'm strating a new life, my old life is over'. Or "I'm a Different Person Now" which is what I've adopted for the name of this project. Precisely because I want to find out with this project what people mean by this so that

1. I can be sure that I am doing no harm
2. I can better understand the psychological and physical processes occuring as one journeys through the Sensory Labyrinth
3. I can articulate these processes so that they or findings about them can have relevance to theatre in general and to other fields as well.
4. To know a little better what I'm doing!