For several years I have felt a calling to make a journey, or better, to engage a quest: to discover an authentic relationship with the world; and develop, with my fellows there, the ground for a dangerous conversation.
This Calling: to encounter the people – the people for whom the theatre is supposed to exist, and in whose ancestor’s need for a common exaltation, the theatre, I have been told, had its origins; to glean some sense of what the hunger of the race is? …what stories are people listening to? (what are they being told?)… and what are the stories that people are hoping for?; to confirm the ferocity and humility which the actor, in this time, must possess; to ask the questions: Who and What and How are the Poet, the Seer, Shaman, Shape Shifter, and the Metaphysician manifested in this time? …What, now, is the “space before the people”? …and what exists of Wonder in this age?
I want to learn from the gestures and actions of people who are not interested in aesthetics, or “art”, or “creativity” …or “the theatre”, about the pain and joy of being responsive to life as it happens – the motions of those who live their lives all of a sudden. I want to listen for, to hear, if there is a flesh bound yearning that can be considered “the ground of our (collective) being” — The Mystery: the stillness, silence and the darkness of the unknown where “the theatre” waits for the naïve, spontaneous embodiment of story; to discover the nascent impulse for a theatre whose reason-for-being exists in the simple dynamic acts of touching each others’ lives: the birth and rearing of children, the embrace – or estrangement – of family, the necessity of toil, the effort and ecstasy of imaginative flight, the enfolding of those loved, the wrestling with the unseen, and the act of burying the dead.
And then I will have to have a dangerous conversation with my fellows about what it means to be a Poet – one who is awake, one who is willing to risk their life to embrace and kiss the cheek of chaos…to suffer the meaninglessness, derision, terror, and the despotic in order to become “humble people who are willing to bear on their shoulders the irresistible beauty of all things.” (Lorca)
Provoked by 45 years of devising, performing and teaching theatre in the United States, I look to discover, through the actions of my fellows in the world, a deeper perspective on community and the necessity for what “we“ call theatre. As a means to support this Walkabout – this road of discovery – I am taking with me a performance, a set of lectures, and classes – all of which represent my explorations, practices and engagements with, what I now refer to as, a Dynamic Theatre and an Actor who is a Poet.