With such a dynamic art form that deals directly with the human life and its presence in an artistic endeavor, dealing with not only the aesthetic and spectacular pleasures of society but the emotional journey of its audience in order to implicate change throughout, the in between people remains a phenomenon with a strong foundation and purpose – to shift the balance back to the phenomenon and spectacle that is the human life and therefore its interaction with its surroundings through mind, body and spirit.

A type of theatre that is able to circumvent all constraints.

Rehearsal Log – June 16 2010

The Literal Encounter vs The Embodied Encounter

We began todays rehearsal with a conversation circle.  Just to allow us to talk about what has been on our minds in general in life.

Then:

Part 1: We created the literal visual manifestation of the Missing Piece Meets the Big O.  We assigned a page to each ensemble member and then created the visual picture of what this story is.  We then talked about how it is inherently impossible to be able to portray or show what the Big O is at ages past our own.

Part 2: Positive and Negative Space leading to the embodied Encounter

1)working with a partner move together filling only positive space

2)then only fill the negative space

3)then we started with two ensemble members who were only filling positive space while the ensemble filled the negative space.  When the feeling was right an ensemble member would then gravitate towards the positive space group an become a part of them.  This later became known as the blog.

4)We then worked o move together in positive space while retaining the shape of a human being.  This was done by forming a tight line and allowing the impulse of the group to cause movement to happen.  Each time the impulse came from an individual we started again.

When embodying encounter, be aware of the mechanisms of survival – defense, understanding, trust, and breath, and the organics we use to emphasis the nuances of life – belief, faith, love, breath.

Rehearsal Log – June 15, 2010

The Plan or The Singular Presence

Today’s rehearsal was about presence.  When approaching presence we talked about two distinct parts of you:

Body – which is takes root in trust – we must discover the body devoid of physical inadequacies in order to fully trust ourselves.  Freedom of the body is equal to a blank canvas and although we still retain our physical and emotional experiences which have shaped who we are, while the canvas is blank it is still a canvas, similarly we are still who we are but now we are universal.

Life – which takes root in understanding – we must discover the moments we share, the commonality of those moments.  The human life has the potential of experiencing all things available to a human life.  What defines our lives is how we react to the same moments within a given context.

“Show me what I’m looking for” says the missing piece in each encounter.  With each encounter we ourselves approach with our body and life open and present.  Once we shed the inadequacies, we allow the encounter to become whatever we want it to be.  We embody the encounter.  As we grow, we separate ourselves, the other, the environment and the imagination whether to understand them or to encounter them individually or to dominate them or destroy them.  In putting the pieces back together we rediscover ourselves in a new form or the body embodying the encounter.  This is how we can reach the spectacle experience.  This is how we shed our inadequacies.

When you work together, what do the dissected moments of life look like?

What does it mean to be alive?

Why are you performers?

Your conflict in all of this is found in the struggle between your inside and outside world.  Conflict in every single capacity begins with the self.  Joy in every single capacity begins with the self.

“So like monks and nuns who dedicate themselves to the service of God, actors must dedicate themselves to the service of the universal” – Lucid Body page 24

“Your present life is all you have.” – The Lucid Body page 25

Before you can fully share your life with others you must actively be present within it.  Respond.  React.  Redefine. Evolve.

You’ve learned to manipulate your world from inside using the music exercise on the subway.  You can have the world become an extension of you by simply choosing a piece of music that causes you to have a visceral reaction and then applying it to the world around you.  But we don’t want to manipulate our world as this is only an extension of ourselves and does not allow others to willingly participate.  So instead, we must affect our world.

Rehearsal Log – June 8, 2010

Reaction

Tonight was a very distinct and important night for the ensemble and this process.  Last night, after rehearsal, I went home and dove deep into myself in search of the answer to one question – “What is this book about?” which led to a pretty essential nose dive of…well..me.  Having lost focus through that question and having deciphered so much only to learn that I have deciphered nothing, I went to bed hoping that optimism would guide the way and that there was truth to what I remind myself daily of – “in our moments of deepest exasperation and frustration, the most intense creation is getting ready to emerge.” – I hope so.

Today before rehearsal, I found a moment to recollect and take another stab at what this all meant.  That’s when these questions came about:

What is this book about?

What is life about? – I know it gets worse…

What are you about?

What are we about?

What is the common thread through all of us?

-what does disaster touch inside us that makes us respond?

-what does the journey into ourselves look like?

These questions sparked an idea.  I think it may have been Ellie that had mentioned that there was something to being asked to let go of our minds and just focus on our bodies.  So to me, that translated as well in this search for a common thread, let’s start with the physical manifestation of that.  Let’s tie everyone together so that they are physically connected while searching for the common thread in the human life.

So.  We tied each other together.  And then we talked first.  (I should say that when I went to my dark place last night, I forced myself to go as far back as I can in my notes and see where I might have strayed from what seemed so clear by myself.  I was brought back to page 40 in my moleskin and I began to move forward.  Ashley later reminded me that its often important to go backward in order to move forward.) In reviewing all of this I also took stock in an idea Maura had the other day which was to define specific moments or things that one can identify as common in all human lives.  So we tied each other up and we started there.  We began by taking birth and death as two things that all human lives share.  We then expanded our list to:

Birth

Death

Love

Change

Hunger

Thirst

Fear

Joy

Struggle

Interaction

Tension

(there are three more that I’m relying on the ensemble to provide, because I’m drawing a blank)

So the idea was that these words are common things in all human lives and that we identified them in an effort to identify the common thread.  So then what is the book about?  We then went around the circle and answered without thinking what the book is about in one word.  The idea here is that no one’s answer was the same as anyone elses but it all stemmed from the same source.  We were exploring the same material and yet each of us had a distinctly different reaction or meaning.  It is important to note this because in creating a universal thing that an onlooker can experience, we found a need to provide the common thread that is identifiable in order for the onlooker to fully immerse themselves.

We then talked about the relinquishing of control of the experience.  That often using language we send out a message to the audience and that there is the potential of losing control of the message because with language comes immediate interpretation, categorization and filing away and then reaction.  This happens because the performer is losing control of that energy and in losing control relinquishes the ability to retain the overarching meaning and convey that to an onlooker.  It is important that the energy behind our actions be crafted not from language but from action and emotion often devoid of language (that’s not to say that language doesn’t carry an affectual ability, but that language should be necessary and not what we rely upon first.)

So tied up, I asked everyone – using the endpoints of birth and death – to show a lifecycle while tied together.  I then played music only by a string quartet covering Incubus and then I made a change without telling anyone.  Rather than allowing these rules to be the governance of the exercise I decided quickly to call out some of the words that we came up with before.  I broke the rules that I was trying to establish and contradicted the message I was attempting to convey which is to feel and do now and to define it later – that the emotion and energy moving now carries with it infinite power if we do not try to limit it through language.  And here I go contradicting it entirely.  The product was the biggest reaction that I’ve seen in rehearsal thus far.  I will leave it to the ensemble to state their reactions but what I realized on the subway ride home was that the atmosphere that was created pushed and pulled everyone in so many different directions, causing frustration, anguish, sadness, empowerment, genuine fear, danger and so much more.  I realized that while our task might be the impossible task of creating a lifecycle and showing a unity or common thread through which we might all identify and stem from, that we created what is practically and actually out there – something that we are all too familiar with which is the reality of life when the common thread is not being sought after – when it is about each individual and not about the group.  Using a rehearsal space that we defined as safe and experimental (in that we can actually play and experiment) we found an exercise that brought all that we have actively kept out just by nature of the other exercises…into the room and recreated it.  In my eyes, we created one of our horizons, which is that of what we actually deal with.  We’ve recreated all of the different things that we might feel dealing with all of humanity on a daily basis and its valuable because we now have one reference point – one buoy in a sea that will hopefully become clearer.

Rehearsal Log – May 26, 2010

Awareness Exploded

It all starts with you.  That’s a pretty loaded statement and in the context of our project, it’s even more loaded.  Today we talked about awareness.  Not necessarily about awareness along the lines of environmental awareness or social awareness, but what we soon defined as “Circles of Awareness” – 4 to be exact.

The first circle of awareness is that of yourself.  Self Awareness.  It’s not about your awareness of your positioning or what you’re saying – its about being aware of the whole you – the limitations of your physical body (how far your arms can stretch, how loud you can scream) – and the extent of all of the non-tangible parts of you – your presence.  Self awareness is about identifying and aligning with your presence and really figuring out who you are – then shedding the inadequacies that hold you back from being truly aware and present of yourself.

The second circle of awareness is that of your environment.  But it doesn’t stop at your physical environment – that which physically surrounds you.  The environmental awareness is a keen sense of awareness that takes you into the environments of different relationships you have.  The environment between two best friends is distinct and almost tangible, it is navigated a certain way and while not necessarily being acknowledged, it is specific, dynamic and unique.  The environmental awareness circle can also include the next circle.

The third circle of awareness is the other.  So often, we discern who we are by identifying what we are not.  We say I’m not tall, I’m not skinny, I’m not this or that, I’m not you, I’m not…etc.  While the other can be present and is often an intrinsic part of the environment, we very clearly make distinctions between ourselves and the other(s).  In the subway exercise, we emphasized this distinction by putting ourselves seemingly in control of the other.  All of these people are moving because I am willing them to through the music that I’m playing and a reaching out to the last circle of awareness.

The last circle of awareness is the imagination.  As children this circle of awareness is often closer to us than we actually are to ourselves.  Our imaginations know more than we know about who we are and are often where we go to discover more.  As we get older, we begin to step out of that circle, very clearly identifying our imagination as something, (often as the other) and putting it far away from us.  It’s not that we’re not using our imaginations, but as we get older we’re calling upon our imagination as opposed to already existing in our imaginations.  Our realities take over and we’re forced to carry our imagination in a bag that goes everywhere with us but is often forgotten.  The point of being more aware of your imagination is to bridge the gap between yourself and your imagination.  To put that skin back on, no matter how you do it, and to begin to look at things through the lens of your imagination.  This circle of awareness for me is really the way that I identify and align all of the circles of awareness.  Your imagination is a powerful thing.  So powerful that once you realign with it you are often surprised by how much you didn’t know about yourself.  It is daunting but worth it.

Post for May 26, 2010

It all starts with you.  That’s a pretty loaded statement and in the context of our project, it’s even more loaded.  Today we talked about awareness.  Not necessarily about awareness along the lines of environmental awareness or social awareness, but what we soon defined as “Circles of Awareness” – 4 to be exact.

The first circle of awareness is that of yourself.  Self Awareness.  It’s not about your awareness of your positioning or what you’re saying – its about being aware of the whole you – the limitations of your physical body (how far your arms can stretch, how loud you can scream) – and the extent of all of the non-tangible parts of you – your presence.  Self awareness is about identifying and aligning with your presence and really figuring out who you are – then shedding the inadequacies that hold you back from being truly aware and present of yourself.

The second circle of awareness is that of your environment.  But it doesn’t stop at your physical environment – that which physically surrounds you.  The environmental awareness is a keen sense of awareness that takes you into the environments of different relationships you have.  The environment between two best friends is distinct and almost tangible, it is navigated a certain way and while not necessarily being acknowledged, it is specific, dynamic and unique.  The environmental awareness circle can also include the next circle.

The third circle of awareness is the other.  So often, we discern who we are by identifying what we are not.  We say I’m not tall, I’m not skinny, I’m not this or that, I’m not you, I’m not…etc.  While the other can be present and is often an intrinsic part of the environment, we very clearly make distinctions between ourselves and the other(s).  In the subway exercise, we emphasized this distinction by putting ourselves seemingly in control of the other.  All of these people are moving because I am willing them to through the music that I’m playing and a reaching out to the last circle of awareness.

The last circle of awareness is the imagination.  As children this circle of awareness is often closer to us than we actually are to ourselves.  Our imaginations know more than we know about who we are and are often where we go to discover more.  As we get older, we begin to step out of that circle, very clearly identifying our imagination as something, (often as the other) and putting it far away from us.  It’s not that we’re not using our imaginations, but as we get older we’re calling upon our imagination as opposed to already existing in our imaginations.  Our realities take over and we’re forced to carry our imagination in a bag that goes everywhere with us but is often forgotten.  The point of being more aware of your imagination is to bridge the gap between yourself and your imagination.  To put that skin back on, no matter how you do it, and to begin to look at things through the lens of your imagination.  This circle of awareness for me is really the way that I identify and align all of the circles of awareness.  Your imagination is a powerful thing.  So powerful that once you realign with it you are often surprised by how much you didn’t know about yourself.  It is daunting but worth it.

Post for May 25, 2010

Today we began exploring the idea of awareness.  The ensemble was asked to go home and find a piece of music that they identified with.  It’s that one song that no matter where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing, it just does it for you.  It puts you in that place where nothing can touch you.  So the idea is that you take that song and the next time you’re on the subway, you play that song, take a moment and then look up and allow the world to unfold in front of you.

The point of this exercise is that through your own awareness of the entire subway car and the music that is helping you find a visceral place inside yourself, you begin to feel like you are in control of all of the action in front of you.  People entering and exiting the subway, people looking down, looking up, picking their nose – it doesn’t matter because in this instant you are making all of that happen.  Why?  One of the reasons we identified is that the subway is purely functional – no one is ever trying to impress anyone else, everyone is doing exactly what they would do if they were at home by themselves – some are putting make-up on, some are pooping in the corner, most are quiet and kept to themselves.  This strict functionality of the subway positioned with you sitting there playing this music and gazing out across the landscape that you seemingly created – this creates an overwhelming awareness of your reality and gives you a sense of being able to change what you see in front of you.  This awareness of yourself and the other is key to beginning our process.

Post for May 24, 2010

So this week we began the journey that I’ve been waiting to begin for so long.  The In Between People – a name that came out of a joke conversation in a car turned company, turned self-titled work – now with an ensemble and a direction.

Beginnings are not without foundations and not without middles and ends.  I’m not sure what this piece will become, what the middle and the end will look like, but what I am sure of is that we will build something worthwhile.

So it all starts from this childrens book by Shel Silverstein: The Missing Piece Meets the Big O.  It’s a pretty straightforward book, quick read, simple illustrations, but this book makes you stop.  There are a ton of books out there that can be called universal and that carries a strong life message in it, but this book is different in my eyes because this book asks you to literally stop and redefine who you are in every instance of your life.  It asks you to be aware of you.

“The power of the performer to cause affect within their audience is based on the power to align the perceptual world of the imagination with the physical world of reality in order to activate the reality of the venue through the imagination of the audience using the newly defined performers aesthetics, therefore asking the audience to interact from a place devoid of chronology and without the need for narrative; a bridge between imagination and the reality of the moment.  We as performers lend ourselves to the potentiality of the audience’s ability to create and believe within themselves, in our attempt at creating a worlds within worlds.  Instead of demanding of our audience that they abandon their reality, the performer strives to stimulate the creation of a world where the audience might align itself, that is to say all of its constituents, with the aesthetics created by the performers giving over to their sensory experience.  The performer manifests the bridging moment where the sensory environment aligns with the real environment giving the audience a reference point in which their horizon is expanded, their inhibitions eliminated and their physical presence in the world shattered, through a new set of governing aesthetics.  This perceptual affect is the essence of the space itself being transformed into a performative body pulling in the performer and the audience simultaneously and turning their focus outward towards a horizon that is referenced by them.  The physical body is free to explore these new governing aesthetics within the spectrum imagination, which is collocated in reality.  The spectacle experience.   This, our newly acquired landscape of spectacle experience, is where we as spectators, performers, creators, possibly healers meet.”

“The human body, present and spectacular in its immediacy and complexity, present on an empty stage devoid of context or narrative carried with it the effectual potential to significantly alter and affect the perspective of the onlooker.

This context could be considered a distraction from our experience within the real moment.    The real moment is an encounter in time and space between the present body and its other, whether the other is placed internally or externally. The body is a spectacular collision of perception, imagination and physical substance, and the encounter, or interaction of another body with the present body, will always carry the potential of a powerful affect.    In essence, this is a circular interaction where the encounter is self-contained within the questioning of the encounter therefore breeding a new encounter; a pay-it-forward system in the exchange between performer and spectator. This argument then brings foundation to the notion that the daily encounter of two bodies, an interaction within a real moment will indefinitely breed further encounters, in essence defining the present body as performative.  This argument deepens when it is considered as encounter without context, or where context is incidental to the very existence of the body in its ultimate goal towards a pre-defined or actively redefining horizon.
My argument stated above was that the performer could cause this snowballing affect based in the encounter without any consideration to narrative and without a contextual basis. But in order to do this, the performer would have to rely on the collective effort of their perception based in their imagination and the negotiation of the presence of their body in the reality of the real moment in order to create a plane of encounter where the spectator could be responsive.

The Present Performer
As humans we respond to the real moment contextualized, neglecting the potential power of our naked encounter below our defined context. The body contextualized becomes a response to the environment which is a creation of our context and we are furthered from the initial encounter in the real moment through inadequacies of the body which are made clear by our environment. We too often begin by acknowledging the presence of our environment and then experience ourselves in this environment. The presence of the body is based on the active participation of all of the present senses of the other.
Merleau-Ponty explains that a blind body having been granted sight through an operation understands the warmth and concept of a ray of sunlight1, (the experience devoid of the context). Upon first visual encounter of it, it does not comprehend how it cannot grasp it in its hands, sending the body into a deeper investigation of the context of the sunlight rather than embracing the affect of the sunlight upon the body. Quickly it discovers the physical properties of a thing that remained completely experiential during the absence of the visual sense and its perception of it is permanently altered. In this case, in the real moment of this experience, the body is subject to the governing aesthetics of the physical environment, although before the presence of the visual sense, in a perceptual environment devoid of circumstance, the body allowed for the existence of other conceptual properties, which caused sensation to carry more meaning.
As performer standing upon the empty stage, the environment within which our body physically exists needs to first be a construction of our body’s response to the non-contextual or perceived conceptual properties before allowing the physical reality of the environment to impose itself. The ray of sunlight to a blind performer carries with is an action, a response based on the sensory perceived properties. The response is to the feeling and texture, to which the physical environment imposes a visual precedent first in our minds and in our internal senses allowing us to navigate them without suspicion or pretense. We are able to create a physical space within ourselves based on the perceived conceptual response prior to the acknowledgment of a built environment outside of us, which constitutes a different importance and hierarchy to which we become subject to. Where we fail to call upon the perceptual world within which performance is most powerful is when we allow the other which could also exist in our perceptual environment the opportunity to exist in our physical environment first, therefore removing our true and initial reaction to them which is visceral. Our ideal location for the other is in our minds eye, a place where we are the true writers of the story to which we will respond with the most freedom, but in actuality this ideal is not reality. Here, in the classroom it became apparent that the actor was not seen as being in the context of the initial encounter. The
spectator in this case would not only acknowledge their own inadequacy to which they sought refuge, but the performers as well. The other existing first, and defining ourselves as existing as a physical response to the other, we place ourselves in a world where we are defined by the negative space of the other. This being the way we carry ourselves through life, it often becomes an inhibition that the other is identified and defined first. The paramount exhibition of our physical reality, crafting our response is the reliance on language and narrative in order to respond. We actively surpass all forms of a possible perceived environment, the other and our perceptual space, and we move to language. Where our perceived world might include all humanity as other positive and negative space to which we are in direct and full contact with, relying on our senses to carry out interaction and interpretation, we look to our language as our first order of defense and our complete force of offense in the physical world and senses as our second order of defense. We explain, rather than experience that which is experiential. As human beings, we are dependent on the constant taking of the experienced temperature outside our body and altering our inner perceptual temperature, in this case based on the senses, with what we are receptive to on the outside. As performers, and considered performers day to day, we become accustomed to responding to narrative and immediacy, leaving no room for the perceptual environment within ourselves to strike harmony and balance with our sensory experience.
In this, we act in response to an aesthetics crafted by language, which is inherently incomplete, instead of creating essential sensory responses based in an aesthetics crafted by our senses, which are complete in their inherent governance of the body as well as the imagination. We actively limit ourselves and define a horizon in reference to our bodies as reachable and pragmatic, while our perceived environment and our perceived body is not given the opportunity
to pursue a horizon which is referenced by our body and responsive to our presence. It is through the abandonment of the immediacy of a single moment and the concurrent acquisition of the urgency of the sensory response, which is the ultimate guide by which we access ourselves. The stimulus of an immediacy crafted by a real and pragmatic moment is too much for a body engaged in sensory response, and so we acknowledge the presence of this language-governed reality over the perception of the self. But this immediacy crafted by the real moment and our response creates a venue of reflection to which certain inadequacies of our existence in the real moment are unavoidable and therefore incorporated and debilitating.
The ability of the self to cast off inadequacies and discover the spectacle of just being in space is reserved for few, of which, as trained performers, we transform the venue of reflection into a venue of response and are activated. Those performers who are then able to craft their physical environment from the perceived environment in which they perceptually stand throw away the response to a moment of immediacy presented by a reliance on language or for the performer, narrative, and discover the aesthetics and power of being truly present in a moment that bridges both the imagination and the real moment.    The power of the performer to cause affect within their audience is based on the power to align the perceptual world of the imagination with the physical world of reality in order to activate the reality of the venue through the imagination of the audience using the newly defined performers aesthetics, therefore asking the audience to interact from a place devoid of chronology and without the need for narrative; a bridge between imagination and the reality of the moment. We as performers lend ourselves to the potentiality of the audience’s ability to create and believe within themselves, in our attempt at creating a worlds within worlds. Instead of demanding of our audience that they abandon their reality, the performer strives to stimulate the creation of a world where the audience might align
itself, that is to say all of its constituents, with the aesthetics created by the performers giving over to their sensory experience. The performer manifests the bridging moment where the sensory environment aligns with the real environment giving the audience a reference point in which their horizon is expanded, their inhibitions eliminated and their physical presence in the world shattered, through a new set of governing aesthetics. This perceptual affect is the essence of the space itself being transformed into a performative body pulling in the performer and the audience simultaneously and turning their focus outward towards a horizon that is referenced by them. The physical body is free to explore these new governing aesthetics within the spectrum imagination, which is collocated in reality. The spectacle experience. This, our newly acquired landscape of spectacle experience, is where we as spectators, performers, creators, possibly healers meet.
The performers presence within the spectacle experience acts as a net cast out into the physical world drawing the spectator in and asking them to enter the landscape leaving behind the immediacy of the real world. Here in this landscape, the emergence of the imagination as the governing aesthetic subverts the human need to live in response to human inadequacy, thereby destroying the defense system by removing the need for it. The performer in this landscape is a beacon, outstretched fully in reach of their horizon, radiant and steadfast, giving cause to affect to those who enter. The performer gives over to a new form, and the only physical presence of them in the real moment is the transparent lens through which the spectator looks and responds to the real moment seen through the governing aesthetics of imagination on the other side. The performers presence becomes the gateway, narrowing and expanding to respond directly to the spectator approaching. If through the performer a united world can be seen as a real moment, justified by the performers aesthetics, there exists the increased potentiality of a spectators belief
in a world where their inadequacy is not the governance by which they live. Instead the result of this landscape is the shedding of inadequacy and a concurrent outstretch to a deep personal horizon justified by spectacle experience. The spectator who comes to the edge of spectacle experience is drawn in by the presence of the performer. In this real moment the performer is charged with the obligation of bridging the real moment with the aesthetics of imagination, activating a moment of deep visceral enlightenment and freeing. This is an alignment of the real moment, its constituents and the potentiality of imagination. The kinetics of this moment are dictated not through character or narrative but through simple aesthetics of these bodies in the landscape of spectacle experience.
The performer, existing entirely in the perceived body, takes on the aesthetic of the physical body and the perceived body in the physical aesthetic creates a push out to the physical bodies horizon. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the power of enlightenment, which could take place in this horizon. “All knowledge takes its place within the horizons opened up by perception. There can be no question of describing perception itself as one of the facts thrown up in the world, since we can never fill up, in the picture of the world, that gap which we ourselves are…”2
The push to this horizon is a kind of kinetic direction, an ability to continue to push outward and through this outward push pass the perceived space in the aesthetic body on to the spectator and allow them to experience the perceived space of their other and want to experience their own perceptual body. In a way, the performer in pushing outward through their spectacle is drawing in the spectator and through the affect of the performer on the spectator, the spectator is turned around and pushed back out now pushing their perceptual body towards the other. The full grasp of the creation and subsequent power of the aesthetic performer, fraught with imagination and visceral in their affect, invites a new approach to performance which takes root
in the perception of the human body and the potentiality of the multiple dimensions of space it occupies.

The Perceived Body in Perceived Space:
The perceptual body – the senses interpretation of the body – in perceptual space – the landscape of spectacle experience – is based on the ability to remove the self from the real world and be placed on an imagined landscape, one which exists solely within the body, in a way reflecting upon the self as the self while in the presence of the self.    “Because I know that the light strikes my eyes, that contact is made by the skin, that my shoe hurts my foot, I distribute through my body perceptions which really belong to my soul, and put perception into the thing perceived. But that is merely the spatial and temporal furrow left by the acts of consciousness. If I consider them from the inside, I find one single, unlocalized knowledge, one single indivisible soul, and there is no such difference between thinking and perceiving as there is between seeing and hearing.”3 Merleau-Ponty launches the conversation of the perceived body in different dimensions of space, moving to describe the soul of the human being as a culmination of the senses and the body existing in tandem. The performer in the applied light of Merleau-Ponty’s account, in order to cause affect, must strive to discover the viscerality of this indivisible soul in the real moment and use this viscerality to activate the real moment on the landscape of spectacle experience.    The senses no longer function separately, but are drawn together as the soul, which is perceived by the mind as the body in its truest form. Similar to that of an out of body experience, the mind is then both integrated with the overall sensation of the experience and reflecting upon the sensation of experience simultaneously. But Merleau-Ponty argues that the self can never
experience something while simultaneously reflecting upon it. “Between my sensation and myself there stands always the thickness of some primal acquisition which prevents my experience from being clear of itself. I experience the sensation as a modality of general existence, one already destined for a physical world and which runs through me without being the cause of it.“4 The human mind is capable of creating a perceptual self that can only exist within a perceived space, defined here as the soul on the landscape of spectacle experience. Within this playground of the governing aesthetics of the imagination, which are that of the unlimited possibility of perceived experience, the mind can take on an omnipotent point of view, becoming both the analyst of experience as well as the product this experience. In this dimension of perceptual space, the mind carves out circular plane in the asphalt of the real moment, within which the imagination is in full control. This is the first creation of the landscape of spectacle experience. Under the auspices of the imagination, a function of the cognitive and experiential mind directly reflective of and integrated in itself, or the souls playground, a perceptual body is created in order to navigate this new environment. In this space there is no existence of time as the soul is without reference point and is operating in the past present and future. The creations of the soul are indescribable, but the perceptual body becomes the voyager of this omnipotent creator. “Things co-exist in space because they are present to the same perceiving subject and enveloped in one and the same temporal wave. But the unity and individuality of each temporal wave is possible only if it is wedged in between the preceding and the following one, and if the same temporal pulsation which produces it still retains its predecessor and anticipates its successor. It is objective time which is made up of successive
moments. The lived present holds a past and a future within its thickness.“5    Within this perceptual environment, the perceived body is allowed to co-exist with the world rather than be subject to it under the auspices of the real moment. This co-existence utilizes sensation as not a call and response of the body based through the senses response to the stimulus of a real catalyst, but a visceral and aural awareness of the perceptual environment, extending the souls ability into the past and future in order to identify all spaces and all possibilities – its manifestation in the real moment being the extension of this potentiality to real lived experience.

The Perceived Body in Physical Space
The co-existence of the perceived body and its perceived environment is the quintessential language by which the aesthetics of the imagination can operate through the performer in the real moment. While in perceived space, the horizon of the perceived body is tangible as the perceived body is both at the horizon and in pursuit of it. In the real moment application of the perceived body’s governing aesthetics the pursuit of the horizon becomes the activator of the audience affect. The performer introduces a pursuit of the horizon rather than just the reference to horizon which is the real moments quantifying factor. In referencing the horizon as opposed to pursuing it, the real moment keeps the real body in momentary space and forces the real body to be subject to its surrounding world. The pursuit of the horizon introduced by the performer, forces the real world to yield to this pursuit, relinquishing the imposition of inadequacy on the real body. This pursuit of the horizon requires of the real body to retain the aural awareness of the perceived body under the auspices of the imaginations governing aesthetics that it acquired through its once omnipotent existence and translate such that it can now attempt to co-exist with the real moment. The potentiality of the perceived body in real
space turns into a type of inexhaustible kinetic motion, by which the perceived body is always pursuing a horizon that it can co-exist with. The friction that would once slow the real body and cause it to be subject to the real moment has no power with the smooth surface of the perceived body and its powerful kinetic motion. The application of imagination aesthetics to the real body in real space is the momentum needed to destroy the inertia of the real body under the pressure of the force of inadequacy. The continued application of the imagination aesthetic breeds a finer sense of aural awareness and increases the pursuit of the horizon soon providing a sustainable force to continue the pursuit. That is to say, the spectator in the presence of the performer is given the momentum to move past their inertia. With continued exposure to the presence of the performer who is in their perceived body in the real moment will progress to move the spectators potential energy into kinetic and breed not only a move past inadequacy by the spectator but also a performer of the spectator through a newly acquired sense of aural awareness.
The person who perceives is not spread out before himself as a consciousness must be; he has historical density, he takes up a perceptual tradition and is faced with a present. In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body which is better informed than we are about the world, and about the motives we have the means at our disposal for synthesizing it…In this primary layer of sense experience which is discovered only provided that we really coincide with the act of perception and break with the critical attitude, I have the living experience of the unity of the subject and the intersensory unity of the thing, and do not conceive them after the fashion of analytical reflection and science. (Merleau-Ponty 214)
Guy Debord quotes Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that is, it exists only by being recognized and acknowledged.” (Debord, 115) The spectator coming to the circular plane carved in the asphalt of the real world, within which the performer stands looking inward
and outward at the same time, is “recognized and acknowledged” only to then be encouraged to look outward and inward likewise. The Struggle of the Performer In The Circular Plane of Spectacle Experience
Inherent within every humane being is a spectacle experience that surpasses all inadequacy. In order to dissolve the hold of inadequacy, what is asked of the mind is to become conscious of itself, not in a mechanism of reflection but in the recognition and cyclical nature of co-existing with the real moment. In doing this, the mind must first acknowledge the presence of time as a function of itself and then dissolve the notion. The acknowledgement of the presence of time forces the mind to thwart the soul and yield to the reality of the real moment. But deep in the plane of spectacle experience the soul can yield to a time consistent with the perceived body, something Debord calls “spectacular time.” “Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality.”6    This “illusorily lived time” is therefore a product of the perceived self existing in perceived space. In the incubation of the soul in perceived space an action is entirely contingent upon the body’s capacity to negotiate both the perceptual and physical worlds needing to acknowledge the presence of both in order to exist in real space and then alter that space through the souls incubation. Performers are trained to do this under the auspices of a character in a narrative in order to form coherent and informed actions based on the minds commitment to the physical world as well as the characters soul incubating in the perceived space. The struggle is when the performer is not given a character or a narrative by which to negotiate the two planes but when the character is the performer and the narrative their life. The performer must split themselves, existing in between the perceived space and the real moment, in between imagination and reality, in order to acquire their bearings of their spectacle experience and use them in the real moment. Debord calls this the “Spectacle”. “The Spectacle, like
modern society itself, is at once united and divided. The unity of each is based on violent divisions. But when this contradiction emerges in the spectacle, it is itself contradicted by the reversal of its meaning: the division it presents is unitary, while the unity it presents is divided.”7 The performer, in committing to their struggle, bridges imagination and reality, uniting the two through the division within themselves.
“I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished – since that distance is not one of its properties – if I were not there to scan it with my gaze.”8    Much the same, the performer standing in the center of the plane of spectacle experience present to the real moment of the spectator unites their imagination and the real moment which is shared between the performer and the spectator, therefore transforming into a transparent being and so providing the spectator with a view of a world united through its division. This view is the manifestation of the pursuit of the horizon.
Inherent within every human being is the spectacle that surpasses all inadequacy. That spectacle is the human life acknowledged by its presence and powerful in its ability. We need not cloud the spectacle with narrative if we are to view clearly the light shed upon the spectacle by the performer.

The Struggle of the Performer In The Circular Plane of Spectacle Experience
Deep within the truly powerful spectacle that is the performers unity in their division lies the ability of the spectator to have a moment of vulnerability. In acknowledging the presence of
the performer, the spectator is yielding to this vulnerability and entering a visceral space in which they themselves are presented with their inadequacies upon the plane of the spectacle experience. As the spectator gives over to the performer (and the performer to the spectator) and looks deeper into the transparency of the performer, the light shifts and the performer becomes a mirror by which the spectator is looking deep within themselves. Immediately, they encounter and are confronted by their inadequacy and the conflict that modern dramatists say is the driving force and reason behind narrative based performance is now present between the spectator and themselves. In this moment of visceral power, the spectator must face off with their inadequacy and choose to dismantle it or retreat back through the portal of the performer. As performers, we need not create conflict for our audience to place themselves in, but find the conflict within our audience and allow our audience to become transformed through the unity of their division. This division is the face off and the unity is the last thing the performer shows the spectator, inviting them a little bit deeper in order to complete the change and create the perceived spectator’s body in the real moment, surrounded by a new sense of aural awareness. The struggle of the spectator is not the approach to the performer’s circular plane, but the acknowledgment and giving over to the aesthetics of their own imagination presented to them through the transformation of the performer within the circular plane. “Art reimagines time and space, and its success can be measured by the extent to which an audience can not only access that world but becomes engaged to point where they understand something about themselves that they did not know before.”9
We must strive to effectively shatter the balance we have created from our inadequacies, a product of our subjection to the context of the real moment. In a moment of complete chaos, where the performer is divided and united both within and without, we see ourselves in the
reflection of the performer and are transformed. As performers and spectators we must struggle in order to achieve unity within and amongst ourselves. This struggle is manifest in spectacle that is human life, and the awareness of the other – a justification of ourselves and our presence – called theatre. We must wake the spectacle within us from its dormant state and use it to both reflect and respond. In the effort to reach the horizons of encounter we must consistently attempt the impossible.”

Copyright Andy Yanni 2010 – All Rights Reserved