When I went to the first Temenos Conference on art and the renewal of the sacred at Dartington Hall, one of the highlights of the program was a studio performance (with masks but no costume) of Japanese Noh drama with an accompanying lecture. I was transfixed. For two hours I sat (in their remarkably uncomfortable theatre) simply absorbed in the compelling flow of engaged feeling, bound in a ritual of gesture, sound, and music. This was surprising since most of my ventures to the theatre (before and since with notable, if rare, exceptions) are best characterized as ventures in patience, followed by disillusion!
Thinking it might be a 'fluke' of place and circumstance, the next year, I discovered a Noh troupe was in London and here I could experience a full, costumed, ritualized performance. No fluke, once more I was mesmerized and left the theatre a few inches from the ground, thinking, 'This is what theatre is'. A world beyond simple naturalism, an archetypal world. A world stripped bare to the elements of form and feeling interacting with real depth, a world that reveals another world, enfolded in this one, and that moves you, if attentive, to a different place in oneself, so you can see yourself in the world more clearly, rinsed of easy emotion into an interiority of feeling.
The troupe that came to Dartington was that of Hideo Kanze. I remember seeing them been shown the beautiful garden at Dartington. All but Kanze had slipped back into the familiar world of distinguished Japanese visitors being shown a site and they reacting as gracious tourists. Kanze, however, was strikingly different - he walked down the path, lightly, alive, attentive to everything around him, seeing. To watch him was immediately to want to be able to walk like that - wholly present in the presence.
These memories flooded back reading Didier Mouturat's fascinating, 'Life Behind the Mask: Theatre Practice as Instrument of Self-Knowledge.' Mouturat was nineteen when he met Cyrille Dives at a theatre workshop in 1969 and immediately reacted against what this enigmatic maker of masks and sometimes theatre designer and painter was asking of him. He was mature enough, however, later to realize our dislikes can be indicators of a deeper attraction; and, as he pursued his own career in the theatre, steadily establishing himself, as actor, director, administrator, he found himself in conversation with Cyrille in the hotel room in which he lived in Paris.
Slowly a rapport builds and the two, together with a third, launch a project to develop a 'theatre of masks' - both their making and exploring how their reality might reshape theatre anew. The book explores how this search, halting, slow, never fully realized, became too a spiritual practice, a search for self-knowledge.
A mask strips its bearer to an essential, stable, archetypal form. The face cannot change, so how does the rest of one - posture, movement, gesture - align with, serve, embody the given form - and what are all the baggage of ego and its tricks that eludes that attentiveness to a purity of form, a self-remembering of that feeling in its own liveliness. How does this knowledge gained through one mask apply to our daily life, lived so often asleep, unaware, go through its habitual motions. Mouturat writes of this with a spare, analytical, honest beauty in search of the being, he has lost in having.
As you read, and if you are familiar with Gurdjieff, this practice of attentive self-remembering is very resonant but it is only towards the end is it revealed that this was not coincidental. Dives, himself, for a time, was Gurdjieff's pupil; and, Mouturat at some point joins a Gurdjieff group of another of his pupils. Once again affirming the deep attraction the Armenian master has exercised on those seeking the theatre's deepest, most transformational roots. Peter Brook obviously too comes to mind.
"To create art," writes Mouturat, "We would have to know how to turn back/Towards the process that makes us/The creature/We are becoming.'' His book is an artful, thoughtful contribution to the invitation and challenges of doing just this. Of stepping into a feeling and watching it come to be, live, and depart as part of understanding the patterning and dance that we are; and, how so often, we lose it, freeze it, disguise it in the unattentiveness we so often have.
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