Consciousness,
Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume
1 Number 2, July 2000
_______________________________________________________________
The
Pashyanti Project
by
Peter Malekin and Ralph
Yarrow
Drama
is direct experience. Drama is or
can be liberating, as the rising of the sun liberates after the dark and cold of
night. It can liberate by
transmuting being, what we are in ourselves, prior to our ideas of ourselves and
other associated ideas, our mental furniture, prior even to our ground states of
feeling. In the silent and magic
moments of theatre we are “taken out of ourselves” not merely merged in a
collective, but experiencing the emergence of our awareness devoid, momentarily
or for longer, of the limitations of the image we take upon us as
“ourselves” in the charade of ordinary life.
The make-believe world of drama can transmute consciousness, which is the
ground of perception, feeling and understanding, and the ground of changing
self-images. We say “I” before
we add name and form and gender and the other appurtenances of our lives (though
since our “self-image” comes from outside us, it is rather society and
environment that live us, “our” life, and in part own it).
We can move into a moment in which “I” is in abeyance, when there is
awareness innocent of categories, including those that might apply to the drama
we have witnessed. The drama is
there as a cloud might be there to the innocence of the sky, and so is the
theatre and audience, but in the absence of “I/we” they are just there,
unowned, unpossessed, there being none to possess them.
The
“I/we” that is predicated and suspended here is that of an audience. But in
stepping out of everyday mode and role, there remains the potentiality for
reinstating them. In other words, “audience” is here located as being plus a
capacity for action. Since actor-trainers from many traditions have also sought
to locate this suspense-before-animation, it looks as though it can be common to
both production and reception in performance. What follows will explore both
vectors.
This
non-manipulative state is the nearest we come in ordinary life to a ground state
of consciousness. It is a “ground” because conception and activity are based
on it, though it also gives some inkling of the freedom of ungrounded,
non-contingent consciousness (“pure consciousness” in the terminology of Stace
and Forman;
“consciousness without an object” in the terminology of Wolff;
ecstasy in the terminology of Whicher).
That is why it is liberating, and refreshing.
Non-manipulative, it is also devoid of meaning, except in so far as being
is its own meaning (meaning is manipulative and codal).
From it we can recreate our own lives and create meanings for the drama
in which we have participated. Meaning
is secondary, to being and in time. Out
of consciousness emerges mind, operative, restless and fidgety, the coloniser of
life that constitutes our ego. In
the world of ego we are, or we appear to be, what we are not. The ego is also just there, neither necessary nor
unnecessary, simply a given, and its relational web makes up what in everyday
terms we call our life, but we can benefit from even a moment outside its sphere
of influence, unbounded by it, untrapped. This,
theatre can, sometimes, give us.
Theatre
is not an affair of a moment, or moments, alone.
But the moment as we have described it is important to theatre.
As Peter
Brook pointed out (echoing Blake), the moment contains all time (Brook 81).
As Shakespeare pointed out (resonating
with Blake and Juliana of Norwich) the stage is all space.
In the fullness of the moment is the potentiality of time, but in the
moment of fullness time drops away. Fullness
precludes sequence as there is nothing more to attain and the moment becomes
momentless. Since expressed words
are tied to time, our expression of this becomes complicated.
The experience itself is simple. The
moment does not abolish time, the sequence of drama and action, but it opens up
within it a different dimension. The
moment is a lapse into freedom, and that freedom changes the action, for
dramatic action, time and freedom are all experienced in consciousness through
our minds, and our minds have gone out of themselves towards that
ground/groundless consciousness, towards a liberation, towards freedom. If such
a freeing moment is experienced in a play, then dramatic time ceases to be
self-enclosed, self-defining, whether or not there is narrative or emotional
closure. It is often said that we
experience only “now”, but what we in fact experience is nearer immediate
presence. We invent “now” from
the colouring of memory and anticipation, and isolate the “now” as a moment
– but it only becomes “moment” in retrospect, just as, from the temporal
point of view, long periods in the timelessness of samadhi
only become “long periods” in retrospect.
The same is true also of the inertia of deep sleep.
“How long have I been
asleep?” is a question that can only be answered on awaking (those who fell
asleep in the twenties of a viral sleeping sickness had to be denied mirrors
when dopamine awakened them, for their world view did not accommodate a sleep of
decades and their self-image was that of the young).
It is nearness to what we have called “the moment” that gives young
children the agonisingly slow sense of a time that stands still, agonising since
time and the experiences “in” it in this world are often distress or agony.
Time is flexible and the key to it is not the metronome but
consciousness.
This
account suggests that an underlying freedom, beyond egoic and category-bound
experience, is available through theatre. As an aesthetic proposition (and also
at least implicitly, therefore, a psycho-political practice) this is neither new
nor restricted to theatre, as we have attempted to show in detail in our books (Malekin
& Yarrow 1997; Yarrow 2000); others have made
similar claims for the effects of theatre forms from ritual to the absurd, from
Noh to Shakespeare. But in order
for it to be more than a proposition or an interesting idea, it has to be both
experienceable in and through bodies and minds, and repeatable. Empirical
research on audiences poses problems of scale and availability of appropriate
equipment (since things like analysis of brain and body functioning are
involved) and it also raises questions of the correlation between physiology and
consciousness that cannot be unequivocally settled.
It is therefore more practical to investigate the other bodies involved
in theatre-making, namely actors and directors.
The
Pashyanti project therefore aims to progress from the descriptive
(as outlined in this essay) to experimental application.
It has already taken some initial steps in that direction.
In addition, many theatre practitioners from different traditions have
articulated similar aims and attempted by a variety of methods to realise them
with performers. Some of these
endeavours and our own intentions will be outlined below.
First we need to explain the title more fully.
Behind
outer physical and inner mental speech Vedic tradition posits two stages, pashyanti, and before that, para.
Pashyanti is pre-verbal, marked
by unity of subject and object, non-discursive, immediate, devoid of any sense
of spacetime, a holistic cognition. Para
is prior even to pashyanti, a first
stirring towards speech, a sense of “something to be said”, and arises out
of unconditioned mind (non-contingent consciousness).
The
full experience of para and pashyanti entails a clear and settled mind and wakefulness on the
subtle levels of consciousness, but most of us have at least some experience of
them. We have the experience of
knowing what we want to say, not having words to put it in, searching for words,
rejecting trial formulations as “not what I want to say” and eventually
hitting on a satisfactory formulation, or even wrenching language into new
shapes and modes so that formulation shall be satisfactory. What we want to say is certainly conscious, otherwise we
could not use it to judge articulation, but at that stage it is non-verbal,
words are lacking. This is not the
fullest or clearest experience of pashyanti,
but it verges on pashyanti.
In its fullness pashyanti is nearer the eureka experience, the “got it” of a
whole new conceptualisation instantaneously present, the sort of thing that for
instance composers can experience, when a whole work or movement is
instantaneously present to their minds, becoming sequential when written down
(see Malekin and Yarrow 45).
The
para stage is also most commonly found in creative work, and not
only in the arts. Strindberg seems
to have been aware of it, to judge by his saying, “Quiet, I hear a poem
coming!”
These
experiences are relatively common. They
are likely to be particularly clear for those who have training in the mental
disciplines of yoga, though they are not themselves yogic conditions or
techniques. It is simply that yoga
tends to produce greater clarity and peace in the mind, less “noise”, and
greater awareness of the states of consciousness that transcend the limitations
of individual and discursive mind.
The
pashyanti and para
experiences also raise intriguing questions, both about the nature of spacetime,
and the commonly available models of the mind.
Spacetime may be much nearer the quantum level in the way it emerges in
the ordinary operations of the human mind than is commonly thought (if this
surmise is correct then those playing with the idea of consciousness as a field
would be on the right track). Also
the relations between subject and object appear to be plural rather than
singular.
For
theatrical praxis such theoretical speculations are not immediately relevant,
but the issue of rhythm and breath is. As
a practitioner of yoga moves mentally into the still clarity of samadhi, whether cognitive samadhi
(samprajnata samadhi, the mind
with an object) or non-cognitive samadhi
(pure consciousness devoid of any empirical content), then physical breathing
slows and apparently comes to a total halt.
On emerging from samadhi the
breath returns to whatever level is normal in surface activity for that
practitioner (ordinary everyday breathing in fact also begins to function
differently after years of yogic practice).
Pashyanti, not being a
specifically yogic condition, has either no such effect, or such an effect in a
far milder form. However, since pashyanti
is ontologically prior to everyday spacetime, and since it in part shares with
cognitive samadhi an apprehension of
its mental object in total cognitive immediacy, it does have fully present in it
the potential and potency for completely integrated rhythm in external space and
time. In other words it contains
the potential for perfect co-ordination, except that the co-ordination is a
whole working out into detail, not detail organized into unity.
Rhythm
consists in polarity in spatial disposition and temporal sequence.
If such polarity in theatrical practice emerges from pashyanti,
then it emerges from unity, and the unity, in the form of coherent
co-ordination, will be retained if there is no distortion between pashyanti
and outer speech/action. This unity
should inform movement, posture, affective flow and speech rhythm.
Most important it should inform the speaking of Shakespearean verse,
where the base rhythm in the “score” from which the actor speaks is at one
with the flow of thought-feeling in the role and the overall situation.
If
we are right in this hypothesis, and only practice can test it, then it will
also have implications for the dynamics of relationships in space, and for the
projection of plot and action, since plot and action cease to be merely
sequential, merely a matter of lull and climax, something nearer Peter Brook’s
all time in a moment.
Overall,
theatrical practice emanating from pashyanti
emphasizes the integrative functioning of drama for actor and audience alike -
not what the drama, speech and action is about, but what it does.
And what it does is not confined to changing the emotions and ideas of an
audience, but can also change their coherence in being, in unity of mind,
feeling, consciousness and potentially action.
As noted by yoga philosophy in the East and the Platonists in the West,
there is a double movement within human consciousness, the one outwards towards
action, the other inwards towards integrity of being.
Plotinus indeed saw human action as failure of
vision, the inability to grasp the fullness of contentment at the heart of their
own natures leading humans to seek an external realization of what lay within
them (3.8.4.237) – from this point of view the magic moment of silence in the
theatre, of suspended action and suspended identity with role and persona, is
not a preparation for action, action is a preparation for silence.
In great performance, however, these two combine.
Action flows out from pashyanti
bringing silence with it, and silence carries action back into integrity of
being. The intermediate stage is pashyanti,
which is the beginning of action on the edge of silence. Through realization
from pashyanti the sequentiality of action is transformed.
The
aim of this project is to build , where appropriate, on the moves referred to
above, and to add specific understandings of physiological and mental
functioning at generative or originary levels, in order through practice to
enable actors and directors to access the pashyanti
level more fully and to integrate discursive understanding
back into it. As noted, this
should lead to holistic rhythm not only in gesture, movement, speech and overall
stage Gestalt, but also in the way
drama is thought, in the first instance by the director. If rhythm grows out of
underlying wholeness it carries that wholeness into its divisions
(differentiation is not fragmentation). The overall aims are to make available,
to realise, all latent signification in a play - in other words, to capitalise
fully on theatre’s greatest advantages, the simultaneous manifestation of an
enormous richness of signifying codes – and also to awaken the source of
meaning in the awareness of audience and actor, to enliven their native
creativity.
Applied
to verse-speaking, the aim is to get the subtle energy-flow of actor and
actress, the outer breath, and therefore the speech rhythm, to be more than
successive, to have the whole speech (even play) arise spontaneously out of
immediate cognition, out of the pashyanti level
of mind.
This
is not just about keeping “in play” a multiplicity of potential meanings,
though the interplay of paradox and layering across verbal, gestural and other
codes is what gives theatre its density and qualifies it as an effective medium
to initiate maximum co-creativity from its receivers. What we are after is
rather not losing the “allness” in the particular significance; about
holding the total construct of meaning, the Gestalt
if you like, within and beneath each utterance and its embodiment. Impossible demand, of course, in that it requires both
performers and receivers to be alert at that x-ray level of intuited wholeness
“prior” to speech and form; yet although we can’t be “there” all the
time, there are ways (and theatre, among other disciplines, knows them) of
tuning in from time to time.
What
is the fullest level of resource for a play? It is its ability, through geste,
metaphor, register, rhythm, network of relationships, visual and aural codes, to
generate a dynamic of meanings.
`What
is the most powerful resource of the actor? It is to be many people, many
shapes; and in each of these forms to tap the flow of energy, to embody the
processes of their articulation.
What
is the key modality of an audience? It is the capacity to intuit a “play”,
to sense an organicity and to derive a coherence, from the multiple signs,
sights and sounds it receives.
These
analyses imply the possibility of functioning at a level from which forms arise:
at the inception of Schiller’s Formtrieb,
perhaps. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from the more familiar
activity of sifting or compiling meaning from a diversity of information. We are
not talking about adding up and arriving at a product; we are instead proposing
accessing a wholeness from which diversity arises. The proposition runs: the
“play”, the “character” and the “meaning” emerge as
the articulated forms; they do so because they can be inhabited in a condition
of latency. The wholeness is (as Rilke says about the nature of objects and as
the phenomenon of holographic reproduction suggests) present in every part.
So:
how can the “all” of a play be available? How can all the participants in
the event express and experience it? And, going even further, how can the play
be or incorporate or lead its receivers into “allness” - which might suggest
something beyond the apparent concerns of the individual work and impinge on
transpersonal zones of awareness?
Where
mind and body meet, before action, before speech, where knowing is a condition
of being leading to feeling, thought, words, deeds, the quality of action is
untrammelled, coming from a wholeness within which you are situated. Start with body, start with words, start with analysis of
implicit subtext, start with characteral relations and power games, and much is
achieved. From the level of pashyanti,
prior, ontologically prior to this differentiated, all is achievable.
From this level, whole in potentiality, speech is spontaneous, feeling is
spontaneous, act is spontaneous. There
is an easy flow, like a river that knows its own beginning, its own end, whose
identity is not that of rapids or dam or cataract, or even as river, since river
is only a manifestation of untrammelled possibility.
Identity is thus not destroyed. It
is transmuted.
The
quality of time also changes. Other
times, other modes of time, are glimpsed, possibly slipped into; leaving the
theatre, time is needed to readjust to time, to recreate time in our everyday
image.
To
train the body so that it is transfused with this knowledge is difficult, to
train the breath into spontaneous being well-nigh impossible outside certain
vocational spiritual traditions. The
risk is strain, the imposition of direction imposed with partiality. Breath, thought, feeling, body - one; body, mind - one; affect
one factor and you affect all. Work
from the level where they are different, however, and the effect is partial,
because sympathy is not living. Work
out of pashyanti and you affect all,
as one organism. Potentially you
affect all others engaged in a production also; on the pashyanti level sympathy approaches identity.
The sympathy that exists, and can be denied, in the differentiated, is
always at the mercy of the ego identity. On
the pashyanti level the ego is
identified with perception in a nontemporal apprehension (immediate,
nondiscursive). Retain the quality
of that level in action/acting and ego is lost in art.
A kind of negative capability.
How
are performers to get to this level of pashyanti?
We have noted that some experience of it is common enough, especially in
a situation where you have something to say but cannot find the words for it.
Usually this arises when we are touched to the depths or are seeking a
change in mode of apprehension or understanding.
What we want to say is already known to us; it is conscious, but it is
not verbalised, and not being verbalised it is difficult to use in everyday
life. For much of the time such
preverbal comprehension registers as “feeling”, but it is feeling in the
sense of intuition, not emotion, for when it is operating the mind ingathers in
quietness. Major crises can produce
it, such as the approach of death, and that is probably why the Elizabethans
attributed to the dying the power to prophecy.
That level of mind is not necessarily universal, but it is free from the
detached separateness of the ego of surface mind. Nor is “feeling” the only way of experiencing it, as we
have pointed out.
When
actors work on a role, they often
have an unexpressed idea of what they want to do with it, of “where I want to
go”. This is not the same as an
intellectual understanding, nor as an affective subtext based on Stanislavskian
emotion-memory exploration, nor as a physical “score” of movements,
gestures, glances, rhythms; nor as a way of phrasing lines or pointing words.
All of these will be affected by the underlying idea and will interact with it,
but they are not the same as it. It
is probably never articulated, except maybe in the triumphant sense that
“tonight”, I “got it”. All
rehearsal practices, director’s comments, personal observations are, largely
unconsciously, checked against this blueprint, which is not static but evolves
as conscious mental, physical and emotional patterning fills out: it is an
ever-present intuition of the possibility that is the role.
As such, it grows within the performer, and development in its light
becomes self-motivated: motivated from a part of the self that knows its fullest
capacity with reference both to the performer’s resources and to the
perception of the role. The drive
to realise this may have a lot to do with why actors go on trying, just as a
sculptor goes on trying to release the form of his or her vision from the raw
material.
The
performer, then, can be led on by his or her own sense that s/he can be
“more”; and that “moreness” is a property both of performer and of the
role; it operates across the boundary between “I” and “not I”; it is
properly both a moreness and a lessness. As
Richard Schechner points out, performers inhabit this border territory; they
also, in so doing, draw on a quality or capacity which he designates as “not
not I”. I am not my
differentiated egoic everyday self; nor am I, say, Romeo, Willy Loman or
Elizabeth I. I am something which
is and is not both of these. My
“self” is not entirely co-existent with either of these differentiated
structures; nor is it uniquely operating in a Stanislavskian (identified with
the role) or Brechtian (separate from and controlling the role) mode.
I am all these modalities and I am the zone across which their
transference and transmutation occurs.
In
a similar way, a director may have an “organic” sense of the shape of the
play to be realised, which underlies work on individual components without ever
being articulated, except - to whatever degree is possible - in the resultant
performance. Communicating with
this level is less a question of driving through a self-willed project than of
listening to a sort of sensed heartbeat, of dilating one’s “directing”
mode in conjunction with a kind of receptivity.
Such levels of operation then, can be and are accessed.
Any director knows that the disadvantage of performance (as opposed to
rehearsal) is the need to enter into the particular, to make definite choices:
stand up now, not then; say it (only) this way, not that; look at her, not at
him. It’s a relief of course, not
least for the actors: at least/at last, they think, we know where we are.
Skilled directing is the art of giving way to this temptation as late and
as little as possible. Once we know where we are, we are, as Beckett elegantly puts
it in Fin de Partie, “baisés”.
There is nowhere else to go.
What
we are after here then is to enable access to this virtual or numinous intuition
of wholeness, to develop or exercise some channels by which it can be most
readily approached, and then not lost in the subsequent unravelling into form
which is the play. The operation
will need first to take the form of a process
of negative capability, a shifting through and beyond egoic involvement and
particular significance.
Approached
from the other side, from the universal aspects of mind and beyond, pashyanti can register with total clarity as a complete realisation
that can then be experienced as differentiating into words and logical
sequences, into the discursive and temporal.
We have noted that, thus experienced,
pashyanti is near to the
inspiration of those composers or artists whose work comes as an instantaneous
whole, and to the eureka experience. The
freshness and revitalisation of experiences verging on this level come not
solely from the breaking of the mould of mental habit, but from the extension of
mental life off its mere superficies towards integration of all levels of
consciousness (which in fact exceeds mere mind), and towards fullness of mental
power, even though pashyanti is
relatively a surface experience.
What
is needed then, is to bring performers, individually and collectively, firstly
to access a state of “neutrality”, where habit and familiar patterns are
suspended, where both the everyday self and its forms and roles, and any easily
adopted “actorly” personae, are put aside. A sort of waiting without
expectation. Where the performer is not the everyday I, not the character s/he
may adopt, only the possibility of being neither and both.
Where the play, both as interaction of personae and as interweaving of
text, is still unknown. It's not
irrelevant then that the levels accessed here are what conventional categories
of identity and meaning leave out: participants meet themselves in another
guise, not as they are in everyday situations or familiar training or
performance modes; they are asked to engage with what in these situations they
do not know. Jacques Lecoq claimed
that the most urgent need for the performer is permission to fail: to be able to
become what (you think) you cannot do. Others
have used terms like “sacrifice” or “abandonment” to describe passing
through this “failure”. What
it involves is, more precisely, a temporary encounter, perhaps initially
vertiginous or scary, with something like the sense that “I can’t do that; I
have absolutely no idea how to do/be that; I cannot imagine what doing that
would be like; I do not extend that far; if I am asked to do that I will be
lost”. It is absolutely necessary
to enter that loss, that absence. To
rest here. To unfind oneself. To
be only a readiness, a blank screen.
This
stage (neutral waiting) can be approached many ways.
They could include the use of neutral mask work, kinds of visualisation
and relaxation. They need to lead
to a state which is both relaxed and attentive, without specific content to
awareness. Accessing this means in
the first instance, starting from everyday conscious awareness and refining or
reducing the degree of activity via any of the five senses.
Once encountered, the resultant temporary condition needs to be returned
to frequently, in order ultimately to make access to it more readily available,
or to establish it as an underlying stratum of awareness (a probably lengthy
task).
This
“inward stroke” can progress by taking an image (sight), or a sound
(hearing), or a sensation (touch), or a rhythm, or the breath. We have found in
initial experiments that pranayama (breathing exercise), carefully guided towards easy and
unforced passage of an ever-reduced volume of air, begins to induce a
physiological condition approaching neutral awareness; that other participants
find the visualisation of the juxtaposition of sea, sky and sand (as in the
neutral mask “waking up” exercise used by Copeau) helpful.
Other possibilities include standard drama exercises like progressive
relaxation or Spolin’s “circles of attention”; yoga asanas,
appropriately selected and directed (i.e.
towards balance, flexibility and relaxed focus);. rhythmic movement and
chanting; and shamanic chanting or other similar vocal work.
It
is important to develop first some familiarity with this condition, because it
is one which allows forms, formulations, patterns of perception and behaviour,
to be suspended. There is no
attempt to pretend they do not or should not exist; they are not devalued, just
bracketed out temporarily.
This withdrawing from activity is a withdrawing from intention, including
the intention to signify or to grasp significance.
If, as a performer, it is thought useful to “go out of your (everyday)
self”, then it is important to go as far as possible.
Zeami indicates this direction when he says that the actor should
“forget the voice and understand…the melody.
Forget the melody and understand the pitch.
Forget the pitch and understand the rhythm” (Rimer
102). Indian actress Alaknanda Samarth, working in collaboration
with a visual artist in Bombay on Heiner Müller’s Medea,
needed to explore a “state of mind/body” in some way located in a kind of
Beckettian process of “pause” between words (“Line…cut off
memorization…blank out…2nd line”): an “understanding of the
non-psychological, non-individual” (Seagull
64). Barba’s quest for
“pre-expressivity”, Grotowski’s request for “disarmament” or
“sacrifice” on the part of the actor, Indian director Kavalam Panikkar’s
definition of a goal of performance as “the extreme point of the
imagination”, all suggest something similar.
The aim of retiring to this imagined “dying” is precisely to be born
again from here: that is the next phase, where embryonic signification begins
anew. If the particularity of
individual conception is first “washed clean”, there is a chance that a
different kind of entry or intuition of the work may be allowed to form.
In working in this way, each performance is a reemergence from origin.
The
next stage is to begin to inhabit not a structure, not a text, not a plot or a
story, but the tracing out of its possible nexus of relationship.
Don't go too fast. Hold back
from detail. This stage requires an
intuitive merging with the whole field of the project in hand (play, scene
etc.), but not as idea. As image,
perhaps; or colour, pattern, sound; as any nascent sensory construct, but at its
initial, unelaborated stage. This
needs to be felt/shared/inhabited rather than seized as an object: a fully
imaginative entry into and being with what will become material.
From the relaxed focus of stage 1, it is possible to allow a sense of the
project to form. Allow the non-specific awareness of the project to be present
without concentration or forcing; from it, a sensation, a rhythm, a pattern, a
mood, a tone may emerge. Remain
with this. Neither try to develop
it nor to hold on to it. If it
either begins to crystallise into details, or disappears, start again. Keep going back and forth in this initiatory zone until the
fragile sensory outline is relatively familiar. From there, the next stage (a collective sharing and sensing
prior to any further development towards form) can begin.
The sensing of the play as a whole follows, moving from “feeling”
(intuition) to idea, not the other way round (theories, ideas, preset attitudes,
should be abandoned for the time being to leave the intuitive mind free to
operate). Role and situational
analysis should only come last, on the basis of total intuitive comprehension.
Training
methods to get actors, or ideally an entire company, including back-stage
members, on to the pashyanti level
have already been outlined. They
can be developed further. Selected
methods need to increase the flexibility of mind, so that there is no impediment
to the flow from pashyanti outwards.
They therefore need to avoid emotionally charged stimuli or partisan
ideas (since these excite the surface mind and emphasize difference).
The visualisations already suggested could be extended. For instance a churning sea could be visualised subsiding
into a state of rest. Or some
object in nature could be selected, an object that is appealing, a mountain or
ocean. Visualisation of the object
could be followed by a merging with it in imagination, by entering into it,
becoming one with it, sensing through it and its life, leaving behind your human
identity. Sounds could also be
tried out, dissonances resolving into chords, growing into pure notes with
harmonic resonances. Some of the
sound exercises developed for use with Thanos Vovolis's Greek masks, mostly
vowel cries resonating through the masks, could also be tried out.
Primary colours or a primary colour could be faded back mentally into
their gentle soft root colours (Cézanne said “Colours rise up from the roots
of the world”) and could then be merged into pure white.
Traditional symbols such as the shri yantra could be placed physically
before a troupe and the actors could be asked to enter into the diagram mentally
and pass beyond it; after a while they should be able to hold it mentally while
in a relaxed state. Where
appropriate these techniques could be tried in conjunction with the use of aroma
therapy oils. Soft touch could be
taken mentally, faded into gentleness and expanded to include the touch-sensing
of surrounding objects, including more and more distant ones, until the mind
lets go and the objects fall into the mind rather than the mind becoming
dissipated in objects. Possibly
mental exercises could be developed on the lines of the traditional Platonic
ascent to Beauty. Best of all,
however, would be prolonged training in yoga, the mental techniques especially,
which should enable the mind to slip into or approach the pashyanti level effortlessly at will.
As
already stated, these techniques are complementary to other training techniques
already in use, but they should precede or be interwoven with them. If this
procedure is followed, and if it is successful, and if it involves all
associated with the production, then it will take in design, music and sound
effects, etc. All should project a
state of being primarily and serve a sequentially dramatic function secondarily,
not the other way round.
To enable actors, or ideally an entire company, including
back-stage members, to start to
work from the pashyanti level, they
need - as with much performance training - to increase the flexibility of both
mind and body, so that there is no impediment either to the withdrawal through
subtler and subtler stages of perception to stillness, or to the flow from pashyanti
outwards. For this, ideally, both
time and seclusion are required. Such
company structures have existed, not only in the East but also in Europe.
Copeau's retreats in Burgundy, Gardzienice's Polish village base, some of
Grotowski's “paratheatrical” work have been of this kind and have moved
towards not entirely dissimilar goals. It
is difficult, but even in such
cultural settings not impossible to think of working for relatively extended
periods in this way. Both radical
performance training and practical theatre research are involved, as an
extension of the work of those practitioners mentioned above.
We hope that it will be possible to run at least one- or two-week
residential workshops of this kind.
While
the company should ideally be yogic, this does not exclude any subject matter or
political or other concerns in the drama or performance forms which it practices
and/or investigates. Thought,
including the thought in a work of art, starts from external stimulus, which
affects the mind, and prompts the ideation that then moves out from the pashyanti
level. That ideation will retain
the conditioning of time, place, assumption.
The non-discursiveness of pashyanti
and its union of subject and object will, however, give thought on that level
maximum available coherence and the broadest available range of living sympathy,
as well as the greatest available energy. If that level is brought out on to the surface these
qualities will tend to be retained.
The
effects of such retention will include breathing, the quality of movement, the
quality of speech, and, in a writer, the quality of the words or language. The texts in English where these qualities should be most
obvious are the plays of Shakespeare, for there is something in those texts that
escapes surface analysis. Historical
considerations, psychological considerations, political and social
considerations can be analyzed out and presented as the “significance” of
the play, yet if these factors were retained and the poetry alone removed the
plays would be wretchedly diminished, indeed totally changed.
Codified criticism is inevitably reductive, and subtle modern variants do
no more than was done in earlier periods by moralistic reduction that posited
some “message”. If the play only added up to the “message”, we would not
need the play; the play is what the “message” and the “significance”
leave out.
To
find the play is to experience it, and to experience it is, among other things,
to experience its language, however much language may be looked down upon in
some forms of modern theatrical practice, where it may become a subtext of the
body. That which experiences pashyanti is the mind, and the mind is more flexible than the body,
so that it is easier to move the mind to pashyanti
by using the mind itself through language, thus affecting the body also, than to
work primarily on body awareness to induce a mental state of pashyanti. Since the two factors, while not identical, are closely
identified, it is not a question of one or the other, both are needed.
But mind should not be overshadowed in the process by body.
Indeed one effect of proper body training is that the body should present
no impediment to the mind, the two should move as one, as in Clive Barker’s
“body/think”. If the language
in a play lacks vitality, power, the question is immaterial, but for most of
Shakespeare it is central.
Shakespeare
is distinguished among English poets by the “ease” of his language. It is a quality that has often been noted - Ben Jonson
remarked on it, so did Dryden. The
quality is not easy to analyze, and most have not tried.
From our point of view it is simply that the surface language is very
near to pashyanti; the resistance of
the surface to what we wish to say but have as yet no words for, a resistance
experienced precisely when we are looking for the right words, usually is not
there. This leads to a number of
qualities that are analysable and range from obvious qualities of physiological
mouth movement to perhaps less obvious qualities of rhythmic coherence and
holistic imagery. Rhythmic
coherence is retained even when the syntax and metrical patterning appear
irregular. The breathed rhythm of
the sentences tends to enact the breath rhythm of the state projected. The result is not a statement in the manner say of Dryden or
Racine or Corneille, but something wilder and less formal, language as organism,
for it embodies the breath of the organism, and the breath subtly registers
mental-emotional condition and degree of consciousness.
Imagery and syntax can equally function holistically, combining logically
contradictory tendencies in a way not open to discursive linear analytical
rationality.
The
physiological enactment of feeling and action in a line of verse is fairly
common in seventeenth and to a lesser extent eighteenth-century English poetry
(a point made by John Bailey, who mentioned it in discussion many years ago). Milton’s account of the devils’ chewing dust and ashes in
Paradise Lost is one instance.
They
Chewed
bitter ashes, which th’offended taste
Wih
spattering noise rejected. Oft
they…
With
hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws
With
soot and cinders filled.
10.566-70
The
mouth movements in reading are similar to the presumed mouth movements of
someone chewing ashes. Yet the
language is nonetheless heavy, it has a contrived or arranged feel to it, it
sounds constructed, not natural (the disruption of the most common word order
because of the syntax, and the consequent variants of intonational and pausal
patterning necessary to convey the sense, are factors in this, though there are
also others). Hamlet’s language
can have a similar physiological quality, but with much greater ease.
An instance is Hamlet’s comment on his mother’s sexual appetites and
hasty remarriage in the lines:
O most wicked speed, to post
With
such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
1.2.156-7
The
lines spit, and hissing and spitting are instinctive expressions of disgust,
anger and hostility that are not confined to human beings (cats exhibit them,
for instance, and there is at least one kind of cobra that will hiss in warning
before spitting venom). If the
mouth movement is enacted, feeling follows, and given the instinctive sympathy
to sound in speech, and audience will respond with feeling.
The audience probably in fact responds with some residual or incipient
mouth movement that might be detectable in the brain.
The
mouth movement can also actually mime the meaning of the lines.
When Hamlet asks his father’s ghost why
The sepulchre
Wherein
we saw thee quietly inurned
Hath
oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To
cast thee up again
1.4.48-51
the
image is metonymic for death itself,
as swallowing the dead, but in this case vomiting them up again.
In line 50 the mouth hollows over the “o” of “oped” and the
“a” of “marble” (and to some extent the “o” in “ponderous”),
while the mouth is open for “aw” of “jaws” and remains partly open for
the final “s”, while the closure of the endings of “oped” and
“marble” give virtually the mouth movements of the preliminary and abortive
heaves of a fit of vomiting. “Cast”,
starting from the throat and ending at the front of the mouth, gives the final
heave, leaving “thee” vomited “up again”.
Yet in spite of all this the lines have an easy mastery, they flow
beautifully, arising spontaneously as perfection.
They live the meaning without strain.
This
distinctive holism and ease is found almost microcosmically in passages of the
plays, for instance in King Lear:
Regan
What need one?
Lear
O, reason not the need! Our
basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's. Thou
art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wearst
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But,
for true need -
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
2.4.256-263
The
passage obviously expresses conflicting impulses, ideas, definitions of need.
They can be teased out and a discursive statement given of the
“meaning” of the passage in the manner of editorial notes, yet if this is
done the “meaning” of the passage changes radically.
What is missed is the wholeness of conflict, the way in which one idea
not only interlocks with the other, but the conflicting ideas and feelings are
part of one another. Separated out
the ideas change. So do the
feelings. In other words the
impulse of the verse has organic unity. If
in performance the delivery is “pointed” in order to “clarify” a
particular interpretation, not only is the wholeness truncated, but the
underlying dynamic, which here is rooted in conflict, may be glossed over. Both
the actor and the audience need to feel this rather than have it
“explained”.
The
organic quality of the verse comes out in sound, rhythm and syntax.
The caesura after the opening cry of Lear's speech is one of pent-up
exasperation. The following
“basest beggars”, with its explosive “b”s, is the bursting out of breath
and energy, while the falling spoken rhythm of the words together with the
spitting and hissing sounds of the “s”s and “t” give the contempt (of
both the beggars and the proposed idea of need).
The next line, with its double caesura before “in” and after
“thing”, gives a kind of double ended line with an emphasis on “Are” (in
its metrically inverted foot) and “superfluous” (again the word hisses).
The preliminary explosion out of the way, the next line has a deliberate
plod with no caesura, the effect of frustration becoming tight conscious
control, and this quality is highlighted by the alliterative “n”s.
The short polysyllables and easily elided monosyllables (“more than”)
are followed in the opening of the next line by monosyllables leading up to the
caesura after “beast's”. The
caesura marks the shift to the alternative to the “cheap as beast's” idea
that is being rejected. Most
naturally therefore the “Thou” would be stressed and the emphatic statement
ending in “lady” demands a pause at the end of the line.
The next nearly three lines have obvious plays on “warm” and
“gorgeous” backed up by other initial “g”s and “w”s, while the lines
also pick up the earlier refrain of “nature needs”.
Logically and rhythmically the lines collapse in on themselves, combining
two contradictory ideas and lines of argument: first, if you only needed clothes
to keep you warm, you would not need the excessive clothing that makes you
gorgeous; secondly, your gorgeous clothing makes you gorgeous but it doesn't
even keep you warm. The
contradictions could be removed by careful distinctions between socio-sexual
needs and need for bare physical survival, but then the wholeness of the driving
need disappears.
This
contradictory passage on nature's needs comes out of the caesura, the pause
after “Thou art a lady”. It is
part of the contradictory, the artificial notion of what it is to be a lady. But if being a lady is this artificial and contradictory,
then is man's life after all really “as cheap as beast's”, an idea rejected
in earlier lines? The initial
exasperation caused by the rejection of Lear's need for symbolic social status
in the form of his knights is here an exasperation at the whole idea of need.
Lear rouses himself to grasp the central nexus of the question, and the
caesura after warm is succeeded by “But for true need”, a move towards
resolution which breaks down with the end pause of the line and the anacoluthon
as he addresses the heavens.
The
clash of opposing drives continues in “give me that patience, patience I
need”. A simple appeal for help
from the heavens would take the form, “You heavens, give me the patience that
I need”, but patience is instead pointed at by the “that” in “that
patience”, the first construction is abandoned after the first “patience”,
the caesura that follows is again a fulcrum on which the line and thought turn,
and Lear's mind turns inwards with the repeating of “patience” and the
recognition in “I need”. Need
thus becomes need for a quality in Lear himself, it is internal, as opposed to
the external versions of need at the opening (“nature needs”).
This presents a partial answer to the question, unanswered, about the
nature of true need, but it does not dispose of the external difficulties that
gave rise to it in the first place. What
emerges from this is obviously not some syllogistic consideration of the concept
of need, or even the series of contradictory ideas suggested by taking the lines
sequentially, rather it is a self-contradictory state, the validity of opposites
pulling apart, which is the explosion of Lear into madness, and into sanity.
The patterning of the sounds and the pent-up breaths as lines and phrases
swing round in direction, is the state of life energy in Lear expressed in terms
of sequences. From this point of
view it is pashyanti as physiological
mind giving rise to discursive expression.
Not “reason the need” but “feel the need” is Lear’s cry; or
“reason isn’t the need, I am, and my need is of you/everyone/everything”:
Lear here is the need for need. Need
is a condition of Lear’s being, of the character and of the dynamic of
interaction which make up the play; it is also the structure of understanding by
which the audience may enter the Lear world.
It bodies out to condition all action within that world.
To enter (for performer and audience) means engaging not with a
definition, not with a characteristic, not with a single act of desiring or even
a single acknowledgement of lack, but with a motive force, a groundswell which
impels complexities, oppositions and multiple reflections of plot and action.
To make these fully operational, performers need to be able to access the
generic. That means working out
from a kind of understanding that is not yet language. So the preceding analysis
is not a set of instructions to performers, but an assessment of some possible
outcomes. Each performance has to reactivate the dynamic.
Lear’s
state of life energy is not one which can be simply explained or grasped; it is
the state of the play as a whole, which presents no way out, allows no
resolution. The play forces, or
tends to force a change in the state of being of the audience, driving them to
rise above the predicaments within it, not proceed through them to some
“solution”. Without the pashyanti effect this quality of the play would be impossible.
It is a characteristic of theatre which (as script or as performance)
derives from the pashyanti level that
the part contains the whole within it, for pashyanti is preverbal and prespatial in that it does not have
discursivity - discursivity, time and space are latent within it. The audience
is not here offered the simplistic or exorcistic version of catharsis
Brecht feared (“he’s done it, so I don’t have to bother”). Rather, it is
invited to experience a complexity which pushes comprehension beyond familiar
paradigms and the knower beyond recognisable modes of knowing.
This
extended (and illustrative) analysis is intended to indicate ways in which
Shakespearean verse is dynamic and performative because it emerges from a
unitive and organic sense of the total existential situation (Lear’s
“take” on the world) which impels everything he says and does. The extract
and the play exemplify the contradictory mental and physical drives which
determine his (Stanislavskian) “intentions”, and which the performer
therefore has to “play”. But how can one play this degree of contradiction?
We
are suggesting that to access the pashyanti
level prior to linguistic and semiotic operation in a systematic way, is to
enable actors to develop familiarity with a point of origin for such work.
Barba’s suggested route to a “pre-expressive (sub)score” moves back from
movement to the impulse to move, from language or vocalisation to shaping of
breath or sensing of pitch. Cicely Berry explores text as movement by requiring
actors to walk and change direction at each punctuation mark. Mask training
(e.g. Commedia) may demand the adoption of different postures or body shapes.
These and other methodologies indicate a direction towards the identification of
modes of organicity; many of the raids by twentieth-century European
actor-trainers (Artaud, Grotowski, Brook and Mnouchkine among them) on Eastern
performance practice can be understood as a quest for states of
psychophysiological balance and energised potential. Our project seeks to take
this work further.
Given
a company either intimately suited, appropriately trained or long established,
the whole should also be present in the part in the sense of individual role.
As we sense the mind and feeling of those we know well, or sense the
feeling of people who have left a room we enter, so many artists sense the
feeling and mind of fellow performers. Pashyanti
is free from ego, not personalised. On
the level of pashyanti minds can meet.
It is not necessarily a universal level of mind, but it is nearer the
universal level than is discursive mind. There
should therefore be instinctive cohesion, if not total coherence between the
actors, increasing as they approach the pashyanti
level and begin to act out of it. Thus
the quality of a whole production should change and given the sympathy of minds,
it should include the mind of the audience also.
The
internal contradictions within Shakespearean imagery and thought have, like the
ease of the language, been previously noted by English poets and critics. Dryden was aware of them (they provided part of his
motivation for rewriting Antony and
Cleopatra), and Dr. Johnson was similarly irritated by their presence in Macbeth
and in Shakespeare’s work in general. In
our view Shakespeare’s holistic images are not half finished versions of
surface thought. Rather the
contradictory combinations enverb a different quality and a different meaning
from anything attainable in discursive suface language.
Surface statement analyzes or explains, talks about
something; poetry used as Shakespeare uses it is the experience itself.
This is why poetry is nearer to the language of the soul than discursive
prose, and why in the present age, when we are alienated from ourselves, prose
is the dominant medium and poetry has become increasingly discursive and
prosaic. This judgement of course
presupposes a model of the mind different from the ones that form the basis for
current establishment discourse. It
is precisely this quality of Shakespeare's language that makes him stand above
other English poets and most of the poets in other languages that we have
encountered. That is also why the
traditional canon was right to accord centrality to Shakespeare, and why those
who regard canons as solely political constructs are wrong.
The
passages of verse that we have considered come from the middle plays of
Shakespeare, because the verse there is most easily accessible to analysis.
The verse in the plays changed in the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime.
In earlier plays like Richard II and Romeo and
Juliet the verse is more discursive and ornate, playing largely on the
auditory form of rhythmical, syntactic and rhyme structures, which is one reason
why these plays “tell a story” in the sense of having a pageant effect,
albeit a very moving one, that we view from a vantage point outside the action.
In the middle period, especially in the great tragedies, the involvement
tends to be more direct. There too
a distance is not lacking, but we gain it by going through the experience in the
play, not standing, however moved, outside the central action. In the final plays, especially The Tempest and The Winter's
Tale, something much subtler is going on, and much more difficult to
analyze. The verse reverts to
something approaching the early technique, and the plays regain something of the
spectacle element, but the vantage point of the viewer has changed and the verse
is subtler than the early verse. The audience-stage relation is complex and
paradoxical, influenced, for instance, by the shifting viewpoints and juxtaposed
realities of The Tempest, by the
narrative break and chorus in The Winter's
Tale. Through the awakening
speech of Paulina and the revels speech of Prospero the audience, and possibly
the actors, move from witness of the whole external action to witness of their
own minds, yet with a kind of detachment that was not there in the early plays.
Melody in these great speeches is noticeable, but they are not just
pretty, they have strength. The
conflict of the tragedies is there, in action and verse, but there is also
detached serenity, so that the conflicts are dominated by stillness.
The structure of the plays and the structure of the verse are closely
aligned because they arise from the same level and enact the same design.
Prospero
lets go of his magic, perhaps because he realises that power resides not in
external tricks but in a state which can encompass a conjunction of opposites.
He also asks the audience to let him go (“let your indulgence set me free”),
for unless they do he cannot change.
Our project seeks to move performers through such a letting go and to
reconfigure performance outwards from that wholeness which is more than all the
parts.
What
we are dealing with is a kind of magic unrealism.
Works
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Malekin,
Peter and Yarrow, Ralph. Consciousness, Literature and Theatre: Theory and Beyond.
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Plotinus.
The Enneads.
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John Dillon. London: Penguin, 1991.
Rimer
and Masakazu. On
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W.T. Mysticism
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