Consciousness Theatre Literature and the Arts

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Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts



Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts

Edited by

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS



Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe

This book first published 200 6 by

Cambridge Scholars Press

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright ©2006 Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-904303-63-3



T ABLE OF C ONTENTS

Introduction..........................................................................................................xi

Chapter OneF. David PeatArt, Science and Consciousness............................................................................1

Chapter TwoRalph Yarrow

The Performance of Consciousness: The Consciousness of Performance ..........13

Chapter ThreeJade McCutcheonExplorations under (Below) Standing Consciousness: The Actor’s

Altered State in Performance—Actor as Shaman ........................................27

Chapter Four Michael Morgan

Creative Chaos in Fitzmaurice Voicework..........................................................34

Chapter FiveJennifer Ewing PierceEmotional “Lifeworlds”: Toward a Phronetic Understanding of an

Ontology of Acting ......................................................................................41

Chapter SixSam Kogan and Helen Pierpoint (Paper presented by Alex Dower)

The Science of Acting and Consciousness..........................................................52

Chapter SevenJessica Bockler The Actor’s Self:A Transpersonal Exploration of the Actor-Character Relationship.....................60

Chapter EightDuska Radosavljevi ć

Believe it or Not? Suspension of Disbelief and Emotional Responses toFiction ..........................................................................................................70



Table of Contentsvi

Chapter NineJude JamesThe Porous Body As Ontological Site - Interface For A-Located

Realities........................................................................................................83

Chapter TenRaymond MunroWitness Consciousness and the Acting Process..................................................92

Chapter ElevenMonica White NdounouThe Paradox of Acting for an African American Actress .................................101

Chapter TwelveOrnella CorazzaConsciousness and Japanese Martial Arts.........................................................110

Chapter ThirteenMargaret ColdironThe Actor And The Mask: The Mover Moved..................................................117

Chapter FourteenDaniel Meyer-DinkgräfeTheatre and the Vedanta Philosophy of Action.................................................124

Chapter FifteenKarla Shacklock Delving into the Dancer’s Consciousness -‘The Dance Consciousness

Model’........................................................................................................130

Chapter SixteenMaya N. Öztürk Through the Body: Corporeality and Consciousness at the Performance

Site .............................................................................................................143

Chapter SeventeenPatrick Colm HoganImagining What You Can Do: Free Will, Creativity, and Art...........................159



Table of Contents vii

Chapter EighteenWilliam S. Haney IIThe Posthuman, Short Fiction and Consciousness............................................168

Chapter NineteenDaphne Grace21st Century Approaches to Postcolonial Studies: Incorporating

Consciousness ...........................................................................................178

Chapter TwentyElpida-Sophia ChristianakiAspects of Political Consciousness in Jean Anouilh’s Adaptation

of Sophocles’ Antigone..............................................................................188

Chapter Twenty-OneIoana SionThe Shape of the Beckettian Self:Godot and the Jungian Mandala...................197

Chapter Twenty-TwoCharles WhiteheadSocial Display and the Evolution Of Human Self-Consciousness ....................208

Chapter Twenty-ThreeMarianne O’ BrienAttentive Minds: Aesthetics and Ethics at the Intersection ...............................222

Chapter Twenty-Four Milan JarosThe Neo-Baroque Toyness of the Narratable Self.............................................232

Chapter Twenty-FiveDaniel WattUs and Them! The consciousness of puppets and other abject objects .............240

Chapter Twenty-SixKaroline Gritzner The Fading of the Subject in Sarah Kane’s Later Work....................................249

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Myer TaubThe Second Mowing .........................................................................................258



Table of Contentsviii

Chapter Twenty-EightAnthony EnnsSpiritualism, Writing Machines, and Mediations of Consciousness .................269

Chapter Twenty-NineJeffrey Strayer Consciousness, Art, and the Limits of Abstraction in Art.................................278

Chapter ThirtyJohn Danvers…of the spangled mind: notes on art, awakening, becoming…........................296

Chapter Thirty-OneAmy IonelIs Consciousness a Verb?..................................................................................319

Chapter Thirty-TwoGeoffrey KayTranscendence and Throwing: The Experience of Making Pottery ..................331

Chapter Thirty-ThreeAvi RosenArt at the Event Horizon ...................................................................................340

Chapter Thirty-Four Tone RoaldEmotions in Art Appreciation: a Psychological-Phenomenological

Investigation into Experiences with Visual Art..........................................352

Chapter Thirty-FivePaul StapletonDialogic Relationships in Extra-Disciplinary Performance...............................358

Chapter Thirty-SixElena Cologni‘Present-Memory: Liveness Versus Documentation And The Audience’s

Memory Archive In Performance Art’.......................................................368



Table of Contents ix

Chapter Thirty-SevenMartha BlassniggClairvoyance, Cinema and Consciousness ........................................................387

Chapter Thirty-EightMichael PuntCinema, Technology and Clairvoyance.............................................................400

Chapter Thirty-NineRobert PepperellLocating the Screen: Mind, World, and Dialethic Logic...................................405

Chapter FortyManjiree GokhaleImportance of Yoga in Music Education...........................................................412

Contributors.......................................................................................................419

Index..................................................................................................................434



Introductionxii

Notes

1 See www.aber.ac.uk/tfts/journal

2 The books in theTheatre and Consciousness series are Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe,Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential (2005);Michael Mangan, Performing (Dark) Arts: a Cultural History of Conjuring (2006) Anwen Jones,Consciousness and Symbolist Theatre: Immediacy of

Presence (2007) Ralph Yarrow, Peter Malekin and William S. Haney II,Sacred Theatre (2008)

3 The books in the Rodopi series are Amy IoneVisualizing Innovation: Cross-currents in art, science, technology and visual studies (2005). William S.Haney II,Cybercultures, Cyborgs, and Science Fiction. Consciousness and the

Posthuman (2006). Robert Pepperell, Michael Punt, David Surman, eds.Transdisciplinary Connections: Technology, Film and Consciousness (2006),John Danvers, Picturing Mind: Consciousness, Art and Experimental Texts (2006), Daphne M. Grace, Re-locating consciousness: Diasporic writers and the Dynamics of Literary Experience (2007) and Anna Bonshek,The Big Fish:Consciousness, Sound, Structure and Form (2007)



CHAPTER O NE

F. DAVID PEAT

ART , SCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS "The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself through me. I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting.... I become the

subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objectiveconsciousness.”

Paul Cézanne, quoted in Cézanne and Modernism: The Poetics of Painting , JoyceMedina, State University of New York Press, 1955

"I have always claimed that painting's prime function is to dictate what the world looks like ... What we imagine to be the 'objective' look of everything and anything islargely a complex, a weave of textures, forms and colours which we have learned,more or less unconsciously, from painting, and have superimposed upon external reality. The actual 'objective' appearance of things (of anything and everything) is

something that does not exist..." Patrick Heron, “Solid Space in Cézanne”, Modern Painters Vol 9 (1), 1996 .

.It would be difficult to find two more striking statements than those which head

this essay. In one, Paul Cézanne, speaking of his own experience, claims that thenatural world achieves consciousness through the work of the artist. In the other,the painter Patrick Heron argues that the artist’s work determines the way we seethe world around us, for without art the world would appear as a meaningless

jumble of sensations. These are dramatic claims and I think that their startling boldness is more a challenge to a certain habit of thought we have inherited than towhat, to some, may look like outrageous fantasies.

Despite the revolutions in thought that took place during the twentieth century,we remain inheritors to a worldview that sought to objectify the world and rob it of values and qualities. As the physicist Basil Hiley put it, “scientists come to praiseBohr (the leading figure to interpret the full meaning of quantum theory) and decryEinstein (who refused to accept quantum theory) but end up ignoring Bohr andthinking like Einstein”. Likewise the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, who had a longassociation with Carl Jung, argued that spirit had been banished from matter for three hundred years and that the crisis facing the contemporary scientific viewpointwas its lack of soul.



Chapter One2

In this essay I will suggest that the remarkable scientific advances of the 20thcentury - quantum theory, chaos theory and the theory of relativity - suggest waysof thinking that are harmonious with much earlier ones and that this form of consciousness is also being expressed by artists such as Anish Kapoor, AntonyGormley and Janine Antoni as well as in a theatre dedicated to the notion of thestage as a sacred or ritualistic space.

Many early peoples experienced the world as sacred, and matter as a livingsubstance. The Blackfoot prayer, “all my relations” includes not only the membersof the tribe but the four legged, the winged and the trees and rocks. LikewiseThomas Aquinas wrote that “the essence of the stone is in the stone and grasped byour mind, but it exists before in the mind of God who is full of love…God canthink the stone as it becomes itself but could equally cut off its energy”.

In the early Middle Ages matter was considered sacred, metals were born in thewomb of the earth and the artisan, alchemist, miner and artist thought of themselves as the midwives to nature, helping her in her striving for perfection.Dürer’s self portrait of 1500 depicts the artist as Christ; an identification of the

painter with the redeemer of matter. Indeed this tradition of alchemicaltransformation in art continued down the ages until the present day with an artistsuch as Anish Kapoor.

During this period time was the cycle of sunrise and sunset, the clock of theseasons and the hours of prayer. Indeed, Aquinas argued that usury was morallywrong because time belonged to God and should not be secularized. Similarlyspace was a container for the sacred. The image of space in Dante is of a series of circles, and within the space of society each person had their proper place. In this,the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, with the social circular space of the citymirroring the celestial spheres. It is also probable that in that same period spaceand time were experienced as more unified than to us today. Certain NativeAmerican languages, for example, unify space and time by using different tensesfor events happening “here” from those happening a distance away – because itwould take time to reach that distant place.

Within such a worldview matter and consciousness were closely related and inthe work of the alchemist there was a synchronicity between inner and outer. All of this was to change with the advent of some remarkable mental technologies thatarose towards the end of the 13 th century and the beginning of the fourteenth. This

period saw the introduction of the Arabic number system in place of the Roman,which enabled complicated arithmetic calculations to be performed with ease. Itwas also a time when more systematic philosophical arguments appeared, alongwith the formalization of logic. People learned accurate map making and thecompass allowed ships to sail out of sight of land. At the same time double entry

bookkeeping surfaced in Europe. For the first time merchants had the tools thatwould bring about a clear understanding of how their business was progressing.



F. David Peat 3

They could calculate the advantages of increasing their stock, or of investing inships to bring back spices or other goods. In addition, the first mechanical clocks

began to appear on public buildings. Now time became secularized and reduced tonumber. This allowed time to be metaphorically equated to money – as in “savingtime”, “wasting time” or “putting time aside”.

In a relatively short space of time these truly remarkable mental tools hadappeared, tools which allowed people to envision the world as an object within themind; one that could be contemplated and manipulated in the abstract. Doubleentry bookkeeping allowed people to exert control over their businesses and to

predict the future. Where early peoples had lived in an eternal presence or in thecycles of recurring time, now individuals in a linear and numerical time coulddream of progress and a future that would be in some way larger than the present.

I believe that these new technologies of the mind had a truly revolutionaryimpact on European consciousness. Not long afterwards the Renaissance beganand with it the development of the tool of perspective in painting. Just as

philosophy had been refined with the tools of strict logical argument, one in whicheach step in a deduction in fitted into a global scheme, so too with perspective theworld of appearances was bent by the global logic of what mathematicians call

projective geometry. With the early art of Byzantium and the school of Sienese painting, multiple viewpoints were allowed and time was present in painting. Nowtime was banished and the world abstracted into a single logical viewpoint.

With all this going on, the rise of science could not be far behind, with figuressuch as Galileo and Newton. According to Newton, living space now became nomore than an inert backdrop for the mechanical motion of particles, and time wasreduced to a mere mathematical parameter. All of nature was governed by

Newton’s three laws of motion. Gone were the sympathies and correspondences of an earlier age to be replaced by mechanical interactions involving forces. And if allmatter was governed by the laws of causality what meaning could there be for mind and free will?

As science advanced it brought with it the benefits of new technologies but italso showed us how insignificant we were. We lived on a tiny planet circling a star towards the edge of one galaxy out of countless millions. And life itself was nomore than a mere accident. Even in our own time there are scientists who assertthat consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of matter, a secretion of the physical

brain that cannot act back on that brain. We make no decisions, we have no freewill. We are in the position of a child holding a toy steering wheel in the family car and believing that their turning of this toy wheel is actually driving the car.

This pessimistic position has drained the natural world of all meaning andreduced human beings to objects whose behaviour is determined by automatic

nerve impulses and flows of chemicals. Yet the earlier ways of seeing had never totally vanished. They were always present in the work of poets, artists and



Chapter One4

mystics. After all, Teilhard de Chardin could write that “all created things, everyone of them, cannot be looked at, in their nature and action, without the samereality being found in their innermost being – like sunlight in the fragments of a

broken mirror – one beneath its multiplicity, unattainable beneath its proximity,and spiritual beneath its materiality”.

Take, for example, the theme of alchemy that threads its way through the visualarts. Dürer had not only portrayed himself as the redeemer of matter but had also

produced the etching Melancholia I, with its Black Sun and many alchemicalreferences to the first, Nigrido, state of an alchemical working. Likewise,Michelangelo’s sculptures for the Medici tomb portray Day with a face partlyobscured and only roughed out – a clear reference to the Black Sun and the firststage of an alchemical working. While Night is androgyny – a male body withfemale breasts – again a reference to the mystical marriage or Chemical Weddingin which male and female principles become unified. This latter reference pops upagain in the twentieth century with Marcel Duchamp placing a mustache on theMona Lisa. Likewise the French title of his Great Glass can also be read as “theVirgin Mary translated into clouds by her celestial beaters” – the lower part of theglass being read as earth with its empty tomb and the upper level being that of heaven. Alchemical references can also be found in the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio De Chirico while Jackson Pollock explicitly names one of his action

paintings Alchemy .The pessimistic, reductionist mind set which persisted for several centuries was

to be swept away in the twentieth. While it is possible to see the scientificrevolutions of that century in terms of theoretical, experimental and technologicaladvances, science is never truly context-free. What scientists choose to study, andthe sorts of questions they ask, arises out of the wider context of the society theylive in. After all, Einstein argued that a scientific theory is not so much a deductionmade upon the basis of experimental observations, although that does come into it,

but a free creation of the human imagination. Indeed, he told the young Heisenbergthat it is the theory which suggests what is observable in nature and not the other way round. In other words I am suggesting that there was a general unfolding of human consciousness, or at least Western consciousness, that occurred about theturn of the nineteenth century and blossomed both within the arts and sciences.

The year 1900 is a convenient watershed marker for this change because it wasin that year that, during a lecture, the President of the Royal Society claimed thatscience had discovered everything there was to discover and all that remained weretwo small clouds on the horizon. Ironically one of those clouds turned out to berelativity and the other quantum theory. 1900 was also the year when HenriPoincaré published his results on the stability of the solar system, indicating that

under certain conditions a planetary orbit could become unstable and chaotic. This



F. David Peat 5

was the seed that several decades later would blossom into chaos theory. It wasalso the year in which Max Planck proposed the existence of the quantum of light.

But thinking had actually begun to change several decades earlier in the arts.Claude Monet introduced a new level of subjectivity into painting by including his“fugitive sensations” on the canvas. Georges Seurat had begun to break down ascene by the use of small spots or atoms of color. While the quantum of light didnot appear for a decade and a half later, nevertheless the physicist LudwigBoltzmann was proposing that the laws of thermodynamics could be broken downinto the random motions of underlying atoms. While this theory was stronglycriticized by Ernst Mach and the Vienna Circle, it nevertheless showed that generalthinking in science and the arts was moving to some sort of reality that underliesconventional outward appearances.

But it is to Cézanne I turn as the great exemplar of a combination of artistictemperament and scientific attention to detail. In 1900 Cézanne moved to a houseclose to Mount Sainte-Victoire where he was to make so many studies of that greatwhite sail in the sky. Cézanne wished to move beyond Impressionism. For himMonet was “only an eye, but my God what an eye”. Cézanne wished to revisitImpressionism, but with the intellectual rigor of a Poussin. And so he constantlyexperimented, constantly sought to express the consciousness of nature, constantlysought to “realize” his “little sensations”.

"I am becoming more lucid before nature,” he wrote, “but always with me therealization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that isunfolded before my senses.... Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, thesame subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most

powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for monthswithout changing place by turning now more to the right, now more to the left."

What Merleau-Ponty termed “Cézanne’s doubt” inhabits each of his paintings.It tells us that we can never be certain about the world ( just as chaos theoryclaims), nor can we ever exhaust its richness in a single description (just asquantum theory demands complementary descriptions). With Cézanne, time hadre-entered painting and was never to leave – after him came the cubists with their multiple viewpoints, the canvas as an arena for the action of a Jackson Pollock, or as the artist’s actual body as the space for expression.

What is more Cézanne’s work anticipates one of the claims made by thetheoretical physicist, David Bohm, that the underling nature of reality is anenfolded or Implicate Order. Curiously this idea came to David Bohm though along correspondence with the artist Charles Biederman, author of The NewCézanne . Bohm for his part was looking to a new order in physics, one that wouldembrace both quantum theory and relativity. In their correspondence Biederman

explained to Bohm about Cézanne’s method of painting in which each tiny area of the canvas in a sense was an expression of the whole.



Chapter One6

There is a story of the endless sittings that the art dealer, Ambrose Vollard, hadto endure for his portrait. In the end Cézanne announced that he could not continuefor there were two tiny patches of bare canvas where Vollard’s hands were

portrayed. If he, Cézanne, were to touch them then he would have to repaint theentire canvas. Truly this was the Implicate Order anticipated – the whole enfoldedin each of the parts and each of the parts enfolded over the whole.

If Western consciousness was changing, or rather unfolding a much earlier viewpoint in which we were all enfolded into the natural world, then science didmake some of this transformation more explicit. In 1905 Einstein published hisspecial theory of relativity and three years later Hermann Minkowski in an addressto the 80 th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians announced“Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mereshadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality”.

Space and time had finally healed the facture that had divided them at the endof the 13 th century. What is more, space-time now played an active role in nature;its twists and turns causing the elliptic orbits of the planets, the bending of lightand the existence of black holes. Where once space had been the mere backdropfor Newtonian mechanics, now it was the container for dynamical richness.

I doubt any explicit connection existed between the two, but the notion of scientific space, or rather space-time, as an active container for events rather than a

passive backdrop, does have the same feel about it as experiments that began a fewdecades later in the theatre. No longer would such a theatre seek to portray adepiction of reality, a type of illusion in which the fourth wall had been removed toallow an audience to overlook what was being portrayed on the stage. The stagenow became a container, a crucible, an alchemical vessel, a sacred space in whichactors could move beyond conventional limits of language and gesture. Theexperiments of Antonin Artaud, The Living Theatre, Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski,La Mama and others sought to extend the theater and even touch on sacred ritual.

Space also plays an active role in the work of the British sculptor, AntonyGormley. As a boy Gormley was required to rest in his bedroom of an afternoon.At first he found the experience claustrophobic but gradually he began toexperience an inner space. It was, he said, a space without dimension, beyond goodor evil, a space rarely visited by most of us. Gormley made this space the basis for his work. He begins in a meditative state, experiencing the inner space of his bodythat is then cast in plaster. This plaster cast then serves as a mould when the work is cast in iron.

Faced with one of Gormley’s sculptures one’s body begins to subtly adjust position and orientation. It is as if the piece serves as a form of mirror to one’s self.As we come into relationship with the iron figure we begin to experience a sense of

internal space. It becomes an involvement, a reflexivity and exploration of one’sown interior space.



F. David Peat 7

Here it is possible to make a jump from art to science yet again for the physicist, David Bohm, once told me that he felt there were two ways to arrive atthe laws of nature. One was by looking outwards, at experiments in the laboratory,and the other was by looking inwards. After all, he said, the matter of his own bodywas the same as the matter of the universe. When doing physics he sometimes hadexperiences of inner movements that mirrored those of the equations he waswriting down. He once spoke to Einstein about this and Einstein told him thatwhile working on the field equations of general relativity he would sometimessqueeze a rubber ball to experience the muscular tensions in his arm. LikewiseJackson Pollock was asked that since an abstract artist had to abstract fromsomething in the natural world, what exactly was Pollock abstracting from. Hisreply was, “I am nature”. The abstraction of nature was coming from withinhimself.

I should add here that more recently Gormley has begun a new set of pieces“Quantum Cloud” which had their origins in a discussion he had with the physicist,Basil Hiley, and myself. In quantum theory the old notion of a continuouslydivisible space is inadequate. Along with David Bohm, Hiley had beeninvestigating what he termed “pre-space”, that is, a set of algebraic relationshipsthat would provide the underpinning for what could perhaps be called a protospace, a mathematical scheme out of which the space of quantum theory couldemerge. When we mentioned to Gormley that, in the words of the mathematician,David Hilbert, algebras were “relations of relationships”, Gormley was stuck withthe idea of sculpture based on sets of relationships in space which, when viewedfrom a certain angle would take on the appearance of a human body.

The metaphor of the space-time container also surfaces in Jungian therapywhere the therapeutic hour is envisioned as a sort of alchemical vessel in whichhealing takes place. The Jungian therapist Beverly Zabriskie suggests that each oneof us carries a set of “frozen accidents” dating from incidents in childhood. WhileFreud believed that his “talking cure” could release the pressure of repressedmemories by going back into the past of his patients, Jung preferred to remain inthe present, in the actuality of the encounter between patient and therapist. For Zabriske the alchemical vessel of the therapeutic hour allows therapist and patientgenerate “heat” together; possibly another word for this heat would be Eros . It isnot so much that the therapist seeks to cure the patient but at some point they both

become psychically entwined, or in her own words “they fall into the dark hole of the unconscious”. At this point a healing takes place within the encounter and the“frozen accidents” are thawed. Just as in sacred theatre there may be a point wherethe isolated consciousness of the individual actor becomes possessed by the sacred,or the god, so too the separation of healer and patient vanishes.

This would be well known to the Naskapi of Labrador, for they have two wordsthat were translated in a Jesuit dictionary of 1729, as “the magician/sorcerer sings



Chapter One8

to the sick man”. Naskapi is of the same language family as Blackfoot, Cree, MicMaq, and Ojibwaj, all of which are very rich in verbs and do not tend to divide theworld into categories of thought. Alan Ford, a linguist who has studied the Naskapilanguage, told me that what was really being expressed was the action of singing or that “singing is going on” and that modifiers to the verb implied one who sang andone who received the song. Just as with actors on the stage, or patient and therapist,the notion of a transaction between separate individuals becomes replaced by somesort of enveloping, unanalysable whole, an expression of a totality, of somethingemerging that is perhaps sacred.

And having written the above, I am so struck that again the metaphor bounces back from art into science. In trying to understand the meaning of quantum theory Niels Bohr would invite physicists such as Heisenberg and Pauli to Copenhagen todiscuss together. One area they had to clarify is what happens when a measurementis made. For anything to have been observed or measured some sort of changemust have been registered. This could be the click of a Geiger counter, themovement of a needle on a chart, the writing of data onto the hard disc of acomputer, etc. But whenever a record is made an exchange of energy had to take

place. Measuring the temperature of a cup of hot coffee, or a cold Martini requiresan exchange of energy between the liquid and the thermometer. Normally we canignore this as being very small indeed. But what happens at the quantum level?

Suppose we made the most delicate measurement possible on an atom. For themeasurement to be recorded some energy exchange must occur and the minimum

possible exchange is that of a single quantum. But a quantum cannot be divided.We cannot say that 50% came from the atom and 50% from the measuringapparatus, or 99% from the atom and only 1% from the apparatus. All we can sayis that at the moment of measurement the apparatus and the atoms form anindivisible whole. The observer is united with the observed. Before and after themeasurement we can speak of an atom and a piece of apparatus but at the momentof observation there is only an unanalysable unity.

One can even go further. The physicist John Bell has shown that if two particles, originally united, are taken apart then in a certain sense they remain co-related in that what happens to one is in some way sensed by the other. Since thisco-relation does not depend on distance, physicists refer to this as non-locality.Again the metaphor of stage, therapeutic hour and quantum theory seem to mergewithin this deeper sense of connection, wholeness and unity.

This dance between separation and connectedness features in the work of theAmerican artist, Janine Antoni. Antoni, in part, investigates our separation fromthe materiality of the world. We may be able to touch the world but never fullyincorporate or enter into its essence. In a work such as Lick she cast a bust of

herself in chocolate and then began to lick away the features – in a senseincorporating her face into her own body.



F. David Peat 9

In my discussions with Jungian therapists we often touch on the question of “Where is the healing?” That is, in what space does this healing take place – in thespace between patient and therapist or, as I have suggested above, in a space

beyond the distinction of either? A similar question was raised in my discussionswith Anish Kapoor who asks, “Where is the art?” In other words, in what spacedoes the art exist? Is it located in the physical piece, in the interaction between thework and the viewer or in some space beyond either of them?

As a companion question Kapoor also asks, “where is the matter?” He isconcerned with the nature of the materiality of his work. After all, many of his

pieces involve voids in which it is not possible to locate oneself – he speaks of these as “endarkenment”. In some pieces many layers of paint are applied to theinterior, each time with less and less thinner being used to the point where, ineffect, pure pigment is being applied. The result is an inner surface, a void, thatsucks in light and gives no sense of dimensions or location. As with Gormley’swork, the response of the viewer is more visceral than intellectual.

Unlike some other sculptors Kapoor does not begin with detailed drawings of the piece to be completed, rather he starts with what he terms “the intention”. Byholding onto this intention he allows the work to emerge and may not know itsfinal form until later. Holding an intention was also the way the composer MichaelTippett worked. The music, for him, had to be contained within the body until suchtime as it was ready to be written down. On one occasion this music was containedwithin the body, within the alchemical vessel, to such an extent that Tippett

became ill. Indeed music itself poses a form of paradox. In some ways it can be themost abstract of the arts, yet (with the exception of electronic and computer generated music) it requires the human body of the performer for its realization.The composer Edgar Varèse claimed that “music is the corporalization of thought”.It is at one and the same time an abstract art form and an embodied one.

For Kapoor the work emerges out of an intention and he is even willing to usealchemical metaphors for the way in which matter is transformed under themanifesting intention of the artist. Indeed he believes that in truly successful worksthe matter of the piece has undergone a type of change that could only be describedin alchemical terms.

“Where is the matter?” is also a question asked in quantum theory, for our picture of the underlying nature of matter and reality changed radically during thetwentieth century. Take Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, for example, whichtells us that there is a basic uncertainty in the position and speed (technicallyspeaking, the momentum) of a particle. Heisenberg initially interpreted this as

being the result of the disturbances we make each time we observe a quantum particle. That is, through the act of observation the initial speed or position of the

particle is shifted slightly. Niels Bohr adopted a more radical view. It is not possible, he said, to even speak of an electron as “having” a position or “having” a



Chapter One10

speed. The electron does not “possess” such intrinsic properties. Indeed, if weobserve an electron at point A and later at B we cannot even say that the electron“had” a path between A and B. Rather it is our act of making an observation, of interrogating the quantum world, that provides a context in which nature gives usan answer. In some contexts this answer will be about position, in others aboutspeed.

In other words there are no well defined intrinsic and independent elements of reality “out there” waiting to be observed by us. Thus Bohr denied Einstein’sassertion that the world must be created out of independent elements of reality.There are only acts of observation in which we interrogate the natural world, andthe way in which we make this interrogation establishes the context in which ananswer will be given. We must replace Newton’s vision of the world as some sortof “Lego” toy built out of independent parts in interaction. While speaking to the

present author the physicist John Wheeler linked the earlier vision to seeing theworld though a sheet of plate glass. Quantum theory has smashed through thatglass. “So the old word observer simply has to be crossed off the books”, Wheeler said “ and we must put in the new word participator .”

Bohr went even further. Heisenberg had claimed that the understanding of quantum theory lay in the mathematics, but Bohr pointed out that when physicistsdiscuss the meaning of a mathematical equation they are forced to use ordinary,everyday language, admittedly with the addition of some technical terms. Butwithin our language, which evolved amongst beings of a certain size and living ona planet with a certain force of gravity, are enfolded all our assumptions aboutspace, time, matter and causality. As soon as we begin to talk about the quantumworld, as soon as we search for some model of its reality, we are importingconcepts that apply only to our large-scale world. “We are suspended in language,such that we don’t know what is up and what is down”, Bohr claimed. To attemptto discuss the deeper nature of quantum reality to enter into paradox and confusion.

A somewhat similar train of argument was pursued by Ludwig Wittgensteinwho shifted emphasis from philosophical discussion from the “great questions”,such as the nature of “truth”, “goodness”, “consciousness, “free will” and “ethicalaction”, to investigating the way language was actually used in philosophicalarguments. That is shifting the focus from asking what a concept “means” to takinginto consideration the various ways a term is used. The great challenges of

philosophy were compared to a person trapped in a room who tries in vain toescape through the window or up the chimney, never realizing the door to the roomwas never locked in the first place. Great problems become pseudo problemsgenerated by our lack of attention to the way language is being used.

David Bohm agreed with Bohr on the limitations of our language but at one

time believed that it would be possible to extend language into a mode that is moreexpressive of process and transformation than of separate objects in interaction. He



F. David Peat 11

called this the rheomode , or “flowing mode”. It was only in the last year of his life,when he met with Blackfoot people and learned that their worldview of flux,

process and transformation was reflected in their strongly verb-based language thathe realized how close all that came to the world-view of quantum theory. Thisdiscussion of the limitations of language also surfaced in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the writing of James Joyce and in theatre experiments designed tomove beyond the limitations of a particular language.

Earlier in this essay I suggested that Western consciousness was seeking somedeeper underlying level of reality. This, I believe can be widely seen in the visualarts. It was present in music with the breakdown of tonality in order to seek other forms of musical organization, as well was with an increasing emphasis upon thespiritual basis of music in composers such as John Tavener, Henryk Gorecki,Aarvo Pärt and Steve Reich. It was present in theatre as directors looked beyondthe West to the traditions of India, Japan, Bali and China. It is also a trend in

popular culture with its interest in meditation, alternative medicine and easternreligions. While on the one hand I am arguing that we are all heirs to a reductionistand restricted worldview of the Newtonian era, at the same time there has been afreeing up and search for something deeper.

This is also present in the scientific ideas of David Bohm. As I mentionedabove, his interest in the way Cézanne painted suggested to him an order of realitythat was close to that of quantum theory. Bohm refers to the Newtonian picture, of well-defined objects separated in space and in interaction with each other. as theExplicate Order. But this is not the primary reality, only an unfolding fromsomething deeper which he called the Implicate, or enfolded, Order. Objects thatare separate within the Explicate Order are mutually enfolded within the ImplicateOrder, and hence may “know” about each other. I should add that Bohm’s goal wasto include mind within this Implicate order with the mind/matter duality onlyemerging in the Explicate Order.

These ideas can also be expressed in a more explicit way using what Bohmcalled the quantum potential. Bohm reformulated conventional quantum theory byusing a particular mathematical transformation which left all the predictions andcalculations of the conventional theory untouched but changed the look of thattheory. In Bohm’s approach the electron becomes a particle that is pushed and

pulled by the conventional forces of physics – i.e. electrical and magnetic fields,and as with all conventional forces, the bigger the field or potential, the larger theeffect. But there is an additional new term, the quantum potential, whose effectdoes not depend upon its size but upon its form . In fact Bohm interpreted thequantum potential as containing information about the context, i.e. the physicalapparatus, that surrounds the electron. In this sense the electron is capable of

“reading” the information about its environment and responding. At this pointBohm argues that proto-mind – the ability or “read” information - exists even at the



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level of the electron. There is no duality between matter and mind, no point of evolution where mind suddenly appears, both have always been co-present.

In a further development of the theory Bohm no longer views the electron as a particle but as a process, a process of constant unfolding and enfolding that isguided by the information within the universe. Yet again we encounter a form of thinking that has moved away from fixed explicit forms into something that ismore fluid, process-oriented and holistic. This I feel is a characteristic of so muchthat has been happening at the leading edge of the arts over the last decades.

In conclusion I would argue that, starting in the last decades of the nineteenthcentury, “Western Consciousness” began a gradual but radical transformation. Thisappears to have started in the visual arts with Impressionism, and the emancipationof traditional musical forms with Wagner and Debussy, but soon moved into thefields of science, literature, theatre, philosophy and general cultural life.

This movement placed less emphasis on positioning the “object” at center stagein favour of something more fluid – a process, flux or transformation. At the sametime it shifted the emphasis on the object in space, upon boundaries and categoriesof thought in favour of orders that lie between and beyond. It questioned ways inwhich we allow language to limit ourselves in theatre, philosophy, literature andeven theoretical physics. It acknowledged a new vision of space as a container for events, both material and numinous. Matter was to be seen in more alchemicalterms as not wholly being distinct from consciousness.



CHAPTER TWO

R ALPH YARROW

THE PERFORMANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS : THECONSCIOUSNESS OF PERFORMANCE

Why is important/useful to think performance and consciousness together?

1. because developments in Consciousness Studies suggest that an understandingof consciousness in various modes is central to an understanding of human

performance/performativity2. because performance theory, in conjunction with poststructuralist theory,

suggests that human activity - in both its individual and social contexts - needsto be understood in phenomenological terms as process, and that performance

theory can enable an exploration/analysis of the modes of its operation3. because consideration of the arts most precisely focuses upon the issue of consciousness in terms of the generative processes of production andreception.

So what I want to do is to look at some ways in which the study of consciousness is currently seen as relevant to performance, and ask whatimplications this has for drama, theatre and life:

• via structures of extra-daily balance in awareness and the extension of theknowing body

• as recognition and deployment of the fulcrum condition of liminality andhybridity

• via moves towards a full engagement in knowing, being and doing – whichhowever necessarily also involves the experience of deconstruction of all

postulations of "totality"• to the location of an extended potential of meaning in/as performance.

This contribution is intended as an opening statement, which aims to touch anumber of bases and open up a number of questions, rather than to examine anysingle strand in depth.



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Much of what I do currently is concerned with making theatre. I use "theatre" -rather than "drama" or "performance" - because for me it is an inclusive term,involving the processes of training and production as well as the corpus of textsand institutions in which those processes sometimes - but not always - occur. So Iam particularly interested in how "consciousness" meets "the arts" in terms of whathappens in the business of theatre.

I have long had the sense that you need a model of consciousness in order tounderstand the processes of creation/production and reception in literature and thearts. Not just because clearly they are phenomenological processes requiring and

providing a sharpened focus on the subject-object interface, but also because theydeal in kinds or zones of experience which in some way go outside the ordinary or everyday, whilst nevertheless doing so via "ordinary" media and mechanisms likelanguage and the human psychophysiology.

When we experience art, we engage in a phenomenological process in onesense no different from the mechanism of any perceptual act; but not quite thesame. As the Indian critic Ayyappa Paniker says, you don't go to see theatre if youcan get the same thing another way, and that seems to apply to any kind of poetics.It needs to reach the bits other beers don't. And doing that means a particular kindof production and a particular kind of reception. That also suggests that there areaspects to language which enable this to occur, and also that there are aspects of human experience which can function in a way which is not solely accounted for

by theories of entrapment within a universe of discourse.Functioning in a "heightened" or more intense way is not in itself all that

extraordinary, and can occur - even or in some cases especially spontaneously -outside artistic realms; but it seems that there is a particular kind of sense to bemade in this mode of activity, involving more than cognitive channels and

producing a more comprehensive kind of understanding (I looked at some of themajor characteristics of activity of this kind in an article in Mosaic in 1986).Theatre work can usefully locate this process, because it is resolutely physical andin the body, but also requires as much as possible of the spectrum of levels andkinds of expressing and comprehending. In this activity consciousness ismanifested as a whole range of physical events across a plurality of semioticchannels, and at the same time the interface of "self" and "world" is processed andreformulated. Understanding it also requires an examination of levels or kinds of awareness such as "imagination" and "intuition", which seem in some way to"precede" fully discursive articulation and at the same time to subtend or enliven awider range of associative significance than much "finished" expression. Is

performance an important activator of these zones? "A theatre which invokesimagination in full consciousness must be instinct with consciousness in all

dimensions – mental, physical, and affective – and on all levels from the externaland obvious to the internal and barely sensed" (Malekin & Yarrow 2001, 73).



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D.E.R. George proposes that performance needs to be investigated as a particular kindof knowledge, "an actual way of knowing" (George 1999, 8); and that it offers "other ways to look at Time, at Space, at Person, at Knowledge, at Experience; which may becloser to both contemporary scientific research (Quantum Theory, Chaos,Complexity) and contemporary philosophical enquiry (Cognitive Science, ProcessPhilosophy)" (George 1999, 9).

Because consciousness in action is inevitably shaped by what it is conscious of (Virginia Woolf calls it an envelope, though it might be more accurate to see thisas continuously re-morphing clingfilm, taking on the shape and plasticity of what itengages with), it is sometimes possible to claim that it does not exist as a separate

phenomenon at all. What we use the term consciousness for may be just a particular kind of brain activity like dream or memory; or a degree of alertness; or an emotional tone or quality which makes things appear different. Even herehowever it generally seems that more is better: "consciousness-raising" implies theimprovement of a condition, and art is usually seen as affording "more"

perspectives of all the kinds of perception I have just mentioned. The Indian theoryof rasa explicitly claims that art-experience aims to put the receiver in a particular state in which he or she is able to "read" more from a performance: both in terms of more nuances, levels, degrees, qualities, connotations and associations, and interms of increased cognitive and affective subtlety and range, instituting a kind of "flow" condition in which observation, understanding and participation are felt asone.

Consciousness also means being conscious. Although the advantages of simply being conscious without any content of experience may seem problematic, anumber of aspects of theatre theory and practice suggest that it may be extremelyuseful. Performance might indeed be thought of as consciousness in action, and inaddition to activating a spectrum of modalities, levels and kinds of knowing anddoing, it also can enable participants (performers and receivers, though perhaps the

binary implications of these terms should be faded down) to move into or throughwhat it is to be able to know, to cohere, to make sense : to locate the place, or non-

place, or moment in or out of time, from which the knowing and the sensing andthe making proceeds. William S. Haney II defines the generative condition of theatreas a "voiding of thought" (going beyond pairs of opposites) and a condition of liminality; and claims that the optimal subjective experience of liminality is

performance. For both George and Haney, the liminal moment frames a knowing of knowing, which precedes new experiences and knowledges. In order to access thegenesis of performance and know that we are experiencing it, it may be necessary toachieve a conjunction of stillness or consciousness-without-an-object and an intuitionof the emergence of form; potential and kinetic energies operating together.

Here a few statements by 20th

century actor-trainers about the dimensions and processes which theatre and performance can activate:



Chapter Two16

Lecoq : l'homme pense avec tout son corps .

Grotowski sees theatre as " a place of provocation " and asks:

Why are we concerned with art? To cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness -- fulfil ourselves. This is not a condition but a process in which what isdark in us slowly becomes transparent.

Stok perceives theatre as: a provocation, a raging challenge to our orderly pigeon-holing minds...Artaud's vehement, unrestrained language and Van Gogh's blazing

pictures burst all frameworks: "probably our life too is whole and infinitely richer inextent and possibility than the hemisphere we are familiar with at present" (VanGogh)

Mnouchkine declares: Je crois à la stimulation par la beauté, par la lumière, par l'espoir, par la joie, par le rire, par les larmes. Je crois à l'émotion. Je pense quece sont des vecteurs de la pensée et que tout cela, ce sont les vecteurs de la vie. Ce

sont des véhicules de l'intelligence.

There are understandings here of physical and psychological process, of how toovercome individual blocks and barriers in a move towards deployment of mentaland physical agility, which reflect versions of learning process and creative activityexpressed by writers on psychology and aesthetics (Maslow's "peak experiences",Csikszentmihalyi's "flow episodes", Jephcott's "privileged moment") and pick upmodels of organicity and flux deriving from Heraclitus, Indian, Japanese andChinese psychospirituality and, perhaps, quantum physics. (There is also a whiff of Sartrian Existentialism, of process philosophy, and perhaps the odd banana skinfrom Bergson in there somewhere.) The 20th-century quest articulated by thesedirectors and actor-trainers, among others, has been for a model of the

performative which can incorporate the radical realignment of ideas about the self in the world and ally it to a praxis in and through which that self engages in acontinuous process of reinvention and reinsertion. It is no accident that the Frenchfor "rehearsal" is " répétition "; but rehearsal is both always and never repetition.We repeat in order to change what we did and what we are: répétition is in theservice not of Kierkegaardian Wiederholung ("l'habitude est une grande sourdine",says Beckett) but of re-creation.

How then to learn "to think with the whole body" (the Austrian Hugo vonHofmannsthal once wrote that it would be necessary to learn to think with the

heart, which doesn't seem too far removed)? What are the requirements for engaging with this process?



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Some of the following would seem appropriate:•

Physical training• aesthetic sensitivity - cf. Rasa • disponibilité • improvisatory attitude• Buddhist/poststructuralist sense of self

What are some of the methodologies to engender and deliver it?• Work on body/breath interface (psychophysiology)• Neutral mask work(neutrality/neutral consciousness)• Training in aspects of Noh and relationships between

action, sound and stillness• Trance/ritual• Ontological acrobatics (I/Not I/Not not I)• Improvisation work, play and games

The history of Drama and Performance is probably as old as the history of mankind. It certainly predates written documents, if not writing. As ritual,

performance is intended to have specific (mind-altering) effects on its receivers,

according to e.g. shamanistic, Indian/Vedic and ancient Greek Eleusinian/cathartictradition. It is efficacious, in Schechner's terminology: it initiates "transportation" andultimately, as a consequence of repeated instances, may affect the perceptualmechanism to such a degree as to effect "transformation"; moving the "self" across the

borders of the known, opening to a more radical and interpenetrative exchange of energies with its physical, cultural, psychic or cosmic environment. These visceral

processes prise open the shell of individual selfhood and shift consciousness acrossfrontiers towards otherness. The performative, dialogic dynamics of drama further materialise, juxtapose and ironise representations of "self" and "other", of internal and

external forces and operators, of layers of memory or body trace; and also of the great parade of binary postures and figurings, of the roles and behaviours we are locked into by psychosocial habit and discourse. These are more structural or metaphoricdimensions, operating in drama as characters, protagonists and antagonists, doubles,ghosts; and as atmospheres, attitudes, body shapes and kinds of motion, rhythms andtones; as caricature, mask and mannerism. Thus both the migratory and the embattled,

both the flowing and the encrypted, are illuminated and transfixed, or energised andtransformed, by the dual drives and modes of consciousness in performance.

The form and forming of theatre ranges much wider than the (western) image

of scripted drama as proscenium arch mimeticism. In many cultures, sometimesfrom an apparent poverty - of economic status, scenic paraphenalia, buildings,



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published texts – emerge astounding riches and diversity in which performancemay function as:

Ritual: communitas , negotiating the border of socialized/individual beingMonoacting: pluralising the performative self mythic journey: materialising drives and desires, encounters with archetypesconfrontation and challenge: relativisation and deconstruction of belief or prejudicecelebration of cultural resource: relocation in historical or material context

physical virtuosity: activation and expression of effortless being (e.g. Chineseacrobats, Legong dancers)carnival: inversion of sociopolitical and doctrinal hierarchy, psychosexualliberationcatharsis: encounter with furthest reaches of affective capacity

And in so doing, theatre and drama as and in performance intervenes in psychoanalytic, sociopolitical, narratological and linguistic, aesthetic and spiritualspheres of human action. Its study may contribute to debates about human existence asdesire, intention and achievement, process, relationship, semiosis and epistemology,ontology and identity. What is noticeable in all these engagements is a degree of excess, a kind of framing or turning on of the lights. Performance, says Schechner, ismarked out in time, space and place; it stands out, signalling an added value. Thatalready suggests that a distinct quality of consciousness is in operation or available. Ittransfixes these key situations and processes in human experience, identifying them ascrucial and composing a space in which they can be negotiated. Once again, the dualmodality of consciousness which is activated here both holds them up to the light(arresting them in order to signal their importance) and stimulates a transformativeengagement with them (entering into their mobility in order to relocate the self inrelation to them). Here we might restate Eliot's "neither arrest nor movement" ("Burnt

Norton") as " both arrest and movement".For this version of the anthropology of theatre, the performance event marks

moments in which a community heightens or crystallises its consciousness of its parameters – paralleled in Turner's reading of the stages of "redemptive" drama. Whatis highlighted is both pause (recognition of the structure of relationship for individualsand community), and flow, where the event (itself often active, processual,carnivalesque) marks transition or rite of passage from one state to another.

Barba's "theatre anthropology" locates bios or energy drives, processes andmoments of moving and stopping, flowing and framing; the body marking its own"decided" consciousness and also attempting to key into a "pre-expressive subscore"of proto-sensation and sensation-memory, thus extending the range and quality of its

self-knowing. Suzuki (legs and feet) and Kathakali (eyes, hands and facialmusculature) work to extend both the degree of (internal) sensitivity to emotional

Consciousness Theatre Literature and the Arts

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