Cultural mining

One of the features of entering a state of uncertainty with others is the sense of belonging (called ‘communitas’ by Victor Turner). After a whole term of risk-taking by the 2^nd year group of Physical Theatre students they performed increasingly extreme acts of outrageousness in front of each other in which observers were both shocked and awestruck at the audacity of the actor (for these were not 'performances', representations of something else, but 'actions' that were real, visceral). Taking risks in front of others exposing, acknowledging and thereby accepting our desires and fears, can make people feel vulnerable but if treated with due respect, care and affection is an act of trust that increases the sense of belonging with those who share it.

This augmentation of audacity could have strayed into a competition for extremity, the sort of self-promoting freedom displayed as an act of prowess by the likes of Frankie Boyle and recently by J. Clarkson. However these acts were done with greater integrity, not the stress-inducing raising of stakes to prove to others but to challenge the limitations that are imposed by our culture, in effect lowering the bar of stress, by dispelling fear, laughing at the demons we carry in our heads and turning them into comic, halloween monsters (Bakhtin). This lowering of the bar enabled an incredible feeling of playful, creative freedom in the choral work that we use as a parallel process to the outrageous acts. In choral work, the group can improvise movements, sounds and words in a continuous illogical flow; it can split into trios, duos and solos and re-form organically. The one rule is that everyone remains aware of what everyone else is doing and follows a line of development in relationship to others so that, rather than a self-indulgent self-expression, the 'self' begins to disappear and the actors experience a state of 'flow' (Csikszentmihayli) in which they are so tightly focussed into the present moment with non-conflictual decision-making that they lose their sense of time passing (typically a quarter/third of actual duration) and despite continuous physical exertion are invigorated rather than exhausted. What emerges is an intuitive unfolding of the unconscious; indeed, it looks like a dream with one scene morphing into another, unrelated, scene. This effect is enhanced by the lowering of the bar, allowing a whole range of actions to emerge that would otherwise be 'off limits'. On top of this cultural freedom there is the extraordinary physical freedom of acrobatic capability so that, in a moment, there can be a cascade of handstands and rolls. As a privileged witness of these proceedings I was deeply moved by the purity, simplicity and trust in this level of play which, although it can reach peaks of mayhem and violence, can also quieten into the most subtle and sublime moments of spontaneous, unrepeatable harmony.

 At the risk of using a pretentious cliché, this does not seem like teaching (in its top-down instruction sense) but more like mining. One can sense that although we may be fumbling in the dark, we are digging into a rich seam and bringing to light all kinds of precious gems whose value is not immediately clear. The beauty of the process is that students have ownership of their own mine and can continue to tap into vast hidden resources that provides more than enough to plough back into further exploration.

Bim Mason