If the theatre artist is broken, subjugated and stricken, the spectator must enter the theatrical space willingly accepting the relationship to that Character of Image, to enter that brokenness and break themselves in order to experience the expression of the Character of Image, allowing themselves the full breadth of the imagination striking them for the sake of awe, for the sake of being mended by the alchemy of beauty that the theatre works within themselves.
Pride blocks many from that experience. We always feel owed something to the extent that the repayment of what is owed requires no work on our part. Someone else works the repayment. And if no one works the repayment, we suck ourselves into our own individualism flinging resentment on those who do not work and our own unworked individualism, a great enemy of art, continues to crush into its self. The theatre, my theatre, the beautiful theatre, expresses itself simply: ‘I owe.’ And there we break. The theatre artist is submissive unto the community of the craft; the spectator submits to that communal submissiveness: there is nothing else to give but the self.
It is not simply a mirroring of emotions. It is an alchemy of brokenness—an acceptance of the unknown, of the unexperienced that hungers for the breaking, a hunger that breaks culture totally unhinged in that desire, that specific force, panting after renewal, desperate for dependence, the dependence of freedom, dreaming of magic, compelled into the reckoning, privilege shorn, demands guilt ridden and flung, poverty all revealed, instantaneous sameness into differentiated oneness into an act of sight that’s vision is based on a blindness, a willing blindness, where the body accepts the soul becomes the body—the enlivened paradox fraught with peril, fear and love, dispels the mask of myth into the myth of masks—the hiding to reveal, the revoking to conceal, the raving starkness that howls into the great gulf of silence where meaning flourishes and the word echoes reformed into the icon of beauty. To break, to shear, to shatter: to hurt. In the hurt, there is warmth—there is comfort.
Is there healing? I cannot speak with confidence. But, joy. Yes, there is joy. That is what I guarantee. But we must hurt. It is not violent. It is not cruel. It is merely pain expressed truly.