This is too soon for an update, it hasn't been a month yet, the last show (#4 of 5) closed last night. And there are some things that are churning around that I have been thinking but not writing so this is just that little first bit of writing. Some new things happened.
First. After one of the shows last weekend (the first weekend), YYYYY had just come back from doing some work in Sedona, a workshop on fire medicine, archaic Egyptian techniques that I won't get into (I don't know and can't know most of it, and don't want to talk for her), after the show she wanted to hide in the back room while we were meeting and chatting with the audience, and she found that, in her post show meditation (after performing a part that has a very sensual and earthy fire dance, channeling Oshun dancing for Shango), she couldn't move, there were spirits all around her and she could not move for about half an hour. I saw have been seeing am still seeing spirits all over the house, it's been cleaned with copal and sage and murphys oil soap haha, but it's still a very busy place. These actors have been channeling a lot of things.YYYYY says that this experience could be partly from the work in the show and partly from Sedona and I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference? I need to explain.
Second, XXXXXX, one of the actors more susceptible to altered states, came over early. In a panic. On Thursday night. Things were opening and she was seeing ghosts and her spirit wolf following her everywhere, could not control it and needed help. I cleaned her and gave her some things to do (to be mentioned in the sorcerers notebook (this is methodology)' and YYYYY worked with her on some energy balance things, all went well, and her performance was remarkable, powerful and tearful and magic.
There are influxes of these spiritual things intertwining with the work I'm writing about, and it's not pure Lukumi or Bantu and this is a methodological problem because, even though those traditions are based in callaloo, mixing cultural forms and appropriating whatever works, these are not reliable nor repeatable results. The data is getting confused. But only if. Only if I'm still making this as a method that other actors can use, to be repeated in other situations.
A few weeks ago I met with my ex-wife, who runs a phd program here in performance of the Americas, and I was telling her about my work, and how it might apply in the fields she knows of, and in talking I realized that there is a problem, in that it's not useful for others because they would have to have a resident santero in the acting company, otherwise my methods of spell and trance are not transferable, or rather, if the methods are transferable, then the cultural specificity of the methods are irrelevant, and any new age or earth religion would suffice. This puts it into that sphere where sloppy and generic ideas of a spirit world can be the basis for anyone wanting to repeat this, and there are plenty of performance works out there that use a watered-down and easily accessible set of spiritual principles in order to make work that is universal and ultimately banal.
However. I trust my instincts as well as the advice of my supervisors and see that the pieces really and truly are all there, so it's a question of putting the puzzle pieces in a certain order to see what the pattern says, what I'm trying to tell myself. And I see that this is, in effect, a shift in focus toward the ones this work is for.
I suspect that it is related to building a useful metaphor for performance, where actors channel characters in the way that mediums channel the dead, and framing the methodology to suggest that in my experiments I am finding that this metaphor is not only true, but that there is really very little difference.
And that what I am constructing, then, is not a method for reproducing my work, but instead, constructing a theory of performance. One that confirms what Herbert Blau, Lorca, and Phelan have been considering and theorizing, that art making is made by ghosts, and we are shells for ghosts to inhabit in order to make things in the material world, and these things talk to both worlds, the living and the dead, when they are enacted and embodied.
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