On and off stage

On stage I do not deny the knowledge that I am Dave, a human being with my own habits, having what Bordieu would call my habitus, a system of learnt ways of being. I have my own performative, an outcome of my habitus, and I live in the world of the Gestus (Brecht). In essence, I am a construct of my past. I have a choice on stage to recognise this. I have a choice not to.

I am a multifaceted individual, and I can choose which facet I apply to each moment on stage. Some facets I cannot escape from. I have a body, this cannot be denied. It can be manipulated, dressed, make upped, but this is my body, this is its shape now in this moment. In essence, if I am nothing else, I am a body, and I am everything that comes with that. I am that social and political construct, I am what I have eaten, I am my memories and my past, all engraved in me. Yet all these parts create noise, each have their own stories, their own vriti (yoga), each can be read by an audience in many different and uncontrollable ways. If a performance requires you to get information across to the audience, then these additional stories can interrupt, or disrupt this dialogue between audience and performer. Or they can heighten this dialogue, enabling a new frame in which to view the performance.

As audience you too are ‘body’. You have disrupted your everyday life to sit and ‘engage’ in a performance. You come with your own stories, your own noise. As audience you do not lose your habitus, your construct of self, as this enables a frame to look at the performance with. Instead, you shift aside your stories and thoughts and become absorbed in the action of performance (when the action is engaging and enjoyable). Like the actor you use the facets of your own body to engage with the performance, you do not forget them, instead, move them to one side. You create space. But where is this space?

The theatre is a transformative physical space. With it comes its own histories, its own inhabited memory, yet unlike the actor and audience it cannot move this aside, it is not a sentient body. It is the actor-audience dialogue that is sentient, and this dialectic communicates across the space that moves its historical stories, that allows it to transform. Bth actor and audience have created space to allow this transformation to occur. This space is not just physical, instead, liminal?