That month went by so very fast.
Next up, I am working on my presentation for the RDC2 in Chicago, just starting to write the first chapter, and getting all the things in line to start on the next project (performers, and uh, the script, too). Lots of things to work on between now and the next update.
But here, I’d like to write a little bit more in terms of de-briefing and reflection from the last piece. And I’m realizing now, as I’m getting my thoughts together, that it might make a lot more sense to write the reflection before asking anyone to watch the piece, in order to comment on how it works with my research questions. My bad. I forget how important context is for all of these things…
So first, there’s this note from the program, this is what the audience read before the show so they had an idea of what was going to happen:
This project is part of a PhD for Transart Institute in Berlin, in conjunction with Plymouth University in the U.K. I’m studying trance, looking at ritual states of consciousness, and how they work in performance. I’m looking at trance through the eyes of Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions (Lucumí and Palo Monte, to be precise), and also through Lacanian psychoanalytic ideas. We are working in states of trance. I can explain more, but I won’t try here.
This is a story you know, told in a way that you might not recognize outside of your dreams.
You’ll recognize some of the characters. There’s Romeo & Juliet, of course, and Mercutio, Romeo’s best friend, and then there’s the Nurse, and Susan, the Nurse’s daughter. Susan is mentioned in the original script a few times. She died when she was very young, so while the Nurse raises Juliet, she has a ghost of a daughter with her. And Rosaline is also here, you don’t really see her in the original, but she’s the one who had Romeo’s heart until he saw Juliet. Hahaha, he thought he would never love again. These stories are repetitions of things that happen to us.
This was made during a gorgeous and stormy time. The loss of my father, and meeting the love of my life, all happening at the same time. So if you feel a little lost, just keep in mind that this is about love and grief. And if you’re not lost at all, it’s still about love and grief. Or maybe love covers it.
Thank you for coming.
There was an overwhelmingly positive response to this work, and, in part, this is something that’s more likely to happen when you’re inviting people into your home to see something, rather than soliciting responses from random audiences in a more public space (I think I would like to try the next one in a more public space, because although I love the intimacy that is possible in a closed setting, I can learn more about how these trances and charms work when it’s taken into a less controlled context). There were theatre professionals in every audience, but there were also outsiders, friends of actors, or students who had heard about it from professors, and there were some houses where the audience was largely made up of people who were not necessarily interested in experimental theatre, trance or ritual. The responses from all of these audiences were much the same, that they found the experience to be entirely captivating, and took them into a mysterious place. There were three responses in particular that stood out for me, the first two illustrate the ritual intentions of the piece worked well, and the third is more personal.
Quan, a Vietnamese refuge who is now working in Phoenix as a teacher and healer of traditional medicine (he is also the teacher of my girlfriend–oh, now fiancé!–who played Susan in the show), told me that he felt as though he were the subject of a peculiar kind of magic. He later told me that the magic felt like something he had not experienced in his travels and teachings, and would like to have conversations with me in the future about my own (spiritual) practice.
One of my friends, Isis Costa McElroy, who teaches Brazilian literature, posted this comment after seeing the show: “stunning! congratulations to all involved! this is pure NKISI to be decoded and cherished.” She is perhaps the most well-informed spectator, having written about Afro-Caribbean ritual and spiritual practices herself. Her use of the term Nkisi is particularly apt, using a term from the Bantu for a spirit object that is wrapped. The show opens with Susan, in the center of a circle, being unwrapped, like a charm, and closes with her being wrapped like a charm, and then the Nurse (played by me) wraps the entire cast to close the spell. It’s important to mention that as she is being wrapped and unwrapped, she says, “Am I going back?” These were the last words my father spoke on his deathbed, so this was intentionally quoting and also invoking traditional Kongo ritual, and also consciously addressing the spirits of the dead.
This needs unpacking, and further reflection, but it strikes me that I am working on both quotation and invocation here. I think that it’s likely that somewhere in this space, between quotation of a ritual and actual invocation of the ritual, there is something where the distance between performance and rite gets blurred. There were further references to this idea of wrapping (wrapping is one of the translations of the Bantu word, “Kanga,” which is sometimes mistranslated as spell, but they may be the same thing) throughout the play. Characters get wrapped up, tied, and there are dozens of verbal references to wrapping and tying in the script. This was also intentional, where I was trying to set a groundwork for a piece of theatre that was, in itself, a charm.
The last response that was particularly powerful was from my mother, who, when she heard the words in the opening scene, gave me a look that I can’t describe but can’t ever forget. For her, and I think now, for me, this was a play that was about grieving, a public act of grieving disguised as theatre.
But that very personal meaning is something that I’m not sure of, not sure how to write about. It’s personal for me, and not meant to translate to anyone else, except for the very few who were there when my father died. I think that’s problematic, methodologically speaking. However, I am one of the subjects in this process as well, so I just wanted to remark in that in this semi-public forum.
I haven’t interviewed the performers yet, and will have these done before the month is over, so I have the data for the first project before I start the second project. At that point, I’ll have more information to offer in terms of how they experienced this, and have some particulars on moments where the sense of being under a spell, or in a trance, was more pronounced. For now, though, I can say that from group discussions and de-briefings, they all felt as though they were performing in an altered state of consciousness throughout the performances.
In rehearsals, we would begin by going into a deep meditative state, where they would find an aspect of their own psyche, an aspect that would be willing to take over for the duration of the rehearsal. I developed a technique for this while we were working together, and so far it seems to work well. We also worked on developing a shorthand so that we could access this state very easily, but more importantly, leave the state when the rehearsal was over. We applied this same technique to the performances, so that each of the six shows was performed in a state of trance. This notion of trance is one that I’m going to speak to very specifically in the presentation in Chicago. People have expectations when they hear the word “trance,” and I sense that it may be something much more acute (with writhing on the floor and shaking and trembling) than what we’re working with. I also sense that I’ll learn more when I talk to each of the performers in more depth, and am hoping to find some keys to developing methods of going deeper. And I also need to be aware that there are performers who don’t want to go deeper, that there is sometimes fear surrounding these things. So it’s my intention, then, to build works and environments where they can feel comfortable, as much as possible, and then find out where the work takes them.
As I keep discovering, the biggest knot in all of this is in regards to questions of documentation. Participating in the work is the best way to see it (at least for the purposes of this research), seeing the show live is the next best way, and watching a video is a very distant third. But it’s what we have. I am certainly curious about how I might present this documentation in order to demonstrate what the research is uncovering, and I’m going to play with some of these thoughts (the ones Laura and Debbie shared with me in our conversation yesterday) for the presentation in Chicago. I’m hoping that will open up some new channels of thought in how to construct the documentation in a way that’s useful and engaging, but also can offer a chance to see the work from distant locations. It may well be, however, that outside of the experience of the live event, any experience of the event would be as an ethnographer, looking through an ethnographer’s frame. I am curious about how it might be presented, then, toward such a frame, and think that there are exciting possibilities there. If that dividing line between performance and rite is really very thin, then perhaps live theatre, when it’s presented as an artifact, needs to be presented in the same way that rituals are presented for a camera. And I need to keep in mind that this is much like that, with videos that serve as the rough footage, the rough footage that contains the performance. And rough footage needs unpacking. And I hope this entry serves as a beginning for some of that unpacking.
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