Belgrade Missive
I'm in Belgrade working on the promo video for Cynefin with Jelena, our inhouse film maker. She's asked me to write a narration and as per usual I've gone and rambled off the point, but it occurs to me very much on the point of the theory of Sensory Labyrinth Theatre. Here's the text as it stands in first draft.........
To dream to life shared moments in space and time where fear and mediocrity are transformed into awe and wonder and where the inner and the outer become one.
This is the artistic mission statement of Cynefin; the Sensory Labyrinth Community Theatre Company Artistic Director, Iwan Brioc and Associate Director, Mike Hotson dreamed to life in response to the lack of community arts that challenges people to confront the uncertainty of life.
Because of our aversion to uncertainty there’s a tendency in us all to channel our consciousness into a certain ‘mainstream’ groove. What Aldus Huxley called ‘the ruts of ordinary perception’. This is a way of seeing, doing and being which is willfully constricted to what we know or what we think we know.
The flaw in this plan, though, is that despite our attempts to escape the uncertainty, through distraction in worldly things or the convenient beliefs of religions, deep down most of us are numb with fear: terrified by the sense that the meaning of our short lives is evading us.
That reflexive consciousness which gives rise to this human existential predicament is the very property that allows us to make theatre. Not only can we remember ourselves yesterday and imagine ourselves tomorrow, we observe mental and physical events as if they were happening on a stage. We can even observe ourselves observing.
Cynefin uses something called Sensory Labyrinth Theatre to address this numbness, giving audiences the opportunity to confront the fear of uncertainty within a safe and compassionate environment.
Theatre and now film depict characters whose uncertain futures unfold into tragedy or comedy. It depends on the suspense and subsequent cathartic release gained from the audiences’ identification with these characters. It’s a kind of social contract whereby the audience agrees to give their attention and imagination to a certain space at a certain time. In return, the events enacted in that space and time will give them an emotional reward, not dissimilar to the biological contract whereby procreation is rewarded by the orgasm. Just as memory and imagination have allowed us to developed infinite ways of enjoying sex, postmodernism has brought about a variety of contrived ways of satisfying the social contract of theatre, through political, intellectual and aesthetic reward constructs.
Sensory Labyrinth Theatre, however, places the audience member at the centre of that uncertainty. Walking alone through a dark Labyrinth, the audience member comes upon sensory portals – scenes composed from the addition or subtraction of discreet sense stimulus, painted delicately onto the ‘canvass of nothingness’. Lost and alone and with very little to project outwards onto, the audiences’ object of identification becomes the ‘self’ - the traveler trying to make sense of this journey, not only along the path of the labyrinth but also in the life it symbolizes.
The immediacy of the audience members’ predicament inhibits normative cognition and at first there is panic. However, the mindfulness and compassion embodied in the inhabitants of the Labyrinth and the curiosity to continue along the path brings about a deep acceptance of the uncertainty. Under such conditions there can emerge a pre-reflexive awareness – a feeling of being alive entirely through the senses, like a child, present in each moment whilst also (unlike a child) one can observe the observer; a non-judgmental witnessing of the self as a character grasping unnecessarily for threads with which to sow together from experience and expectation a personal identity, the proverbial emperors new clothes.
In this way Cynefin works directly not with the social, biological, emotional or political contract but with the existential contract. We are born human and given reflexivity and the capacity for pre-reflexivity, but why? What’s our part of the deal? Why else other than to look at ourselves, and as Augusto Boal says, Theatre is the Art of looking at ourselves.
To dream to life shared moments in space and time where fear and mediocrity are transformed into awe and wonder and where the inner and the outer become one.
This is the artistic mission statement of Cynefin; the Sensory Labyrinth Community Theatre Company Artistic Director, Iwan Brioc and Associate Director, Mike Hotson dreamed to life in response to the lack of community arts that challenges people to confront the uncertainty of life.
Because of our aversion to uncertainty there’s a tendency in us all to channel our consciousness into a certain ‘mainstream’ groove. What Aldus Huxley called ‘the ruts of ordinary perception’. This is a way of seeing, doing and being which is willfully constricted to what we know or what we think we know.
The flaw in this plan, though, is that despite our attempts to escape the uncertainty, through distraction in worldly things or the convenient beliefs of religions, deep down most of us are numb with fear: terrified by the sense that the meaning of our short lives is evading us.
That reflexive consciousness which gives rise to this human existential predicament is the very property that allows us to make theatre. Not only can we remember ourselves yesterday and imagine ourselves tomorrow, we observe mental and physical events as if they were happening on a stage. We can even observe ourselves observing.
Cynefin uses something called Sensory Labyrinth Theatre to address this numbness, giving audiences the opportunity to confront the fear of uncertainty within a safe and compassionate environment.
Theatre and now film depict characters whose uncertain futures unfold into tragedy or comedy. It depends on the suspense and subsequent cathartic release gained from the audiences’ identification with these characters. It’s a kind of social contract whereby the audience agrees to give their attention and imagination to a certain space at a certain time. In return, the events enacted in that space and time will give them an emotional reward, not dissimilar to the biological contract whereby procreation is rewarded by the orgasm. Just as memory and imagination have allowed us to developed infinite ways of enjoying sex, postmodernism has brought about a variety of contrived ways of satisfying the social contract of theatre, through political, intellectual and aesthetic reward constructs.
Sensory Labyrinth Theatre, however, places the audience member at the centre of that uncertainty. Walking alone through a dark Labyrinth, the audience member comes upon sensory portals – scenes composed from the addition or subtraction of discreet sense stimulus, painted delicately onto the ‘canvass of nothingness’. Lost and alone and with very little to project outwards onto, the audiences’ object of identification becomes the ‘self’ - the traveler trying to make sense of this journey, not only along the path of the labyrinth but also in the life it symbolizes.
The immediacy of the audience members’ predicament inhibits normative cognition and at first there is panic. However, the mindfulness and compassion embodied in the inhabitants of the Labyrinth and the curiosity to continue along the path brings about a deep acceptance of the uncertainty. Under such conditions there can emerge a pre-reflexive awareness – a feeling of being alive entirely through the senses, like a child, present in each moment whilst also (unlike a child) one can observe the observer; a non-judgmental witnessing of the self as a character grasping unnecessarily for threads with which to sow together from experience and expectation a personal identity, the proverbial emperors new clothes.
In this way Cynefin works directly not with the social, biological, emotional or political contract but with the existential contract. We are born human and given reflexivity and the capacity for pre-reflexivity, but why? What’s our part of the deal? Why else other than to look at ourselves, and as Augusto Boal says, Theatre is the Art of looking at ourselves.
posted by ArmchairDJ at 10:27 am
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