The Next Spatter

I started this blog in March -- along with my website -- mostly as a way of defining an identity for myself that would be outside of my head and beyond my productions -- the one having limited space and access (that is, my head - apologies to Hamlet) and the other of limited duration (my productions).

But I didn't write too much here at first, except to refer a bit to some other stories, some rather far afield of theater (though to me somehow now related to a particular paradigm of thinking).

Doing the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab not only gave me something about which to write, it also has given me a modest number of readers (this blog surpassed 1,000 total page-views recently).

We Are In The Same Room.

In March, thinking about essays I might sometime write, I came up with the title "We Are In The Same Room." Since '05, when I saw Peter Brook's Tierno Bokar at Columbia, and went on to direct a Brook-inspired production of Wilder's Our Town, my theatrical thinking has been running in a particular direction -- or released like a caged animal to run in the direction it always wanted to.

I find recently that the zeitgeist has been moving in the same direction, and examples abound, including (not coincidentally I think) the use of a seemingly innocuous phrase again and again during the LCT Directors Lab: "in the room", referring primarily to rehearsal, but also reflecting an emerging group understanding and embrace of the nature of collaboration and presence. As the theater in America continues to undergo its biggest phase of change since the beginning of the non-profit regional movement, artists and managers will have to cope with collaboration and presence as increasingly insistent values that change the way we plan work, involve artists, and bring it to audiences. This is already happening in some places -- and getting more and more attention, which is the real point of where the zeitgeist is right now.

Nothing happens all at once, and everything I have to observe that is new is also old. But cultural advance always plays a game of leap-frog, doesn't it? Eventually, doing what has been done before, one finds one's self in a new place, doing something else.

What is really new is that what's old is losing it's power, despite it's size and inertia. All of which to say is that the post-modern avant-garde, now something like forty years old, is giving way to a new paradigm. In this paradigm, the avant-garde has been absorbed into the emerging mainstream, with a new leading edge that I've decided to call "post-identity."

Others are calling it "post-dramatic."

What I like best about these new namings, is that the "post" is the antecedent, and the objects, "identity" and "dramatic" are defined in hindsight, as they slip away... It's when we become conscious of the paradigm we were in, that we begin a new one. This is particular "new one" is characterized by an awareness of paradigm change, which tells me that this is really happening. But you do have to look to see it.

I am not a scholar or critic and I'm sure someone else is writing something about this somewhere else, but as the locus of my own experience, and as an artist, I see what I see and call it what I call it. The arts and our culture are moving into a period of "post-identity". I'll be expanding on this, as I draw it out from my perceptions, but as a function of the zeitgeist I bet you already understand what I mean. Michael Boyd, artistic director of the RSC, calls his efforts of the past few years "anti-zeitgeist", but he is "smelling," and is a part of, the new zeitgeist, in which who I am and who you are are not oppositional but shared.

Beckett feels funny and popular. Non-narrative events draw new audiences. Areas of the modern dance world are giving up resistance to capital-N Narrative, but still wanting it to be something else. Clowning is having a resurgence. There is a simultaneous explosion of new writing in some places, and devised or "theatrically-written" work in others. Narrative itself is having its outer layer of factual naturalism stripped away to reveal itself for what it has always been: the natural movement of collaborative representations of reality.

Narrative, at it's core, is an unfolding living shape, not a psychological dream. Live participation in form supplies its own living content. And theater, far from being a representation of another reality, is an experience of the reality we are really in.

It has always been this way, but we haven't exactly noticed that, have we? We think that there is, one the one hand, us, and on the other, art, but really it all happens together, every time. The old guard called this transcendence. I think it is what is really there to see, not other, but here. This is not a discovery--but it is emerging into the mainstream and so it means something different -- and it is the way it is all becoming. We are created in art. The theater creates us, or we resist, which is a creation of its own kind.

And a character is a phenomenon, just like an idea. And ideas are not dreams.

I've done a couple things since the Lab that relate to this topic, and I will be writing more about them... how praxis got lost in drama, how the virtual world brings us closer to the real one, and how institutional theater is -- and will be -- changing...