Creation Myths

In theatre and performance studies, we have a story that we tell about the origins of drama. In the misty pre-history of humanity, rituals were performed to the gods incorporating song, dance, special apparel, manipulation of props, and the recitation of intentional language.

In this legend, these transpersonal, spiritual events eventually shifted to interpersonal, social events. While retaining ritual-like techniques, theatre became a forum in which citizens told stories to other citizens about issues of shared import. Speaking to one another instead of to the gods, we no longer expected our rituals to actually work, but instead to represent. Rather than attempting real-world transformation, theatre tried to show us what transformation looks like.

This origin myth is a necessary foundation for many revolutionaries in the theatre and performing arts. They say – sometimes in a hushed whisper – let’s return drama to its roots in ritual. Let’s forgo the gaudy illustrations of human suffering, joy, and healing. Instead, let’s actually experience suffering and joy onstage. Let’s actually enact healing rites inside the charmed circle of spectators.

With deep appreciation I welcome these innovations to the imagined community of Western Drama. Without them we’d remain mired in the fantasy of objective rationality inherited from the Greeks or obsessed with the irrefutable authority of the text as truth inherited from our Judeo-Christian traditions. Yet I am always skeptical about quests for origins. The reality you find is never as good as the dream you sought, and looking towards an idealized past is often just a rejection of the present.

What if we turned the myth around? What if rather than ritual begetting theatre, what if theatre begat ritual? Perhaps a pre-historic human got up on a rock and began to wail and flail the felt forms of her personal experience across the fire to her watching friend. Perhaps the friend understood, perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps the performer was changed by her attempt to share with an attentive other the infinity she felt within her.

Maybe the next night the friend was gone and the pre-historic performer repeated the wail and flail, looking up into the night sky and hoping that some distant, invisible friend might see her. Perhaps she did it the next night, and the next, or on every full moon or every time she saw a shooting star or just every time she felt alone. Performance is pleasurable. Pleasure wants to repeat itself. Repetition begats ritual.

If pre-historic performance art as the precursor to organized religion is too much of a stretch, at least let's consider ritual and theatre side by side rather than parent and child. Both give form to the baffling sensations that rattle around inside the human body and pierce its permeable border. Whether sharing those forms with close friends, the majesty of the empty night sky, or an obeisance-requesting deity, we enact the shapes of our striving and - in hushed whispers - hope that this enactment will yield transformation.

The Glance of Lot's Wife

Looking back is dangerous.

In Greek mythology, the musician Orpheus sings open the gates of hell to save his wife Eurydice, only to kill her again, accidentally, by looking back at her before she'd made it back to the land of the living.

Genesis 19 tells us that, after escaping Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's (nameless) wife "looked back at the calamity of the city" and was turned into a pillar of salt.

Contemporary feminist scholarship has been particularly involved in unveiling the inherent power dynamics of looking. Vision is, for humans, the sense that travels the farthest. To touch or taste something, the body must make physical contact. Smelling and hearing reach farther away from the self. But sight can travel miles on a clear day. With distance comes the illusion of perspective. In that empty space between seer and seen, power relations rush in to fill the void.

The notion of "The Gaze" as having the power to affect the subjectivity of both the viewer and the viewed was brought into critical discourse by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the notion of "The Male Gaze" in cinema to describe the way that the audience, regardless of sex/gender/orientation, is catapulted into the subject position of the straight male viewer who has mastery over the fetished female bodies onscreen. This male gaze also functions outside the movie theatre, dangerously coding "woman as image, man as bearer of the look" (Mulvey,1975).

Feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, citing the Orpheus and Eurydice story, describes the "Orphic gaze" as a potentially dangerous way of looking at photographs of past traumas that were not your own. Debate has arisen around the potentially Orphic quality of "looking back" at holocaust photography, pictures of dead U.S. soldiers in the New York Times, as well as the notorious photographs of Abu Ghraib. Why do we want to look? What do we gain from looking? Who might suffer? The line between witnessing and fetishizing can be so thin. How can we avoid "the backwards look that kills again?" (Pollock, 1996a)

Unlike Orpheus, who kills another, the glance of Lot's wife is a suicidal glance that brings her own body to a sudden halt while others move onwards without her. She decides to take a moment -- ever-so-briefly! --to witness and mourn the past, and in so doing her body is frozen forever in the gesture of that single choice.

If I were to theorize "The Glance of Lot's Wife," I would describe it as the calcifying pain that the minoritarian subject feels when she looks back at the long history of oppression against people who look and feel and act like her. The dawning awareness of the past's heaviness can be immobilizing. The attempt to bear witness to shared trauma can leave you unable to see or feel anything other than that trauma's endless aftermath.

I sometimes feel like this, feet and form stuck in place, salty tears running down my hard, salty cheeks. I can't give up my backward glances, yet neither can I give up my gaze towards the distant horizon. I guess that leaves me shuffling forward, trying not to trip over my feet.

Devising the Bible, Myself

This week in my directing seminar we presented short devised works based on the King James Bible. With such a wide-open field of possibility, each piece was unique and deeply reflective of its maker and his or her relationship to spirituality, organized religion, and the human encounter with greater-than-human elements like death, love, or a divine power. Much more so than in traditional scenework, in devised work the passions and obsessions of the director spring forth shamelessly. Faced with the empty space of script-less-ness, one's own internal conflicts and pleasures must twist themselves into new and original forms.

Initially overwhelmed with my options (should I work on Adam and Eve? Revelations? Mary Magdalene?), I eventually found inspiration in a Grotowski text I was reading, titled coincidentally, "The Theatre's New Testament."

"The spectator understands that such an act [the actor's rigorous self-exposure] is an invitation to him to do the same thing, and this often arouses opposition or indignation, because our daily efforts are intended to hide the truth about ourselves not only from the world, but also from ourselves. We try to escape the truth about ourselves, whereas here we are invited to stop and take a close look. We are afraid of being changed into pillars of salt if we turn around, like Lot's wife." (Towards a Poor Theatre, p. 37)

Suddenly hit by the lightning bolt of creative excitement, I jumped online and found Lot's wife nestled into Genesis 19. Nameless and powerless (like too many Biblical women) she is punished for embodying -- in a single backwards glance -- her sense of grief at God's wrathful destruction of the notoriously queer desert cities Sodom and Gomorrah.

Like the actor who reveals herself onstage, devising is a place in which the director can look closely at herself through the scalpel of someone else's story. In my case I used Lot's wife as a vehicle for self-exposure and self-reflection. Like Lot's wife, I desire to look back: to take time to contemplate and mourn the pain I've witnessed both first and secondhand. Like Lot's wife, I am not ashamed of my connection to people and places that a vengeful God might deem sinful. In her story I feel rumblings of my fear of calcification, my longing for transformation, and my ambiguous relationship with the power of flight.

All art can be considered a calcification of experience - the bringing into solid form what was once awash in undulating formlessness. While no one wants to be turned into a pillar of salt, sometimes bearing witness to pain and destruction means taking the risk of turning around anyway.