Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Cummings, Miriam Jessica
Master of Fine Arts - MFA
University of British Columbia
My thesis, WIDE, is a live, solo, participatory performance that asks: Where does the body end? WIDE tells the story of my dad’s sudden death while I was training to be an actor. The piece compares the performances we put on in everyday life—such as the need to perform that we’re ‘doing well’ in the face of grief—with the performances of actors on stage. ‘Wide’ refers to the wide open state of being required to connect with my dad beyond his lifetime; the same state is required of a stage actor. Grief, combined with academic and professional pressures, narrowed me. WIDE is a eulogy for my dad and an act of expansion intended to continue the relationship between him and me beyond his living body. In performance, my story becomes a metaphor for the expansion that the audience is invited to experience as well. The methodologies used to create WIDE are improvisation and discovery, informed by Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints and Tectonic Theater’s Moment Work, two techniques that offer practical tools for creating performance. Five performances total took place on campus between February 1-4, 2024, in the University Theatre, a proscenium theatre with 200 seats and a large, deep stage. The audience was seated in chairs on stage, in a circle. This ‘theatre in the round’ orientation placed the audience in a relationship to each other that highlighted the shared vulnerability of being seen and implicated the audience as participants, not spectators but ‘spect-actors’, a term coined by prolific participatory theatre maker and educator Augusto Boal. ‘Wide’ also refers to the wide open shape of the circle. As audience members step into the open space, they are encouraged to explore where their own bodies end. WIDE invites participants to experiment with sending their voice, presence, and actions beyond their bodies to reach their fellow spect-actors. WIDE asks: How far does the body go? In this support paper I reflect on the process of making WIDE, from initial inspiration to the public performances themselves.
WIDE: A LIVE, SOLO, PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE by Miriam Jessica Cummings B.F.A., Concordia University, 2013 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) May 2024 © Miriam Jessica Cummings, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: WIDE: A LIVE, SOLO, PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE submitted by Miriam Jessica Cummings in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts . Denise Kenney, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor Tracy Ross, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Michael V. Smith, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Astrida Neimanis, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University Examiner iii ABSTRACT My thesis, WIDE, is a live, solo, participatory performance that asks: Where does the body end? WIDE tells the story of my dad’s sudden death while I was training to be an actor. The piece compares the performances we put on in everyday life—such as the need to perform that we’re ‘doing well’ in the face of grief—with the performances of actors on stage. ‘Wide’ refers to the wide open state of being required to connect with my dad beyond his lifetime; the same state is required of a stage actor. Grief, combined with academic and professional pressures, narrowed me. WIDE is a eulogy for my dad and an act of expansion intended to continue the relationship between him and me beyond his living body. In performance, my story becomes a metaphor for the expansion that the audience is invited to experience as well. The methodologies used to create WIDE are improvisation and discovery, informed by Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints and Tectonic Theater’s Moment Work, two techniques that offer practical tools for creating performance. Five performances total took place on campus between February 1-4, 2024, in the University Theatre, a proscenium theatre with 200 seats and a large, deep stage. The audience was seated in chairs on stage, in a circle. This ‘theatre in the round’ orientation placed the audience in a relationship to each other that highlighted the shared vulnerability of being seen and implicated the audience as participants, not spectators but ‘spect-actors’, a term coined by prolific participatory theatre maker and educator Augusto Boal. ‘Wide’ also refers to the wide open shape of the circle. As audience members step into the open space, they are encouraged to explore where their own bodies end. WIDE invites participants to experiment with sending their voice, presence, and actions beyond their bodies to reach their fellow spect-actors. WIDE asks: How far does the body go? In this support paper I reflect on the process of making WIDE, from initial inspiration to the public performances themselves. iv LAY SUMMARY WIDE is a live, solo, participatory performance that asks: Where does the body end? Using storytelling, poetry, and participation, WIDE tells a personal story about grieving the death of a parent. The performance itself is the mechanism that connects the performer to her dad, beyond his lifetime. The performer’s story becomes a metaphor for the expansion that the audience is invited to experience as they explore their own relationships beyond their physical bodies. Drawing from a rich lineage of participatory performance practices, WIDE uses self-reflexive exercises to compare the performance of actors on stage to the way we perform in everyday life. The project was built over a series of six invited development sessions. WIDE elicited vulnerable and engaging responses, indicating that the performance has the potential to solicit profound answers to the question of how far beyond our bodies we reach. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ..................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ....................................................................................................... v List of Images............................................................................................................ vi Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. vii Dedication ............................................................................................................... viii Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 One: Storytelling ....................................................................................................... 5 1.1 Storytelling: Body .................................................................................... 9 1.2 Storytelling: Space .................................................................................12 1.3 Storytelling: Image ..................................................................................15 Two: Poetry ..............................................................................................................22 2.1 Poetry: Body ...........................................................................................25 2.2 Poetry: Space .........................................................................................29 2.3 Poetry: Image .........................................................................................32 Three: Participation ..................................................................................................37 3.1 Participation: Body ..................................................................................40 3.2 Participation: Space ................................................................................44 3.3 Participation: Image ................................................................................48 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................54 Works Cited .............................................................................................................55 Bibliography .............................................................................................................57 Appendices ..............................................................................................................61 Appendix A: Poster ...........................................................................................61 Appendix B: Program........................................................................................62 Appendix C: Script ............................................................................................64 Appendix D: Ticket Sales ..................................................................................75 vi LIST OF IMAGES Image 1: Development session three ........................................................................ 2 Image 2: Creating the circle ...................................................................................... 4 Image 3: “Grief Bubbles” ........................................................................................... 6 Image 4: “Grief Bubbles II” ........................................................................................ 7 Image 5: Dan performing his dad ............................................................................. 11 Image 6: Crossing the threshold ..............................................................................12 Image 7: Folding the shroud .....................................................................................18 Image 8: “Childhood Walls” ......................................................................................31 Image 9: Fabric as cocoon .......................................................................................32 Images 10-13: Drawings ..........................................................................................35 Image 14: Theeeeeee ..............................................................................................52 Image 15: eeeeeee ..................................................................................................53 Image 16: End ..........................................................................................................53 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my supervisor Denise Kenney and committee members Tracy Ross and Michael V. Smith. You have widened my perspective and I am grateful. Thank you to the staff, technicians, instructors, and faculty of Creative and Critical Studies for supporting my research: Joanne Gervais, Shauna Oddleifson, Sam Neal, Matt Rader, Emily Murphy, Ramey Newell, Vanessa Costa, Cole Klassen, Maria Alexopoulos, Yujie Gao, Nancy Holmes, Shawn Serfas, Erin Scott, and Chantal Bilodeau. Thank you to the creative team that gathered from near and far to bring WIDE to life: Jenn Townsend, Lindsay Farrugia, Danna-Rae Evasiuk, and Ziv Wei. Thank you to everyone who attended development session(s): Eva Kasprzycka, Mackenzie Shaw, Erin Scott, Joanne Gervais, Denise Kenney, Michael V. Smith, Tracy Ross, Tara Yadollahi, Bibek Adhikari, Mackenzie Blackwood, Calise Stankoven, Yujie Gao, Matt Rader, Maria Alexopoulos, Samantha Megarry, Kayla Sliskovic, Benji Agcal, Bravim Saini, Annie Furman, Slava Bart, Norah Paton, Jessica Beaudin, Gabriela Petrov, Nick Thomas, Lindsay Farrugia, Shauna Oddleifson, Juniper Charlesworth, and Annie Furman. Thank you to those who volunteered their time and talents: Josh Landry, Ronan Fraser, Mackenzie Shaw, Amy Wang, Annie Furman, Slava Bart, Bibek Adhikari, Yujie Gao, and Kate Twa. Thank you to my loved ones for the way you listen: Delilah Deane Cummings, Olivia Woods, Anne Eitzen, Lindsey Huebner, Meagan Schroeder, Jen Vincent, Ellen Denny, Nick Thomas, Samantha Megarry, Kayla Sliskovic, Norah Paton, and Gabriela Petrov. Thank you to the Syilx Okanagan people whose ongoing care for their unceded, ancestral land and upon which the university is located made it possible for me to create WIDE. Thank you, Kelly Terbasket, for sharing your teachings of reciprocity. viii DEDICATION for my parents Delilah Deane Cummings & Stephen Foster Cummings thank you for telling me (your) stories thank you for going with me, beyond 1 INTRODUCTION I made WIDE to forgive myself for having an imperfect relationship with my dad as a teenager and to evolve our relationship beyond his life. I have always been a private person but my dad’s unexpected death made me secretive. I erected a thick wall, creating a barrier between my work and my life. It wasn’t until an intensive two-week workshop with the Moving Voice Institute (MVI; formerly Canada’s National Voice Intensive) in the Spring of 2018 that the wall between my work and my life began to crumble. I didn’t have the energy to keep my work notebook separate from my personal journal. My notes about the work and my personal reflections ended up jumbled together in one notebook, a practice I have maintained since. For this project, I kept a word document titled “THESIS JOURNAL” that I will periodically quote from. WIDE is a significant step in the ongoing journey of connecting my life to my work. When I was accepted into the Master of Fine Art’s program at UBCO, I made a commitment to create artwork that responded to my current experience. As my mentor Gerry Trentham, whom I met at the MVI in 2018 says, “Let go of all your good ideas.” I didn’t decide what to make before I arrived in Kelowna. Returning to university student life after a decade away punctured holes in the dam that had been holding back a river of emotion related to studying creative writing and performance. Suddenly, my dad was everywhere: in my poetry, in the classroom, on the bus, crossing campus with me. I shouldn’t have been surprised. In late-summer 2022, I left Montreal, my home of thirteen years, and traveled to British Columbia, the same province where my dad, Stephen Foster Cummings, landed sixty years ago. He emigrated from the Southeastern United States at age twenty by Greyhound bus to study and teach Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Vancouver. Of course he’s here with me on campus. Developing WIDE was an opportunity to redefine performance for myself. During the first year of the degree, our entire cohort, a group of thirteen artists, took a couple of colloquium classes together. An early assignment required us to teach a twenty-minute session that introduced one simple tool or concept that we use in our art practice. In discussion around this exercise, I pushed back against the idea that teaching is a performance and that good teaching can be ‘performative’. As I made WIDE, I began to unpack my own baggage around what I designate as performance and why. Just like the firm boundary drawn 2 between my work and my life, I noticed an assumed boundary between performance (on stage) and living (offstage) that I was upholding. When I began this project, I asked: Can the explicit facilitation of guided somatic practices in theatrical performance enact a collective heightened presence that leads to embodied learning? Between October and December 2023, I held six development sessions and invited different participants each time. The attendance at these sessions ranged from as few as five people to as many as forty. Image 1: Development session three (Photograph by Joanne Gervais, November 2, 2023) After only one development session, the answer to my question was clear: a resounding yes. Getting such an easy answer revealed the limitations of my initial question. Guided group practice that emphasizes somatic connection—the connection between mind and body—is powerful. There is no need to prove or disprove that collective embodied practice such as yoga or sports allows for a special bond and experiential learning. To go deeper, I needed to ask a question without a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Over time, I came to understand each development session as a performance: a live, solo, participatory event where discoveries occurred that informed the content of the show. 3 The discovery sessions were fuelled by impulses that led to actions. These actions were taken by myself and the participants and resulted in co-created, shared meaning. For example, during an exercise that I called the “Fabric Exercise”, I experimented with different ways to co-create images through use of a white, gauze-like fabric. First, I used the fabric as a scene partner to create a series of metaphors, for example: this is a secret, this is a shroud, this is the rhythm of my heart. The boundaries of the material became clear as I worked. The fabric could not be ‘a knife’ or ‘a carpet’ – these images deadened the material, whereas other images enlivened it: ‘a veil between my inner and outer world’ or ‘the distance between us’. The metaphor needed to contain enough of the essence of the fabric to resonate. This simple “Fabric Exercise” was a reminder that one form, in this case, a piece of sheer fabric, contains many potential meanings. The human body is no different: a single form that contains endless possibilities. I began to wonder just how far beyond the form of my body I can send meaning. What is the process for gesture and sound leaving my body? When do the actions I take and the words I speak stop being ‘mine’ and enter a space outside of me? How far beyond me does this energy reach? And if I can go beyond my body, can my dad? This paper will articulate the process of seeking to answer a poetic question through performance: Where does the body end? Poetry itself aligns with my questions of ‘beyond the body’. Poetry has a resonance that vibrates between objects, creating meaning and ways of knowing beyond the literal or linear. The performance was designed to engage the audience/participants in techniques that build tangible, repeatable skills that they can take away into their lives, such as somatic (mind-body) listening and physical imagination. Underpinned by practice-based research with roots in postmodern theatre, WIDE is in dialogue with practices that weave audience responses into the performance. I will often refer to the audience/participants and use these terms interchangeably. I will refer to WIDE as a performance, piece, work, and show. I will analyze the elements that make up my creative practice: Storytelling, Poetry, and Participation. Each element had a role in the creation process and public performances of WIDE. The paper is divided into three containers that represent the three forms of performance I used: Storytelling, Poetry, and Participation. Within each container are repeated subsections: Body, Space, and Image. These sections are a nod to the 4 instructional and poetic book of the same name by Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay, Body, Space, Image: Notes towards improvisation and performance (2006). The authors weave meditative movement scores with case studies in postmodern performance, creating a remarkable manual for improvisation. Excerpts from the script are woven into the paper and appear in Times New Roman font. Script excerpts are included at the beginning of each container: Storytelling, Poetry, and Participation. Each container will cycle through the same three subsections: Body, Space, and Image. The repetition is intended to highlight the cyclical and associative nature of the creation process, where harsh delineations do not apply; thick walls cannot be erected to neatly separate the ideas that formed WIDE. In this paper, I aim to continue the process of dissolving the walls between my life and my work: to write in a way that is personal, as well as contextualize my work within academia. Image 2: Creating the circle (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) 5 ONE: STORYTELLING Miriam sits in the upstage chair, reaches under to retrieve the suitcase and places it on her lap with intention. She reaches around, popping the clasp, and slowly opens the lid, revealing the fabric. Delicious; conspiratorial. She places the suitcase on the stage and crosses around it, gently tugging the fabric until it is fully released into the centre of the circle. She opens it completely, so that it lies in the centre of the circle like an area rug. She folds it carefully, as though folding a shroud. When my dad died, I decided not to see his body. A voice inside told me: His body is not him. You already saw him for the last time without knowing it. (beat) I’ve never regretted the decision not to see my dad’s body. Not everyone gets a choice. It felt important to have a choice. I saw him for the last time two weeks before he died. That was goodbye. And for a long, long, time, I felt that goodbye was final. But was it? Where did my dad’s body end? Storytelling is the ‘oldest’ element of my practice represented in WIDE—the one I’ve been doing the longest. I was raised by two people who celebrated storytelling. My mom and dad met at Western University while studying Library Science and I grew up immersed in a world of stories – stories told around the dinner table, stories read aloud, stories shared through correspondence with extended family. I loved to perform. I memorized favourite picture books and charged people five cents a ‘listen’ at the park. I devised musicals, puppet shows, and improvisational performances, as well as a fourteen-minute narrative film at the age of eight. I exercised my love of performance and storytelling through extracurricular activities and eventually, by studying Acting as an undergraduate student. Now, storytelling is the foundation of my creative practice. I find creative ways to tell stories through writing prose, poetry, and plays, through acting, teaching, and dramaturgy. While I have done significant healing in psychotherapy over the years, I have not addressed the impact of my dad’s death in my creative work. In some ways, it was inconvenient that my dad’s presence was so strong during my studies at UBCO. Though Creative Writing classes offered gentle invitations to express my inner world, the university in general did not feel like an ideal place to deeply explore grief. At the beginning of my degree, in September 2022, I let my regular somatic practices lapse to make space for a new city, school, and schedule. By December, I was struggling to motivate myself. In January, I began to do a regular, online yoga practice with Gabi, a colleague from Montreal. I would often start the day with a short, 6 guided yoga practice on YouTube, Gabi on Zoom in another window, and afterward, we’d talk about our work. The simple act of moving in shared (virtual) space with another artist and engaging in conversation was an important reminder that for me, movement always precedes language: articulation of the body leads to articulation of thought. Going forward, I will honour how essential somatic practices are to my work. My work is a somatic practice. Going forward, I will take care to prioritize solo and group movement practices such as yoga, performance training, hiking, walking, and running, no matter what new situation I arrive in. The iterative process I used to create WIDE gave me turns of phrase, vocabulary, and text. I returned to the studio, week after week, arranged blue chairs in a circle, and moved within that space. When I worked with others during the six development sessions, I greeted everyone as they arrived and spent time giving context about my project. This conversational mode of engaging with audience members found its way into the script and became an important part of the show’s dynamic of switching abruptly between performance styles. Sometimes, I worked alone in the studio. During these solo sessions, I found it very helpful to begin the work by reading a passage from a book. The work of Joan Didion and Jordan Tannahill were particularly inspirational for me. I will discuss two of their plays, The Year of Magical Thinking and Declarations, respectively, in the “Image” subsection of this “Storytelling” container. Image 3: “Grief Bubbles” (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) 7 Image 4: “Grief Bubbles II” (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) There is a movement section in the show that happens twice which I call “Grief Bubbles”. I created it during a session that began with reading Didion’s memoir Blue Nights, dedicated to her late daughter, Quintana. “Grief Bubbles” was one of the first moments I created, alone in studio, before anyone else engaged with the work. I don’t remember which came first—the idea to roll around the circle with the weight of my body guiding the movement, as though falling and catching myself or the impulse to search for ‘bubble’ sounds to move to. I searched for appropriate bubble sounds to accompany movement and when I found ‘deep underwater bubbles’ they sounded like grief to me. The metaphor of water as grief is woven throughout the show. This is just one example of a series of impulses that led to improvisation, which became an important device in the show. In Body, Space, Image, Tufnell and Crickmay state that improvisation, “provides us with a means to excavate layers of experience, sensation, character, feelings that we normally rush through or suppress – to travel deeper and deeper into an ever enlarging and changing moment” (46). These qualities—lived experience, sensation, and character—were essential to uncover as I made WIDE. As I experimented, I made discoveries that revealed memories and physical sensations that had been long-buried. Instead of sorting these discoveries into a linear order, I grouped them into a series of moments that could ‘go’ anywhere in the play 8 until their ‘right’ place emerged. Crickmay and Tufnell describe this making process as “one of discovery, in which the precise outcome is unknown at the start. Making proceeds as a dialogue with materials, the maker watching what is emerging and building upon it” (144). My goal in sharing a personal narrative was to find words that expressed both my acute experience of grief and my reflections on that experience, as accurately as possible. I held myself to the standard that if someone saw the show who had recently lost a parent, and was still in the initial shock of grief, nothing I said would ring false to them. They might not agree with what I say and could have a different experience from me but the underlying sensation would not be false – the resonance would not be discordant. For me, this meant not inventing any plot points. Not telling everything, while saying nothing that wasn’t true, from my perspective. Examining the interconnectedness of grief and performance in my past made it easier for me to have compassion for myself, albeit retroactively. I’m still a private person but now I have gentler, more permeable boundaries. I’m unwinding myself from my secrets: the shameful parts of myself that I felt would render me unlovable if spoken aloud. The story of my dad’s death is the glue that gives WIDE a clear beginning, middle, and end. In Scene 2, I introduce my dad as a character and tell an anecdote that brings his presence into the theatre. In Scene 3, I reveal that he died while I was training to be an actor. Finally, in Scene 6, as the opening excerpt shows, I ‘resolve’ the tension of that plot line by deciding not to see his body. In this final scene, the fabric is once again removed from the suitcase and carried to the centre of the circle. I gently fold the fabric, as though it is a shroud enveloping my dad’s body, as though I am preparing him for burial, as though the fabric itself is his body. Using the metaphor of ‘fabric as body’, after making it clear that the fabric can turn into anything we imagine, the metaphor is extended to the body itself. In performance, the body is the conduit for communication through breath, movement, and sound. To communicate, I must reach beyond the form of my body, past the permeable membrane of my skin, into the space between me and the audience, and further still, under their skin. Performance is a somatic act of connection. I wanted to know: Can I create this connection with my dad beyond his lifetime? Can I reach him? Where does his body end? 9 1.1 STORYTELLING: BODY What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (2015) by Ben Spatz aims to recontextualize embodied practices, like acting, as “knowledge in the form of technique” (1). Spatz discusses various acting methodologies, postural yoga, and the performance of gender. He posits ‘actor training’ is an insufficient term for the work that happens in classrooms where performance is studied in an embodied way. Spatz encourages readers to reframe embodied practice as research in technique. He writes: …there is a great deal of research in acting technique, but it usually goes nameless and misrecognized because it appears under the inaccurate label of “training.” Virtually every area of technique that structures contemporary acting practice—from Stanislavski’s active analysis to Strasberg’s Method acting, from Decroux’s corporeal mime to Staniewski’s musicality, and from Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to Bogart’s Viewpoints—is an innovation resulting from research in technique. None of these can be reduced to a matter of “training”… while research on acting produces scholarly and intellectual knowledge about acting, research in acting produces new acting technique (118). While Spatz was writing the book he held a series of events to “create a space in which people could come together and share embodied practices without any pressure to perform in a virtuosic way. I wanted to create the opposite of a talent show, the opposite of popular television programs like American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance” (3). Competitive, cabaret-style popular programs demand that “all performances be ranked as winners and losers, best and worst and runners up. This approach puts individual ability at the centre, rather than transmissible knowledge” (3). Just as I did while developing WIDE, Spatz is testing tools for making genuine invitations for people to perform in a non-virtuosic way. During the public performances of WIDE, I wanted to invite participants to perform in a non-virtuosic way and to genuinely inquire with me to see how far the body can go. In a way, the participation that occurred in each performance was each participant’s answer to how far their body could go—or was willing to go—in that moment, perhaps shedding light on where the body ends from their perspective. My intention was not to demonstrate a ‘correct’ way to do an exercise. I didn’t want audience members to feel that there was an ideal or right way to participate. During development sessions, I did not demonstrate exercises in detail. The attendees were willing to participate, had a good understanding of my project, and in some cases, had a great deal of performance experience. Due to the relative success of these development sessions, my expectation going into performance was that volunteers would be 10 plentiful. In fact, during the performances, I discovered that people were less eager to volunteer than I anticipated. One tactic I used to encourage participation was to give clearer demonstrations of the exercises, which may have led to participants feeling like there was a ‘correct’ way to participate. A specific example of a change I made partway through the run was a moment where I asked a participant to write a five-line scene for us. In each development session, a volunteer ‘wrote’ the scene by speaking it aloud, improvised, and I repeated the text so that the group could hear it multiple times before being invited to play the scene with me. After two performances, I changed the text to read as follows: Next, we’re gonna perform a “how ya doin’?” scene together. It’s probably the most common “how ya doin’” scene ever. You may have already played it today. It happens when you run in to someone you know, or meet someone new. It happens at the grocery store or waiting for the bus. It usually starts with “Hi” or “Hey”, then… (encourages, all say, “how ya doin’?”) Let’s write a five-line “how ya doin’” scene together. We already have the first two lines: Hi, How ya doin’?, then… (takes suggestions from the audience, we write a scene together) Nice. That’s a good one – it has some nuance. We’re going to play this five-line scene a few times, each time with different context. Scenes like this are sometimes called contextless scenes because we can give them any meaning we want. Similarly, in another section where I initially asked for one volunteer to participate, I added the text in bold after one performance: Now I’d like to invite a volunteer to do a performance of someone who is inside this room or outside it. You could perform yourself, me, a neighbour, a friend. People have performed their sibling, their pet, themselves… Who is feeling brave? Let’s warm up by all doing a performance of ourselves at the same time. I’ll count down and then we’ll all perform ourselves. When we’re done, we’ll say “Theeeeeeee end”, bow, and applaud. Three, two, one, go. (Miriam witnesses performances for a few beats; gesture, bow, applause) Wonderful! Beautiful performances. The tool of practicing together as a whole group before inviting one individual to participate with me or perform solo proved to be useful. 11 Image 5: Dan performing his dad (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) Practicing together invites the audience to embody concepts, providing them with two tangible sets of information: the sensations they feel in their body while performing and the visual representations of performance in bodies other than just mine. These ‘demonstrations’ given by audience members for each other disrupt the hierarchy of looking to the performer, or instructor, to provide one ‘correct’ way to perform. While offering genuine invitations for people to perform in a non-virtuosic way, free from competition, I also performed in a virtuosic way: I performed a classic monologue, moved in a beautiful way that read as ‘dance’, and told a moving personal story. When I teach acting, I do not demonstrate in this way, to ensure that I am not reinforcing the hierarchy that my way—my body—is ‘correct’. I came to think of my performance in WIDE as an exploration of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ virtuosity, as well as an invitation to perform in a non-virtuosic way. My virtuosity as a performer was visible to the audience when I moved in dance-like ways and told a story, whereas my facilitation of audience participation was designed to be invisible, to read as spontaneous and conversational. The moments of participation in WIDE were opportunities to share knowledge in the form of embodied practice, to provide tangible tools that the audience could take with them into their lives. 12 1.2 STORYTELLING: SPACE WIDE stretches the mouth into the shape it describes as it is spoken. Try it. Say, ‘wide’ out loud and notice the shape of your mouth. Now try to say it again and keep your lips pinched together as if you’ve tasted a sour lemon. See? Wide. The shape of the word makes it an undeniably poetic title that functions on many levels, however, does not give the audience a clear understanding of the style of performance they are choosing to attend. When the audience arrived, they were invited to hang their coats on a rack near the back of the theatre and take a seat on stage. Some people expressed concern at this seating arrangement. A few insisted that they would like to sit in the ‘audience seats’, meaning one of the 200, plush, fold-down seats located in the house (the audience seating-area). Nonetheless, everyone sat on stage, in chairs, in a semi-circle, facing the house. Image 6: Crossing the threshold (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) Oriented in this way, traditional roles of audience and stage are flipped. Opening with a platter of performance styles: physical theatre, direct address, narration, and psychological realism that directly implicate the audience, only to break this form and join them onstage, utilizes the entire performance space: 13 Miriam enters the theatre and notices the audience who has gathered on stage. She appreciates them and seeks a good seat to watch the show. She tries out two different seats and in the third, bubbles fade in. She melts into the sea, drawing a big breath. Miriam crawls on the ground to a new spot and her finger, then arm float upward and break the surface. Her limbs play in the water above the seats, floating, playing a rigid sea creature… she re-materializes into an audience seat, gasps for air, and changes places again, sitting in the front row. House lights stay up throughout. Miriam mirrors one audience member at a time until… (conversational, upbeat) Now, I’m going to perform a monologue for you. It’s by prolific American 20th century playwright, Eugene O’Neill: the only playwright to receive four Pulitzer prizes. It’s a monologue from the play Beyond the Horizon, set at the turn of the century. In it, Robert, a twenty-three-year-old farmer, stands on the porch of the farmhouse he grew up in and has never left. (gesturing over the theatre seats and toward upstage) Neatly ploughed fields of wheat stretch as far as the eye can see and, beyond them, mountains. The monologue is from Act One, Scene One. Robert speaks to Ruth, whose heart he is about to break. (Stepping onto a raised block set in the audience seats) So I used to stare out over the fields to the hills, out there—and somehow after a time I'd forget any pain I was in, and start dreaming. I knew the sea was over beyond those hills,—the folks had told me—and I used to wonder what the sea was like, and try to form a picture of it in my mind… I came to think of the above opening section as an exploration of compression and expansion of the space, an exploration of the limits of the physical theatre space, as well as the space between the people in the theatre. It was also an invitation to audience to feel these shifts. Scene 2 marks the closing of one space and the creation of another, the circle: (Bowing, encouraging applause) Thank you. (gesturing to the booth behind her) Thank you, Jenn! (walking down the aisle toward to stage) Now, I’m going to cross the threshold between performer and audience. (deep breath as feet touch the stage) Now we’re going to cross the threshold. (turning off the house lights) This is nice. (bringing her chair down stage centre) Now, we’re going to make a circle with our chairs. It’s going to help with the reciprocity: the listening and responding. We’ll bring our chairs into a circle and place them on this red tape on the ground. It’s called spike tape. Actors use it to place set pieces on stage. Great, one spike mark for each chair leg. Actors, please set up 14 for scene two! Does anyone need a hand? (helping as needed; noticing particularly prepared audience member) You’re hired! Using ADM 026 as a theatrical performance space introduced logistical challenges. The space is primarily used as a lecture hall and hosts many classes. There were small daily challenges, like a dirty stage (from wet winter boots) at the top of each rehearsal. There were big technical challenges, like the type of lighting system available, which is not designed for lighting theatre performances and incredibly difficult to use. However, none of these challenges superseded the invaluable access to the space itself. Access to space is one of the biggest barriers to creating new performance works due to lack of suitable spaces and high rental costs. I wanted to have the luxury of time in the performance space as I made the work, allowing me to respond to the space itself as I developed WIDE. The title of the show went through many iterations, including, How I failed (to become a famous actor), How to Fail to Become a Famous Actor: An Interactive Workshop, and Performing Ourselves: An Interactive Workshop. Ultimately, a poetic title was chosen: the word ‘wide’ functions on a number of levels. Cole Klassen, a sessional lecturer at UBCO, agreed to let me host my Dress Rehearsal (the final practice before the show opens to the public) in their Creative Writing 150 class. Cole read the script and interviewed me prior to the Dress Rehearsal. Following the rehearsal, Cole published an assignment for her class on Canvas, UBCO’s Learning Management System software, called “Experiment 3”. In the assignment, Cole asks students to choose a word that is connected to a memory, encouraging students to choose a word with more than one poetic meaning. Reading the assignment helped me to articulate the many functions of ‘wide’ in my piece. I explore width as external physical space, internal space, and as an action. To paraphrase some of Cole’s examples in the assignment: wide as the shape of the body (and the pressure to narrow that shape), the distance between people, a practice of discovery that invites generosity and abundance, a way of seeing the world, an antidote to scarcity and closed-mindedness, a companion in moments of grief and fear, and the feeling of emptiness left in the place of a lost loved one. 15 1.3 STORYTELLING: IMAGE Two plays that influenced my writing process are The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) by Joan Didion and Declarations (2017) by Jordan Tannahill. Each play eulogizes the playwrights’ family members in an entirely different style. To support a robust discussion of the structure and mechanics of WIDE, I will first describe the structure of these plays. In the note that forwards Tannahill’s play he writes, “Three years ago my mother was told she had less than three years to live. The news shattered me. My grief was all-consuming and yet I knew it wasn’t special… Declarations is driven by the desire to articulate the entirety of a life and the inherent impossibility of doing so” (5). Declarations is a play for five actors. The first ‘stage direction’—italicized instructions meant for performers beyond the spoken text—explains how the declarations are connected to physical gestures, “1 enters. She stands for a moment. She then proceeds to make a series of declarations, each accompanied by a gesture. The gesture is meant to illustrate the image or idea contained within the declaration” (11). The play contains a glossary of sorts that is described as “The Gestural Score,” a detailed breakdown of how the stage directions should be interpreted by future actors and directors. In the first half of the play, pages 11-53, every single line begins, “This is…”. The first lines of text on page 11 are performed by one actor and read as follows: 1: This is the thing This is not the thing This is my mother This is her eyelash This is a flag This is an empty promise Tannahill immediately sets up the device he will use throughout the play: declaring a series of statements and giving them meaning beyond their form by embodying each statement with a new gesture. Tannahill moves between concrete images, abstract ideas and commonly used turns of phrase, juxtaposing the familiar and unfamiliar: 1: This is a minor inconvenience 2: This is a derailed train 3: This is a landfill 4: This is naked ambition 1: This is a public service announcement (33). 16 Between pages 71 and 72, the metaphors begin to reveal themselves in a more complete way, the text reads more like poetry and is less dependent on the gesture to complete the metaphor. Here is the text on these pages, spoken by multiple performers: 4: The shape of this movement 3: Is motion 4: The weight of the world 3: Is water 4: And revealed in the water 3: Is movement 1: And the quiet you call dawn 4: And the roar you call water Page 81 marks the first time during the play that a complete phrase is repeated: 2: The shape of this movement 3: Is motion 4: The weight of the world 3: Is water 5: And revealed in the water 1: Is movement Though the same full phrase is repeated, different performers speak the lines. Throughout the following eight pages, the rhythm of the play continues to build. Words and phrases are repeated to the point of losing their meaning and eventually, the performers break into song and dance, to which the playwright refers in his notes as, “a joyous ritual” (87). The same performer that speaks first also speaks the final words of the show. They open with a series of abstract declarations and close with a linear monologue, a story that makes the earlier abstraction clear. The story of a simple moment in which the speaker is waiting for a bus, realizes they have forgotten their phone, and looks up to see their mother: 1: Jogging out of the house in her nightgown and slippers She was home because she was in the midst of chemo No longer working Bald and jogging toward me This is my mother I thought to myself This is her love Jogging with my phone toward me Bald and in her slippers This is her love This is a declaration of her love (90). 17 I first encountered Declarations in the Fall of 2019. I used the text in an acting workshop for non-theatre undergraduate students that I taught at Concordia University. At first, the play mystified the students, who were expecting a ‘normal’ play, with realistic dialogue between characters. Declarations demands that the performer create a personal connection with each image and then embody that image while speaking. This same task, connecting to text and building internal images that relate to the text, can be used to prepare ‘normal’ text, such as the line, “How are you doing?” As I will explore in the “Participation” container, this one line of text can have a range of subtext; one line of text can reveal many different meanings. A performer can associate a specific image or memory or sensation with this one line of text that will affect how it is spoken, giving the audience information about the characters, the situation, and the story that is unspoken. In contrast, Declarations brings image to the forefront, relying less on subtext to create meaning, and more on metaphor. I explored meaning-making through metaphor as I made WIDE. During October-December 2023, while I developed WIDE, I repeated the “Fabric Exercise” many times. I used a semi-transparent piece of fabric to create metaphors, some planned, and some improvised through audience suggestion. I re-read Declarations in early January 2024 and noticed two metaphors in particular, “This is a secret” (13) and “This is the space between us” (43). Retroactively, I realized how much Tannahill’s poetic play had influenced the making of WIDE. I use repetition, rhythm, poetry, and images as metaphor to eulogize my dad and extend our relationship beyond his lifetime. The first time I reveal the semi-transparent fabric to the audience, we experience the fabric together as a shape-shifting, meaning-making device: This is the veil between my inner world and my outer world. This is an invisibility cloak. This is a shroud. This is a secret. This is the piece of you inside of me. Could you please hold this? (Holding fabric taut with audience member) This is the distance between us. (beat) Keep holding. I ask the audience what else the fabric could be and animate their suggestions into images with the fabric. Through this exercise, the audience and I built a common vocabulary of images and an understanding that the fabric could become anything we imagined. This 18 exercise set up the final scene of WIDE, in which the fabric returned and the metaphor of fabric as body, and therefore, body as anything we imagine, landed: In the centre of the circle, she opens the fabric completely, so that it lies like a rug. She folds it carefully, as though folding a shroud. When my dad died, I decided not to see his body. A voice inside told me: His body is not him. You already saw him for the last time without knowing it. (beat) I’ve never regretted the decision not to see my dad’s body. Not everyone gets a choice. It felt important to have a choice. I saw him for the last time two weeks before he died. That was goodbye. And for a long, long, time, I felt that goodbye was final. But was it? Where did my dad’s body end? Eventually, when I allowed my body to be wide, I began to notice new sensations moving through me, causing me to respond, to share what was happening on the inside. Now, I allow myself to be moved. I’m never not moving. The breath falls in and out, moves however it wants. (beat) Images come and go however they want. My dad comes and goes. I conjure him into the present when I am wide enough to hear beyond words. Image 7: Folding the shroud (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024 19 This is the final moment of what I call ‘storytelling’ in the show. These ‘storytelling’ moments are closest in style to Joan Didion’s play, The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion tells the story of the unexpected death of her husband and daughter in excruciating detail. The play is written for one actor who speaks directly to the audience for the duration of the show. The first words of the play read: This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That's what I'm here to tell you (1). These first lines establish a clear relationship between performer and audience. The style of speaking directly to the audience is called ‘direct address’. I use this tactic when telling the story of my dad’s death in WIDE. There is a transparency in the way Didion tells her story: it is told in a linear, chronological order, with recurring phrases, themes and metaphors. The level of detail is granular and includes medical jargon, sometimes giving the sense that the play itself is an autopsy: Quintana is where we left her, unconscious in the ICU, the IV lines still dripping the medications that are what they mean when they say “We’re giving it everything we’ve got.” “Everything we’ve got” doesn’t do it for me. I want the names. I wrote them down. I looked them up. There were antibiotics. Vancomycin. They call it “vanc.” By now so do I. Azithromycin. Gentamicin. Clindamycin. Then there was Xigris. Xigris is Eli Lilly’s drug for septic shock. Said to improve the survival rate from 56 to 69 percent. You might want to file that (12). By establishing a direct address to the audience, Didion includes everyone in the performance space in the story. Instead of allowing the audience to witness at a distance, Didion insists on a style of writing that implicates the audience. Didion is transparent about her life and work beyond the story of the play. In scene nine, the performer quotes from Didion’s 2005 book of the same name, The Year of Magical Thinking: I told you I wrote a book. (Reads from page 188) “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We know that someone close to us could die. We might expect to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect to be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes…” (58). In this way, Didion acknowledges that she is both the character in the play and a real person. Didion does not perform the play, she is not an actor, but she writes herself into the story in a way that creates an awareness that the story being told happened to a real 20 person. To me, the play reads as a record, a diligent practice of remembering the details of a traumatic experience so as not to succumb to the memory loss that is common in the wake of the unexpected death of a loved one. Structurally, WIDE is different from both Tannahill and Didion’s plays, though all three plays share devices such as direct address and metaphor. Storytelling, Poetry, and Participation serve as the containers for sections of WIDE. Storytelling occurs three times, providing a clear beginning, middle, and end of the story of my dad’s death. Poetry occurs six times and includes the movement sequence I call Grief Bubbles. Participation occurs five times, introducing a new exercise each time that builds on the knowledge acquired in the previous exercise. There are two instances where each container is present, briefly, in a larger moment—as if glimpsed: at the very beginning of the show and again in the middle. Storytelling, Poetry, and Participation—the three elements used in WIDE—are cycled through when I enter the theatre, before stepping onto the stage. I move through the audience seating as though sinking and rising in a poetic, metaphorical ocean. I give context for the monologue I perform from Eugene O’Neill’s play, Beyond the Horizon, using direct address. Finally, I thank Jenn, my Stage Manager, and cross the threshold onto the stage, inviting the audience to bring their chairs into a circle. In this way, they receive a “sampling” of each element. The next instance of sampling occurs in Scene 4: I explain that this show is my thesis and demonstrate a poetic listening practice that leads into the “Fabric Exercise” which invites audience members to participate in co-creating images with the fabric. Breaking down WIDE in this way reveals that Poetry and Participation are the most frequently used elements. However, I believe that Storytelling is the most dominant. After the first invited development session, I received feedback indicating that the narrative of the piece was unclear. On October 12, 2023, I noted questions that emerged and brainstormed tools that could help to clarify the story of the piece in my thesis journal: Need to tell more of “the story”. People want to know what’s happening and who I’m addressing. Give them a WHO to invest in. (Grief as a communal experience.) Mystery or suspense: suspense is more manageable to maintain. Need more associative threads: let these emerge and don’t be afraid to repeat or be explicit. As I developed the piece, I clarified the relationship between myself and the audience. I removed the ‘mystery’ of the story by plainly stating the inciting incident that led to my grief: the unexpected death of my dad. I repeated certain ideas and phrases that spoke to the 21 themes of the piece and removed confusing tangential ideas. Still, I’m not sure I told a coherent story that made it clear ‘what was happening’. Despite including more details about my dad, our relationship, his death and its impact on me, I did not achieve the transparency that Didion writes with. In a future iteration of WIDE, I would be curious to experiment with removing the Storytelling element. With this element removed, the show would rely on non-narrative elements, and paradoxically, would perhaps come closer to Mary Overlie’s definition of the viewpoint, “Story”, outlined in Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice: As human beings we reflexively and successfully sort tons of information on a daily basis, formulating a living ongoing story. This material, interrogated as a natural phenomenon, turns into particles that turn into an arrangement of those particles, exposing the manipulation of logic that is the core of Story. Story in the Six Viewpoints is simply seen as a specific logic that functions as an organization of sequences of information… Seen as Logic, Story also seamlessly unites two important voices in art often viewed as opposite, those of abstraction and those of realism. At the heart of both are specific arrangements of Story/Logic (43). What possibilities remain to be discovered in terms of WIDE’s internal logic? How can I include myself in the story without centering my story? Does the way I divulge information about my dad’s death contribute to the hesitation on the part of the audience to participate? I’m interested in using tools from Tannahill’s work that give poetic text internal logic, such as the “fifteen rules for what the gestures could and could not be” (9) outlined in The Gestural Score. Some examples of Tannahill’s rules: • Gestures should be a genuine attempt to communicate the essence of each declaration. • No finger symbols (i.e., a gun, a peace sign, the middle finger, etc.) • Avoid pointing at the thing you are referring to; embody it. • A variety of movement and stillness is crucial. • Very occasionally you can make a sound to accompany a declaration/ gesture, but only if the sound spontaneously arises from the execution of the gesture (9-10). By creating and following a stronger set of ‘rules’ in the performance, such as those outlined above, WIDE might become more abstract, yet more logical. Given that humans are hardwired to make meaning of what they observe and, in this way, constantly create narratives from available information, the question I am asking as I move forward is: What building blocks am I giving the audience to create a narrative? 22 TWO: POETRY I’ve read that grief doesn’t get smaller, we expand around it. Miriam gently replaces fabric in suitcase and closes it. She rises, picking up the suitcase with her, and holds it with both hands, offering it to each audience member. Each audience member gets their own “lines” delivered directly to them. You leave your house alone, walk west, and realize childhood ends when a parent dies: instead of solid matter to push against there is only falling into the well of adulthood, sudden as falling asleep on the chest that brought you into the world and questions simple as mountains: What is childhood but a set of walls raised impossibly around us; a chest to pound upon with closed fists? (rage against, love, prove wrong) Without walls, there is only space vast as a whole life: open space can be filled with anything. Poetry is an element of my practice that I’ve been developing over the past six years. In 2018, I began writing my first-ever solo play called THE ONE, a show about our intimate relationship with our phones and what it means to be authentic in a curated world. THE ONE also used the elements of Storytelling and Poetry, as well as Verbatim Text transcribed from interviews I conducted with my maternal grandmother. There are three characters in the show: Emily, her grandmother, Isabelle, and her phone. My playwright’s note instructs the reader that the poems are “statements of fact, pouring out of Emily when stream of consciousness fails to get to the root of her experience.” As I reflect on my use of poetry in plays, I realize that the impulse to speak poetry in THE ONE is similar to the impulse in musical theatre to break into song; song occurs when spoken words cannot contain the size of the emotion being felt by the character or when a particular moment warrants extension. 23 Instead of recreating an existing structure from another genre, my use of poetry in WIDE has a different intention. The foundational aesthetic of the poetic, or lyrical, impulse—to turn—permeates the structure of my piece. As the verse in a poem turns, moving in unexpected directions, so does the piece. The story does not follow a linear structure, but employs parataxis, jumping from one idea to the next without a ‘logical’ transition; returning to vocabulary, gestures, and moments to examine them more deeply. In WIDE, poetry serves as an anchor in a sea of images, exercises, and personal stories. “Childhood Walls,” the poem that opens this container, appears at the beginning and again at the end, slightly changed. At the beginning, it gives an idea of the tone and themes of the show. At the end, the repetition allows the audience to hear the words anew, equipped with new information about the poem’s meaning. Structurally, the poem serves as a familiar space to arrive at and return to. In my teaching practice, I aim to create this space at the beginning and the end of each class: a check-in and check-out. Three poetic tools that are essential to WIDE are Emotion, Shape, and Image. These tools overlap across disciplines, sharing qualities with the practices outlined by Mary Overlie and Jane Hirschfield. Overlie writes from the perspective of her practice as a postmodern choreographer, dancer, and educator and Hirshfield as a poet and essayist. I will use the established subsections of Body, Space, and Image to contain these ideas. Overlie’s Six Viewpoints outline six philosophical, non-hierarchical, and practical materials for creating performance: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story (SSTEMS). In her 1998 book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Hirshfield proposes Six Poetic Concentrations: Music, Rhetoric, Image, Emotion, Story, and Voice. Each concentration is framed as a “particular state of awareness” which tracks with Overlie’s aim to “bring a perspective to the materials of the stage and of performance, allowing these elements to take the lead in a creative dialogue” (3). Each essay in Nine Gates explores a different facet of writing poetry. Two chapters from this book inspired me during the making of WIDE: “Poetry and the Mind of Concentration” and “Poetry and the Mind of Indirection.” In the latter chapter, Hirshfield describes a poem as: …a detour we willingly subject ourselves to, a trick surprising us into the deepened vulnerability we both desire and fear. Its strategies of beauty, delay, and deception smuggle us past the border of our own hesitation. There is reason to fear: a great poem, like a great love, challenges our solitude, our conceptions, the very ground of 24 being. Encountering such a poem, we tremble a little as we enter its gates. But the end, as in love, is to know and feel what could not be known or felt by any path less demanding (125-6). I resonate with this description of entering a poem. It gives voice to my experience of ‘entering’ the making of WIDE. The poetry and prose I wrote about the loss of my dad during my first semesters at UBCO were a clear indication that I must cross the border of my own hesitation and move toward great love in my work. I need poetry to begin to answer the question, How far does the body go? 25 2.1 POETRY: BODY WIDE is structured as a hybrid performance/workshop where I flow between the roles of actor and facilitator. I am telling a story in the first person, as well as guiding audience members through mini, improvised, performance moments. Moises Kaufman, Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project, created a method for devising theatre called Moment Work, one of the techniques I used to develop this piece. Kaufman explains that Moment Work draws from the work of Bertolt Brecht, a prolific twentieth-century author and activist whose poetry, prose and drama have shaped contemporary theatre. In his 2018 book, Moment Work: Tectonic Theater Project’s Process for Devising Theater, co-written with company member Barbara Pitts McAdams, Kaufman notes that, “Bertolt Brecht’s ideas about the theater have always played a key role in our process, particularly his notion that both actor and character should be present onstage. He didn’t want an actor to ‘disappear’ into a role; he wanted the audience to be clearly aware of both the performer and the character” (209). In WIDE, I did not want to place myself in a purely narrative storytelling role. I did not want to explicitly encourage the audience to ‘live’ or ‘re-live’ events through me. I aimed for a performance style and structure that allowed the audience and I to co-create a piece aware of its form. Moment Work offers tools for building performance that bring clarity to a creation process. I found it especially important to have clear processes during the making of WIDE, given that I spent much of the creation time on my own. The foundational concept of Moment Work is the making of ‘moments’, described by Kaufman and Pitts McAdams as follows: To make moments, we use a simple construct. The person making the moment says I begin to indicate the moment is starting. Then…something happens. “Something” could be as simple as a deep breath, a walk across the space, or a gesture. When the moment is concluded, the moment maker says I end. This construct allows us to frame what we are showing our audience and make it a distinct unit. The I begin/I end construct is the foundation of the Moment Work technique, and it remains consistent no matter how complex our explorations become (37). As I developed disparate parts of WIDE I kept detailed notes in my thesis journal about the moments I made in rehearsal, such as “Grief Bubbles”, “Fabric Exercise”, and “Narrow Body.” These are examples of moments that remained in the performance draft of WIDE. Many moments were created and ultimately cut from the script. Another useful tool from Moment Work is the idea of layering elements within a moment. One of the first exercises, 26 “Make a List of the Elements of the Stage” involves naming as many elements as possible, demonstrating that almost anything can be considered an element of the stage in their view. Here are some examples they give: “Movement, Set pieces, Lights, Virtuosity, Choreography, Hydraulics (technology), Music, Singing, Costume, Character, Audience involvement, Surprise, Spectacle, Double casting, Blackout” (35). Considering these elements of the stage as distinct from one another, each with the capacity to “speak” and convey information, leads to careful consideration of exactly what is needed to tell a story. In the Moment Work technique, elements of the stage are first studied individually. Next, “…we organically shift our focus to how elements combine and communicate with one another…now we ask increasingly complex questions: What happens when we add light or sound to preexisting moments? How does that change our perception of the moment? How does it change the narrative” (60)? Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints are the foundation upon which Tectonic Theater Project built Moment Work. The two techniques share a lineage in postmodern performance practice. In her book, Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice, Overlie writes that “Objects, whether our bodies, a table, chair or bowl can only be deeply appreciated through a focus that has a meditative type of attention” (17). What began as a simple, playful, and impulsive exercise, discovered during the first invited development session on October 5, 2023, grew into a profound metaphor that explored the main question of the show: Where does the body end? In the final moments of the piece the fabric is spread open on the ground and folded as though it is a shroud while I speak aloud the internal logic that led to the decision not to see my dad’s body. I ask: Where did my dad’s body end? The body, like the fabric, is one form that contains many meanings. As I made WIDE, I was curious about the process of creating and sharing meaning with my body and beyond my body. When does my energy leave my body and enter space outside of me? How far does this energy reach? If I can go beyond my body, can my dad? To attempt to answer these questions, I needed to achieve a kind of meditative attention as I worked. I could not create meaningful moments if I was distracted. If I was distracted, I was unable to notice potential moments for connection with the audience. Inspired by a series of contemplative poems written by Chris Nealon, I now think about the kind of attention required to make WIDE in a new way. 27 Kenosis is a term that describes a process of emptying oneself, from the Greek root ‘kenos’. Kenosis is generally associated with a Christian theological understanding: a contemplative process of self-emptying as an expression of humility. In a series of poems from his book The Shore, Chris Nealon writes, “We were sold kenosis as a way to overcome discrepancies in scale/ But everything hinged on the tone you did it in” (8). The refusal to ‘disappear’ into character, to maintain space for the audience to participate, is a kind of kenosis that demands I suspend ego, judgement, and control during the performance. It demands that I speak to the audience in a tone that encourages them to trust me and trust themselves. Emptying myself enough to make space for the imagination of the audience is a contemplative practice itself. The project demands a quality of energy that can't be invented out of thin air, it requires a presence of being that privileges the bond between my mind and body. Overlie speaks about the presence of performers in a specific way that resonates with me. She defines Emotion as “the active self-awareness of the performer” (31). I understand active self-awareness as the ability to be present in a given moment. To be present on stage is to be responsive, open, and grounded. To achieve these qualities, I must listen, become aware of sensation, and allow myself to be curious. Thinking about Emotion as a tangible, trainable skill is useful for a performer, because it is actionable. Attending to the movement of our own breath is a simple and powerful tool to access presence. Overlie states that “total interface between the performer and their audience is what I label presence” (31). I approached the content of WIDE from Overlie’s understanding of Emotion as presence. Throughout the performance, I remained connected to the reality of the performance space and the presence of the audience. This practice of remaining connected to the present moment, rather than projecting myself into past moments of personal trauma, helped me to reframe my own expectations that because WIDE dealt with the theme of grief, it should be sombre, or overtly sad, or encourage catharsis for the audience. In the performance, I created check in points for myself and the audience to ensure that we had tools to access presence. Each participatory exercise was an opportunity for me to check in with myself and the audience. When I say, ‘check in’, I mean that I create space to listen to unspoken feedback from inside my own body and from outside (audience) bodies. Ideally, an actor on stage is in a constant process of receiving, digesting, and responding to felt feedback. In 28 WIDE, I took this active self-awareness, or presence, to another level by pausing the flow of the performance to listen to the audience. Another tool I use, is the invitation to notice. After the audience creates a circle with their chairs, I guide a breathing exercise. Following that breathing exercise, I invite audience members to notice various things: Notice a little space between your inhale and your exhale… Notice the sensation of your body contacting the chair, the floor. Notice how the ground supports your weight completely. Notice the sensation of the air contacting your skin, the lights on your face. Can you smell anything? Maybe even taste something? What sounds can you hear? (pause) Sounds inside the room. Any sounds outside the room? I introduce the concept of ‘noticing’ early in the performance, as well as the tension between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. I say the word ‘notice’ sixteen more times throughout the show. In my experience, noticing is a key skill related to cultivating presence. I challenged myself to stay present with the audience throughout the performance and invited them to stay present with me. 29 2.2 POETRY: SPACE In his lengthy 2017 book, teasingly titled A Little Book on Form, Robert Hass guides the reader through more than fifteen forms of poetry. Hass weaves philosophical queries with practical advice for closely reading poetry. A recurring question is the use of poetry: what is the ‘work’ of poetry? Hass brings clarity to a genre with many facets and moving parts, giving those who engage with poetry a set of tools to understand how poetry works. A poem occupies space on a page in a certain way. The use of space in poetry is decided by the author and informed by the form it is written in, which adheres to specific rules. In WIDE, the poem “Childhood Walls” opens and closes the show. The poem is written in the manner of a georgic poem, though diverges from the traditional form. “The georgic got its name from Virgil’s Georgics, a set of four long poems in dactylic hexameter about farming” (Hass 337). Dactylic hexameter is one type of meter, or rhythm, that a poem can follow. The names for various types of meter come from Greek (Hass 399). Dactylic hexameter describes a poem with a ‘falling rhythm’, in which the first syllable of a line is stressed, or accented, and the two syllables following are unstressed. If spoken aloud, the first syllable would receive more emphasis than the following two, for example, ‘po-e-try’. Dactylic hexameter refers to a poem whose line contains six stressed syllables. “Childhood Walls” is written in iambic pentameter but can be considered a georgic poem in the sense that its role is to provide information and practical instruction. Hass quotes Janet Lembke, author of Virgil’s Georgics (2005), who writes that the poem of the same name, “…not only gave specific instruction to Italian farmers but also passionately advocated caring without cease for the land and for the crops and animals it sustained” (337). Hass characterizes the georgic as a poetic form of knowledge and instruction which shares qualities with the ode, a poem that connects “to the creative imagination and the notions of good” (339). If the ode celebrates an ideal, the georgic is a form that tells us “in a practical way, how to get there” (339). One example of the instructional georgic impulse in modern poetry is “Directive” by Robert Frost, first published in his penultimate volume of poetry Steeple Bush (1947). In the poem, Frost instructs the reader to return to an abandoned town in New England and walk through it. In the 2014 book of essays edited by Mark Richardson, Robert Frost in Context, Jay 30 Parini’s chapter on Steeple Bush characterizes “Directive” as living “in the tradition of the lyric of return” (65). Parini highlights that “Frost begins his poem with a crucial and repeated word, “back.” The narrator leads us back in time, taking us through layers of syntax, searching out a time “made simple by the loss of detail”. It is an extraordinary journey that uncovers a place at once magical and desolate, even haunted” (66). “Directive” is written in blank verse, or iambic pentameter, a ‘rising rhythm’, in which the first syllable of a line is unstressed, and the syllable following is stressed. If spoken aloud, the first syllable would receive less emphasis than the following, for example, ‘to die’. Iambic pentameter refers to a poem whose line contains five stressed syllables. Published in a reprint of the celebrated collection, North of Boston, Frost’s “Directive” gives specific instructions in lines 29-39: Make yourself up a cheering song of how Someone's road home from work this once was, Who may be just ahead of you on foot Or creaking with a buggy load of grain. The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you're lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. Then make yourself at home (179). Parini points out that Frost, the poet, “stands in for the reader” (66), creating the effect that both the speaker and the reader are walking through this landscape, guided by the poet. In WIDE, I speak “Childhood Walls” directly to the audience as I walk around the circumference of the circle, a gesture that mirrors the speaker/reader/guide effect described above. Initially, the poem began with the word ‘I’ instead of ‘you’, reading, “I leave my house alone, walk west, and realize/ childhood ends when a parent dies: instead/ of solid matter to push against there is/ only falling…” a choice which creates a separation between me (the poet) and the reader (the audience). I changed the first line of the poem to orient myself and the audience as travelers together on a journey, both following instructions that apply first to me, the performer, and then to the 31 audience. This manner of providing instruction mirrors the instruction of participatory exercises in the show. During moments of participation, I instruct, demonstrate, and then invite the audience to try. In this way, I go first. “Childhood Walls” is a poem that provides one pathway to move through the experience of grief, bringing structure and order to a chaotic experience. By implicating the audience directly as the poem opens, I invite the audience to walk the path with me, “You leave your house alone, walk west, and realize/ childhood ends when a parent dies: instead/ of solid matter to push against there is/ only falling into the well of/ adulthood, sudden as falling asleep/ on the chest that brought you into the world…” and eventually, by the end of the performance, walking us out of the poem, together, “You inhale and descend into your life, older/ now; far, far younger than you will ever be.” Recently, classmates and I collaborated on a chapbook to give as a gift to our professor. In it, I include “Childhood Walls”, renamed to reflect the action I take in WIDE as I speak it: “a poem to be spoken aloud in a circle amongst friends and strangers.” Out of the context of the play itself and on the blank page, I hope that this title gives an indication to the reader that the poem should move through space, touching each person in the circle as it passes. Image 8: "Childhood Walls" (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) 32 2.3 POETRY: IMAGE As I developed distinct moments to use as building blocks for WIDE, I began to play with elements: recorded sound, movement, duration, space, text, audience interaction, and more. As I developed moments and layered elements, I initiated a pattern that recurred across moments: the transformation of objects and body. I experimented with using different objects in WIDE: stacks of books, a water bottle, a music stand, a buttoned shirt. Ultimately, I worked with only two objects on stage: a light brown suitcase with a semi-transparent, gauze-like piece of white fabric inside. Image 9: Fabric as cocoon (Photograph by Joanne Gervais, January 30, 2024) The fabric can be animated to transform into any shape and, as I made WIDE, I referred to this game of making shapes from the fabric as the “Fabric Exercise”. In the play, the fabric takes the shape of both objects and metaphors: an invisibility cloak, a veil, a secret, the piece of you inside of me, the distance between us. In these examples, the fabric can hide or reveal. As I manipulate the fabric to create different images, I create a live, embodied synecdochical chain—a string of images that share an unspoken shape or function. 33 In her essay, “Poetry and the Mind of Concentration” from Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Jane Hirschfield states that “in a good image, something previously unformulated (in the most literal sense) comes into the realm of the expressed… Image is taken up by the reaching mind, but also within…the muscles’ familiar surge of kinship” (18). Hirschfield argues that images, and therefore poetry, is physical—writing and reading it is a kinesthetic experience. Images within a poem ignite a kinetic response and allow the mind to cross “into the knowledge the unconscious holds—into the shape-shifting wisdom of dream… It is within dreamlife we first learn to read rain as grief…” (Hirschfield 18). In WIDE, I use sounds and sensations of being underwater as a metaphor for grief. The first two times the audience sees my metaphor for grief, they see the images without narrative context. The first time, I sink slowly into the audience seats in the theatre and am submerged under water, my limbs appearing one at a time above the seats. The second time, the image also appears in movement. Only after the second movement sequence occurs is narrative meaning ascribed: Lights to midnight blue, bubbles fade in. Miriam crosses to the centre of the circle, lies on her back, breathes deeply. Her body moved by eddies and waves, eventually she rises and sways. Acute grief has a numbing effect. It feels like being underwater. It insulates me from sensations on the inside and on the outside. I sink, I float. I roll, I rise, I fall. (shift) This sequence mirrors a common three-part structure of Romantic poetry which allows an object to be seen from a new perspective by articulating its inner life. Step One: Show outside of object, Step Two: See inside, Step Three: Show outside again, newly contextualized – perhaps even transformed – by access to new information. The above excerpt completes steps one and two and later in the performance, Step Three is completed when a reprise of the movement section occurs, this time with the following narrative context preceding: Now I’m going to do a performance of Miriam at theatre school, on the inside. This three-part structure is reminiscent of a foundational teaching of Kristin Linklater, a Scottish voice teacher whose technique for freeing the natural voice is internationally taught. 34 David Smukler, a student of Linklater’s who I worked with at Canada’s National Voice Intensive (now the Moving Voice Institute), teaches it this way: Breath drops in cool, warms up inside, and comes up warm. In this example, breath is the object that we experience outside our body that, when inhaled, transforms inside our belly, and returns on an exhale to a state outside of our body, forever transformed by the experience of being inside of us. To enact this process of taking in breath, allowing it to transform, and come up changed during my performance, I must draw on the tool of Emotion: the ability to be actively self-aware. In Scene 2, I take the audience through an exercise intended to build presence and availability for emotion: (Once we’re all in a circle; genuine) Thank you for being with me. I know there are lots of other places you could be on a [Saturday afternoon]. I appreciate you being here. (beat) I’d like to do an exercise together to start. It’s a breathing technique that is sometimes called “Box Breath”. You may know it. I’ll describe how it goes and then we’ll try it all together. First, we let all the air fall out and when we inhale, we do that for four beats, then pause for four beats, exhale four beats, pause four beats. This is an exercise that helps me listen. I like to do this with both feet on the ground and my hands resting somewhere comfortable. You may find a different position more comfortable and you may change position during the exercise. If you get lightheaded you can always breathe normally. Miriam guides. Throughout the performance, I oscillate between introducing images without context and providing context for images that are introduced. Hirschfield discusses a poem by Bertolt Brecht called The Fishing Tackle that examines image removed from context. Brecht describes a room in which, “Hangs a short bamboo stick bound with cord/ With an iron hook designed/ To snag fishing nets from the water” (21). Brecht traces the origins and lineage of the stick, exploring “what happens to a thing (or a person) forcibly removed from its living context” (22). The idea of removal from context is embedded within the questions posed in WIDE: What happens to us when we die? What happens between us while we’re alive? One interesting interpretation of image that occurred during the performance of WIDE was the audience member who did live, digital drawings of the performance as she watched it. Bella Jiang is a graduate of UBCO’s BFA in Visual Arts degree. She came to see WIDE on Saturday, February 3rd at 2:00pm. We had not planned to collaborate, she simply asked my Stage Manager, Jenn, whether she could draw me during the performance. Jenn relayed the question to me—I was surprised but open to the idea. “As long as she can listen and 35 participate as well as draw,” I allowed. It was fascinating to see the moments that Bella was inspired by. She created four drawings: two of me using the fabric to make images, one of me holding the suitcase, and one of me during the section where I demonstrate active ‘noticing’. Seeing myself in these moments, translated to digital drawings, gave me a new perspective on the images in WIDE. Images 10, 11: Drawings (Bella Jiang, February 3, 2024) Images 12, 13: Drawings (Bella Jiang, February 3, 2024) 36 I’m not surprised that three of the four drawings featured the only two objects present in the show. The objects, the suitcase and the fabric, contained layers of meaning and I treated them with a high level of care. The fourth image of me covering one eye with my palm is a moment where I am interacting only with my body and my imagination. I wonder if the level of presence I had with myself in that moment, as I opened myself to being witnessed with my eyes closed, allowed Bella to see the potential for an image that could not only live in my body, on stage, but also resonate on the page. 37 THREE: PARTICIPATION I’d like to invite a volunteer to do a performance of someone who is inside this room or outside it. You could perform yourself, me, a neighbour, a friend. People have performed their sibling, their pet, themselves… Who is feeling brave? Let’s warm up by all doing a performance of ourselves at the same time. I’ll count down and then we’ll all perform ourselves. When we’re done, we’ll say “Theeeeeeee end”, bow, and applaud. Three, two, one, go. (Miriam witnesses performances for a few beats; gesture, bow, applause) Wonderful! Beautiful performances. It’s as simple as that. Anyone willing to volunteer? (volunteer) Great! The only rule is: no words. Participation was the one element of this show that was relatively new to my practice. Though I have performed pieces of writing that encourage audience members to exchange dialogue with me, I have not crossed the barrier into improvised participatory practices that fundamentally change the content and shape of a show. I have facilitated acting exercises in many different contexts, with adults of all ages and the participatory elements of this show drew on my facilitation skills. The purpose of including participatory exercises in the show was to explore embodiment, relationship, and subtext. I was interested in generating a spirit of exploration with the audience as a group, rather than creating a static, predictable context where I performed and the audience watched. In the performance style of ‘psychological realism’, actors live in a constructed world and act in a way that allows us to believe that they truly are those characters. When these characters experience trauma, audiences are free to simply witness and, often, project their own fears and memories onto the experience of the characters, frequently resulting in catharsis—think of fighting back tears in a darkened auditorium while string music swells. I made an intentional decision to avoid extended moments that encouraged the audience to project their own stories onto mine. Instead of having a private experience that remained unshared, I invited audience members to offer their images, associations, and responses to the entire group through guided exercises. The acting technique I drew from is a well-known device popularized by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930’s and described by Iring Fetscher in an essay appearing in the 1980 collection Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice: The theory of the V-effect, the estrangement effect, originated very early in Brecht’s work from the recognition of the necessity for restructuring the theater: the actor was to stand “beside the character portrayed”; identification and empathy were to be hindered in order to make the audience free to criticize the actions and positions that 38 were shown. For Brecht it would be ideal… if the distance between audience and actors, audience and stage, would disappear altogether (13). In her 2012 book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Claire Bishop provides a succinct overview of historical and political context for participatory art practices in Eastern Europe, South America, and to a lesser degree, North America, from 1910 to present, orienting the reader to contexts that specific artworks have responded to. The placement of WIDE within a specific cultural context is unclear and raises the question: What does WIDE respond to? In his 1948 essay “A Short Organum for the Theatre”, regarded as one of his most important theoretical works, Brecht writes, “Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring classes. Thus for art to be “unpolitical” means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling group’” (196). While WIDE is not intentionally unpolitical, it does not explicitly align itself with a certain political viewpoint or issue. One aim of the project was to create a common communication system for the duration of the performance. Language was introduced and unpacked. Words were repeated, for example, ‘performance’, ‘wide’, ‘inside’, and ‘outside.’ Repeated words were placed in new contexts, allowing us to ‘see’ them more clearly. The language of image was employed to speak across languages and cultural barriers, much like the Image Theatre of Augusto Boal. Adrian Jackson, a long-time student of Boal, wrote the introduction for the original 1992 publication of Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors, and in it describes Image Theatre: At its simplest, the idea underlying this [Image Theatre] is that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’; that our over-reliance on words can confuse or obfuscate central issues, rather than clarifying them; that images can be closer to our true feelings, even our subconscious feelings, than words, since the process of ‘thinking with our hands’ can short-circuit the censorship of the brain, the ‘cops in the head’ placed there by society or personal experience. The polysemy of images is a vital factor in this work; a group of individuals will perceive a whole range of different, but often intriguingly related, meanings within a single image, often seeing things which the sculptors had no idea were there. Images work across language and cultural barriers and, as Boal shows, frequently reveal unexpected universalities (xx). It remains unclear whether a common communication system was developed. However, anecdotal examples from various performances can shed light on communication that went beyond words. The “Sound and Gesture” exercise, described in the upcoming “Body” section, reliably connected audience members beyond language. 39 The building of a common communication system across cultural barriers may, in fact, be a political gesture. Indeed, one could argue that physical, embodied communication on any scale is a political act. Building shared vocabulary, communicating through images, and igniting active listening could be seen as tools of revolution. The subjects of performance, body, and grief are universal, in the sense that everyone performs, everyone has a body, and everyone grieves. Depending on an individual’s religion or spirituality, the thesis question itself may be more politically charged: How far does the body go? Intentionally open-ended, this question invites more questions, which lead to dialogue. In this final container, I will move through the subsections of Body, Space, and Image to further explore the element of participation in WIDE and reflect on the challenges I faced and what I would do differently in the future. 40 3.1 PARTICIPATION: BODY The idea of ‘performing’ is set up and deconstructed throughout the piece. The poetry and storytelling function as anchors to tether the audience to ‘self-awareness’ versus ‘self-consciousness’. Audience members are placed in a circle, under stage lights, giving them visual access to each other. The audience is guided through contemplative exercises that centre the experience of their inner world. Sometimes, the audience is invited to witness me perform in relative darkness. In these moments, the focus is taken away from seeing and being seen and placed on feeling: feeling their inner world, empathizing with my inner world. Audience members practiced tangible, repeatable skills: listening, noticing, and performing. These apparently simple tasks are layered each time they are repeated. Listening is framed as an embodied, somatic exercise; listening not just with the ears but with all the senses. Noticing is framed as a spontaneous, imaginative act that goes beyond looking at or watching someone. Together, we notice images, shapes, qualities, relationships and build upon them. Before the “Fabric Exercise”, I model a series of ‘noticings’ for the audience: Miriam models being available to the moment, demonstrating gestures as she speaks them. When I listen to my body, I notice sensations, memories, images. Then I allow them to float away or I hold on to the thread and unravel the next moment. I notice that my palms are sweaty, so I turn my hand over, palm face up. I notice this gesture makes me feel as though I am begging, so I raise my open palm and cover my right eye. I notice the warmth and pressure of my hand on my face feels comforting, so I close my eyes. With my eyes closed I can hear differently. I notice the buzz from the speaker. It feels like a tight spiral. I make the movement of a tight spiral, I wonder whether the movement comes from the neck or the head, or maybe the shoulders. I notice I stopped breathing while I was wondering. I inhale, I exhale. The whoosh of the air moving sounds like a march: irregular footsteps. A tired solider at the end of the war. I wonder if I’ve ever been so tired. I open my eyes and notice… [series of real “noticings” related to space and audience members, for example: I notice that the reflection of the lights on the stage look like street lamps reflected by water, it reminds me of Paris: walking by the Seine at night with a lover. I notice a beautiful, flowing, polka-dot skirt covering the chair completely, almost as though Lindsay is floating in the air above the stage]. (beat) Let’s try noticing images together. 41 Including participatory sections heightened the quality of surprise inherent to live performance. Every performance was different. Who was there and what they did literally changed the length, shape, and content of each show. Generally, the show ran between 80-85 minutes. The consistency surprised me, although as I reflect, this consistency is intimately connected to the way participation occurred—or didn’t. Another thing that was consistent throughout the five performances was the audience’s hesitancy to participate. In stark contrast to the development sessions, audience members were generally less willing to volunteer. I think there are a few reasons for this discrepancy. The people who attended development sessions were explicitly invited to participate and given context about the project in advance. Colleagues were asked to give their feedback and students, in some cases, were attending as part of a class. Between colleagues there is generally a desire to collaborate. In a class, grades are awarded, which creates an inherent incentive and power dynamic. The expectations of attending a workshop and attending a performance are different. ‘Development session’ or ‘workshop’ sounds inherently participatory, whereas ‘performance’ does not. The third development session took place on November 2, 2023 with fourteen participants in attendance (ten in person, four on Zoom). Here’s an excerpt from my thesis journal document reflecting on that session: HOW TO FAIL (To Become a Famous Actor) An Interactive Workshop Facilitated by Miriam Cummings MFA Candidate, UBCO This time I tried little ‘programs’ on each seat. I also invited everyone to select a pen or pencil as they entered the space. The setup of ‘notetaking’ is interesting. I wonder about including a prompt specifically to not take notes, or to take notice with the body, and leave the paper for freewriting at the end. If I go further with the ‘workshop theme’ I could give everyone a reading along with their ticket admission and a reflection exercise afterward. I’ve been wondering about requiring people to wear sock feet or indoor shoes, for example. It was important to me not to ask the audience to do anything I wasn’t willing to do during WIDE and to share more personal information than I asked them to share. To me, this felt 42 like a gesture of goodwill that would build trust. One tactic that might have encouraged enthusiastic participation would be to debrief the exercises during the performance. Digging into what happened during each exercise, and perhaps even doing the exercises more than once based on what happened, would have changed the length of the show. As it played in this first performance iteration, I wonder if the exercises had a sense of being hollow gestures rather than rich opportunities for embodied learning. The second to last exercise in the performance, “Sound and Gesture”, is a potential opportunity for debrief and discussion during the performance. I noticed during this exercise that some participants shared gestures that were abstract and, others, gestures that were literal. No matter what they do, they reveal something. I introduce the “Sound and Gesture” exercise as a way of telling each other – without any words – how we’re doing. Included in the instructions is an option to ‘pass’: If it comes to you and you don’t want to make a sound and gesture, you simply shake your head “no” and we’ll pass to the next person. (beat) Now, see if you can, as my teacher Gerry would say, let go of all your good ideas and when it comes to you, see if you can go inside, feel something, and share it with a sound and gesture. If participants choose the option to ‘pass’—which a few people do each performance—they reveal something. The way they pass reveals something. It was lovely to see people choose to pass because they are choosing an available option with self-awareness, which is participation. As Boal says, “In order to say nothing, the spect-actor must decide to say nothing – which is already acting” (244). Some people choose to perform a literal, representational gesture, for example, scratching of beard, exaggerated yawn, miming looking at a watch, rubbing a grumbling belly... This performance of self, intended to communicate a specific, socially acceptable response, reveals something. Abstract gestures that allow us to read anything we want from them reveal in a different way. Literal gestures reveal how a participant’s mind works and perhaps their desire to do the exercise ‘correctly’, associating being understood with being correct. Abstract gestures tended to share something about the inner emotional experience of the participant. All responses require vulnerability because all require having a moment ‘in the spotlight’ with all eyes on them; all require being seen. 43 This exercise produced interesting responses each night. In retrospect, it could have been useful to discuss my observations with the audience. My wariness about turning self-awareness into self-consciousness by drawing the group’s attention to individual participants and their behaviour prevented me from doing this. If I were to perform the show again, I would integrate offers for observations by asking, “Can I make an observation about your performance?” This way, the audience member has agency to decide whether they receive feedback in front of the whole audience, while being held accountable to make their decision in public. If I were to move forward with this piece, I would experiment with debriefing exercises in the moment and get feedback from participants about whether this made them more or less self-conscious, more or less willing to participate. 44 3.2 PARTICIPATION: SPACE The physical space has a profound impact on live performance. The first entry in my thesis journal, on October 4, 2023, reads as follows: The feeling of the circle prominent. Doesn’t let me off the hook. Keeps me in relationship with everyone all the time and I feel the spaces I’m ignoring or avoiding. Takes a huge amount of energy to play to everyone in the circle as consistently and equally as possible. This is a useful ‘action’ for me and requires a lot of technique. The format of the show feels very “me” in the sense of the ease or flow between versions of myself. Success would be very little difference between regular Miriam and performing Miriam… there is a casualness and heightened energy to both. The orientation engaged us in ‘entreveillance’, a term which artist Darren O’Donnell defines in Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance and Utopia (2006), as “…observation from between or within, the scrutiny of one another within a dynamic of relatively evenly distributed power, where the observed can walk away from the camera at any point and the interest is in observing the quotidian rather than anything spectacular” (61). In his book, O’Donnell introduces the idea of art as tiny acupuncture needles that ease tension which is connected to all parts of the (cultural) body. O’Donnell uses examples from his own performance works and development processes to test his idea. He describes how his 2004 solo performance, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, began each night: Before the show, I hover in the lobby and try to introduce myself to every single audience member. I start the conversation by explaining that I am the writer and performer of the show and asking what has brought them to the theatre… I was surprised to discover that the audience appreciates the contact—some seem honoured by it—and that an easy rapport is quickly established… It’s important to note that, while mingling in the lobby, I am not ‘in character’; there is nothing performative about what I’m doing, and when I’m asked if the conversations are a ‘part of the show,’ I say no, I just want to meet the people in the audience, which is true and not true. But the need to divide the experience into ‘part of the show’/ ‘not part of the show’ reveals the desire to keep art locked securely in a category that is ‘not life’ (55). The question of performative/not-performative is interesting. O’Donnell does not necessarily address the question of whether the greeting of the audience was a performance. My view is that his greeting of the audience is absolutely a performance. Everything is a performance, always. Beneath “I want to meet people in the audience” is subtext that reads: “I don’t really want to meet people in the audience,” The subtext betrays the performativity of the gesture. In WIDE, the audience experience was considered from the moment they engaged with the 45 ticketing platform, purchased a ticket, arrived on campus, parked, navigated toward the theatre, and finally, opened the theatre doors. Audience members were greeted by volunteers at the door, invited to hang their coats on a rack at the back of the space, and find a seat on the stage. Some people asked whether they could sit in the audience seating instead of onstage. Some people informed volunteers that that’s where they’d be sitting. They were firmly invited to sit on stage and informed that the audience seating was not available (it was entirely open and empty). The space itself (university theatre) was ideal in terms of audience experience – during both ‘show’ and ‘not show’. Audience members traveled down the centre aisle of the theatre, descending on a slight angle toward the foot of the stage. There are two small steps up to the lip of the stage, which audience members mounted, and then… stepped onto the stage itself. This crossing of the threshold was an intentional, performative moment of liminality. The audience became the actors in that moment, unbeknownst to them. In What A Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research, Ben Spatz discussing the emptying of performance spaces: “…the empty spaces of theatre, dance, yoga, and martial arts studios across the globe are not neutral with respect to sociopolitical concerns, nor are they generally “empty.” Rather, these spaces have been actively emptied. The numerous and varied items – books, furniture, computers, etc. – that fill so many of our rooms today have been conscientiously removed. Such intentionally “emptied spaces” are zones in which technology has been cleared away, in order to bring forth and make space for embodied technique” (Spatz 14). I wanted to use the existing architecture of the theatre space without adding unnecessary stage dressing. The ‘drama’ of the space already existed. To animate it, the audience simply needed to enter: The setting is a 200-seat proscenium theatre. The audience enters through an exterior door located at the back of the house, audience left. Audience members walk down the centre aisle and up two steps onto a large, raised stage. Chairs are set up on stage in a semi-circle, facing the house. The upstage centre chair has a small suitcase on it. Preshow vibes play and fade into… Miriam enters the theatre and notices the audience who has gathered on stage. She appreciates them and seeks a good seat to watch the show. She tries out two different seats and in the third, bubbles fade in. She melts into the sea, 46 drawing a big breath. Miriam crawls on the ground to a new spot and her finger, then arm, floats upward and breaks the surface. Her limbs play in the water above the seats, floating, playing a rigid sea creature… she re-materializes into an audience seat, gasps for air, and changes places again, sitting in the front row. House lights stay up throughout. Miriam mirrors one audience member at a time until… I came to think of this entire opening sequence as a series of exercises exploring space itself. In her book, Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice, Overlie describes various exercises for building a relationship with a performance space and increasing spatial awareness. Overlie asks, “Cleared of the clutter of plays and choreographies, what remains onstage? What lies beneath inventions” (5)? In the time between my first entrance at the beginning of the show and when I cross the threshold onto the stage with the audience, I am expanding and compressing the space between myself and the audience. I’m testing what ‘reads’ at different distances, as I search for the ‘best’ seat from which to view the performance. I am transforming the space into an ocean as my body sinks below the water and rises above it. I am laying the foundation for a philosophical interpretation of distance: the distance between before my dad’s death and after. And the space that ‘after’ takes up—it goes on and on. The chairs were the only ‘set pieces’ on stage. Their placement was important. At the beginning of the show, they were set in a sort of ‘V’ shape or semi-circle. Once I crossed the threshold on to the stage, I directed the audience to make a new arrangement of the set pieces: This is nice. (bringing her chair down stage centre) Now, we’re going to make a circle with our chairs. It’s going to help with the reciprocity: the listening and responding. We’ll bring our chairs into a circle and place them on this red tape on the ground. It’s called spike tape. Actors use it to place set pieces on stage. Great, one spike mark for each chair leg. Actors, please set up for scene two! Does anyone need a hand? (helping as needed; noticing particularly prepared audience member) You’re hired! Not every performance sold out. Sometimes there were empty chairs. On the closing performance, Sunday, February 4 at 2:00pm, when invited to move their chairs, the 47 audience moved to the downstage chairs. For the whole performance, no one was seated upstage, apart from the suitcase and sometimes me. In the moment, I had an impulse to ask everyone to disperse, to create a feeling of a circle. My next impulse was to let it happen, to follow the interpretation and see what happened. In the final moment of that performance, when the audience is invited to stand if they are able and make eye contact with each other, I had an impulse to close the circle. I invited the audience to make a small circle within the circle of chairs. It was powerful to close the remaining distance between us. I might choose to do that again, intentionally, in the future. Each time there are empty chairs during a performance, the space they create is felt. On Saturday evening (February 3rd) I named that space, encouraging the audience to imagine that the empty chairs are holding a place for those who can’t be here with us. Reframing the emptiness as openings for those who cannot be with us was powerful. It underscored my effort to connect with my dad beyond his lifetime. It helped to set up this incantation during the last scene of the play: Images come and go however they want. My dad comes and goes. I conjure him into the present when I am wide enough to hear beyond words. If he’s here in the present with me, has his body stopped? Did his body stop when his breathing stopped? Or is he here? As alive today as he was fifteen years ago? (beat) For me, he’s here (gestures to her chest), here (gestures to the circle), here (gestures beyond the horizon)… 48 3.3 PARTICIPATION: IMAGE One question that informed the making of WIDE is: How can I perform well in a way that is sustainable? In the past, I have intentionally severed the connection between my body and mind to perform better, for example, pushing through physical illness or emotional distress. I can trace the lineage of learning to value that behaviour in relationship to performance. When my dad died suddenly during my undergraduate degree in Acting, grief disrupted my somatic connection. I was performing well and receiving good grades, so it was easy for me to overlook the importance of this connection. WIDE explores the performances we put on in daily life. In the show, I use binaries such as narrow/wide and inside/outside to explore the difference between what we say and how we feel. The space, or distance, between what we feel and what we express is a central theme of the show. One way I explore performance in everyday life is through abrupt shifts between styles of performance, for example, between poetry and participation: I wish, to be wide. When I am wide I am generous, when I am wide I am multifaceted, when I am wide I see in all directions. When I am wide I have no doubt that I will be drawn to give and give again and, in the giving, receive. All that I give will become wide if I can hold on less tightly. Abrupt shift; bright Workshop lights. Miriam speaks without inviting room for reply. So, how is everyone doing? (beat; “Good”, “Okay”) There usually isn’t time to say much more than that, is there? I find it takes time for me to articulate what I feel. The first step is to actually feel it. I invite you to feel how you’re feeling. The capacity to not only feel what we are feeling, but to articulate it, is a skill. The audience and I practice this skill together by engaging in exercises that make us aware of our somatic experience, noticing images and making associations between them, and, finally, expressing a feeling through gesture and sound to the group. “Sound and Gesture” is an exercise that deconstructs the earlier “How ya doin’?” exercise, which introduced the vocabulary of ‘text’ and ‘subtext’. The exercise demonstrates that actors on stage, like people in daily life, convey meaning through gesture, body language, and tone that goes beyond words. 49 The “How ya doin’?” exercise is a hybrid applied theatre-acting exercise. Applied theatre refers to theatre whose primary goal is social change. Augusto Boal, the creator of a series of practices called ‘The Theatre of the Oppressed’, a prolific theatre director, activist and theorist, explored “the possibilities of a workable Marxist theatre aesthetic in the Brechtian tradition” (Campbell 6). Ali Campbell’s The Theatre of the Oppressed in Practice Today: An Introduction to the Work and Principles of Augusto Boal reflects on the system that Boal created over his lifetime and provides useful context for the hundreds of exercises Boal created and taught until his death in 2009. “The overarching aim [of Augusto’s work] – to rehearse the revolution through a theatre that enacted solidarity – was clearly an extension of Brecht’s vision of a theatre that would provoke action” (Campbell 11). One structure that is particularly applicable to the “How ya doin’?” exercise is Boal’s Forum Theatre, the detailed process that encourages audience members to be spect-actors rather than spectators, meaning that they are invited to actively participate throughout the performance. Three of the steps toward making Forum Theatre, outlined by Campbell, that apply most directly to the participatory exercises in WIDE: • We work out sequences of games and exercises that take us through a de-mechanization: breaking old habits of performance and perception… We improvise. We laugh. We build up the capacity for instant invention in one another. • We offer up personal stories that bring detail to the fleshing out of those examples, maximizing their potential for identification from others. • The spectactors are witnessed in their Interventions and more: they see themselves in the act of Intervention… (Campbell 16). In WIDE, the first three participatory exercises give the audience an awareness of their behaviours, including their performances of self, in fun and playful ways. In the fourth exercise, we explore ‘subtext’ together—the meanings communicated beyond words. The way this exercise is introduced encourages the audience to personally relate to the structure of this exercise, to reflect on the way they ‘check in’ with themselves and others throughout their day. To unpack the deceptively simple question: How ya doin’? The aim is that this personal relationship to the subject material and discussion will encourage audience members to see themselves not just as witnesses on stage but as actors; not spectators but spect-actors. In introducing Boal’s work, Jackson cautions that “Theatre of the Oppressed is 50 never didactic to its audience, it involves a process of learning together rather than one-way teaching; it assumes that there is as much likelihood of the audience knowing the answers as the performers” (xxi). WIDE did not attempt to teach audiences information, rather to uncover and reframe information that they already have. Before we do the exercise, I frame it as an exploration of subtext, a concept that human beings are inherently aware of, but perhaps do not use the word ‘subtext’ to describe the knowledge that someone, or themselves, is saying something other than what they feel: Are we on the same page about what subtext is? Can someone explain? (someone explains) Well said. Subtext is everything happening underneath the words being spoken. Could I have a volunteer to try this scene with me? We’ll use the lines from the scene we co-created together and play a “how ya doin’” scene. And we’ll get some context: who we are, where we are, what just happened… Could I have a volunteer to play with me? (volunteer) Thank you! Another theatre practice that shares an aesthetic with WIDE is Playback Theatre. In their 2021 book, Personal Stories in Public Spaces: Essays on Playback Theatre By Its Founders, Jonathan Fox and Jo Salas describe and contextualize their work, beginning in the early 1960s. In Playback Theatre, the stories of willing audience members are centred and a trained team listens to the story and then performs it. Fox and Salas write that the performing team “will listen to your story and, to the best of our ability, hear and embody its important meanings. It sounds simple. But it is not. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote, ‘Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.’ The ‘object’ in this case is the teller’s story” (Fox and Salas 22). Throughout the making of WIDE and the performances, I prepared myself to listen to the audience and respond in the most authentic ways I could and to model that listening. At the end of the performance, we return to the poem that opened it. “Childhood Walls” is initially delivered to the audience after they have been guided through a breathing technique called Box Breath and been invited to listen with their eyes closed or resting toward the ground in front of them. At the end of the show, the poem is repeated in much the same way, but audience members have their eyes open and are invited to make eye contact as I move around the circle. The invited eye contact is a technical skill related to the listening 51 practice we are cultivating throughout our time together. A final stanza is added, completing the poem, as I complete my final turn around the circle. Miriam gently replaces fabric in suitcase and closes it. She rises, picking up the suitcase with her, and holds it with both hands, offering it to each audience member. Each audience member gets their own “lines” delivered directly to them. You leave your house alone, walk west, and realize childhood ends when a parent dies: instead of solid matter to push against there is only falling into the well of adulthood, sudden as falling asleep on the chest that brought you into the world and questions simple as mountains: What is childhood but a set of walls raised impossibly around us; a chest to pound upon with closed fists? (rage against, love, prove wrong) Without walls, there is only space vast as a whole life: open space can be filled with anything. You inhale and descend into your life, older now; far, far younger than you will ever be. It was important to me to deliver the poem directly to everyone in the audience, one at a time, instead of performing it spoken word style, where I address everyone in the audience at the same time. It follows with the instructional georgic form of the poem to deliver the lines directly to individuals. The poem is a gentle call to action for the listener to consider their own relationship to grief, childhood, parents, forgiveness, and the space these elements take up in their lives. The show does not invite the catharsis that comes with the style of psychological realism, which allows the audience to witness characters experience traumatic situations and project their own fears and experiences onto them. The release of emotion in a darkened room 52 surrounded by people experiencing their personal version of the same event being played is an important tradition that was intentionally avoided in this piece. The structure of the script and construction of the performance space demanded both engagement and self-awareness from the audience throughout the performance. I invite the audience to build capacity: with themselves, each other, and me. Capacity to maintain eye contact. Capacity to listen without turning away. Capacity to breathe through emotion. Instead of releasing the pressure valve and inviting catharsis, WIDE stayed contained by the structure of poetry, facilitation, and storytelling in a way that defies compartmentalization and, at the same time, is contained. Image 14: Theeeeeee (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) 53 Image 15: eeeeeee (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) Image 16: End (Photograph by Shauna Oddleifson, February 2, 2024) 54 CONCLUSION Where does the body end? A poetic question, unsurprisingly, elicits poetic answers. This question and others are asked throughout this paper: How far can I send my voice? When do my words become ‘not mine’? What moves people to participate? I don’t have all the answers. Based on my experience creating and performing WIDE, I suspect that we reach far, far beyond our bodies in our daily lives, in live performance, and beyond our lifetime. If you were to ask me now, “Where does the body end?” I would say, “It doesn’t.” I feel more connected to my dad than I have in a long, long time. Making WIDE has transformed the wall between my personal and work life into a transparent, gauze-like piece of fabric: a permeable membrane that can become anything I can imagine. It has been incredibly useful to reframe ‘performance’ during this process. Instead of maintaining a rigid boundary between performance (on stage) and living (offstage), I now understand performance as a necessary process that I move in and out of intuitively throughout my day, whether I’m on stage or not. The attentive energy I use on stage allows me to notice shapes, textures, and ideas that I’m not always open to. I can bring this heightened state of presence into my daily life. When I am present enough in my life, I can go beyond my body: communicate beyond language, send energy past the barrier of my skin and into the world. If I can go beyond my body, can my dad? I now understand communication as an act of transformation. I transform the air outside my body into vibration and shape it into words. I transform an inner felt sensation into an outer shape—a sudden memory of my dad at the dining room table gathers my fingers into a fist, visible to those who can only see my outside. I transform grief into a thesis performance. If I can transform my body, I think my dad can too. WIDE allowed me to deeply explore three distinct elements of my practice: Storytelling, Poetry, and Participation. In this process, I met my own biases and felt the weight of grief. I honoured my intention to make a thesis that responded to my current experience. By acknowledging the grief that emerged during my Master’s degree, I transformed it. I will write, speak, and teach differently going forward, with more skills and tools than I had before. I’m proud of myself. The person who I most want to see my work is my dad. Thanks to WIDE, I think he has seen it. 55 WORKS CITED Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and Politics of Spectatorship. Verso, 2012. Boal, Augusto. “Translator’s Introduction.” Games for Actors and Non-Actors, translated by Adrian Jackson, Routledge, 1992, pp. xx, xxi, 244. Brecht, Bertolt. “A Short Organum for the Theatre.” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited and translated by John Willett, Eyre Methuen, 1964, p. 196. Campbell, Ali. The Theatre of the Oppressed in Practice Today: An Introduction to the Work and Principles of Augusto Boal. Methuen Drama, 2019, pp. 6, 11, 16. Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play. Vintage Books, 2007, pp. 1, 12, 58. Fetscher, Iring. “Bertolt Brecht and Politics.” Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice, edited and translated by Betty Nance Weber and Hubert Heinen, The University of Georgia Press, 1990, p. 13. Fox, Jonathan and Jo Salas. 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Wiese Productions, 1996. 61 APPENDICES Appendix A Appendix A: Poster by Shauna Oddleifson 62 Appendix B 63 Appendix B: Program by Miriam Cummings 64 Appendix C WIDE Performance Draft | February 10, 2024 WIDE premiered at the University Theatre (ADM 026) at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, February 1-4, 2024. WIDE is Miriam’s MFA thesis, performed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. Scene 1 The setting is a 200-seat proscenium theatre. The audience enters through an exterior door located at the back of the house, audience left. Audience members walk down the centre aisle and up two steps onto a large, raised stage. Chairs are set up on stage in a semi-circle, facing the house. The upstage centre chair has a small suitcase on it. Preshow vibes play and fade into… Recording: Welcome to the University of British Columbia Okanagan. The University is located on the unceded, ancestral land of the Syilx Okanagan people. One Syilx teaching is reciprocity: a practice of offering and receiving. We will practice reciprocity together by listening and responding. Thank you for being here. Please take a moment and silence your cell phone. Remember that vibration is sound. Let’s create an environment that allows us to listen well. Thank you and enjoy the performance. Miriam enters the theatre and notices the audience who has gathered on stage. She appreciates them and seeks a good seat to watch the show. She tries out two different seats and in the third, bubbles fade in. She melts into the sea, drawing a big breath. Miriam crawls on the ground to a new spot and her finger, then arm, floats upward and breaks the surface. Her limbs play in the water above the seats, floating, playing a rigid sea creature… she re-materializes into an audience seat, gasps for air, and changes places again, sitting in the front row. House lights stay up throughout. Miriam mirrors one audience member at a time until… Miriam: (conversational, upbeat) Now, I’m going to perform a monologue for you. It’s by prolific American 20th century playwright, Eugene O’Neill: the only playwright to receive four Pulitzer prizes. It’s a monologue from the play Beyond the Horizon, set at the turn of the century. In it, Robert, a twenty-three-year-old farmer, stands on the porch of the farmhouse he grew up in and has never left. (gesturing over the theatre seats and toward upstage) Neatly ploughed fields of wheat stretch as far as the eye can see and beyond them, 65 mountains. The monologue is from Act One, Scene One. Robert speaks to Ruth, whose heart he is about to break. (Stepping onto a raised block set in the audience seats) So I used to stare out over the fields to the hills, out there—and somehow after a time I'd forget any pain I was in, and start dreaming. I knew the sea was over beyond those hills,—the folks had told me—and I used to wonder what the sea was like, and try to form a picture of it in my mind. There was all the mystery in the world to me then about that—far-off sea—and there still is! It called to me then just as it does now. And other times my eyes would follow this road, winding off into the distance, toward the hills, as if it, too, was searching for the sea. And I'd promise myself that when I grew up and was strong, I'd follow that road, and it and I would find the sea together. (Bowing, encouraging applause) Thank you. (gesturing to the booth behind her) Thank you, Jenn! (walking down the aisle toward to stage) Now, I’m going to cross the threshold between performer and audience. (deep breath as feet touch the stage) Now we’re going to cross the threshold. (turning off the house lights) This is nice. (bringing her chair DSC) Now, we’re going to make a circle with our chairs. It’s going to help with the reciprocity: the listening and responding. We’ll bring our chairs into a circle and place them on this red tape on the ground. It’s called spike tape. Actors use it to place set pieces on stage. Great, one spike mark for each chair leg. Actors, please set up for scene two! Does anyone need a hand? (helping as needed; noticing particularly prepared audience member) You’re hired! Scene 2 (Once we’re all in a circle; genuine) Thank you for being with me. I know there are lots of other places you could be on a [Saturday afternoon]. I appreciate you being here. (beat) I’d like to do an exercise together to start. It’s a breathing technique that is sometimes called “Box Breath”. You may know it. I’ll describe how it goes and then we’ll try it all together. First, we let all the air fall out and when we inhale, we do that for four beats, then pause for four beats, exhale four beats, pause four beats. This is an exercise that helps me listen. I like to do this with both feet on the ground and my hands resting somewhere comfortable. You may find a different position more comfortable and you may change position during the exercise. If you get lightheaded you can always breathe normally. Miriam guides. Let that go and allow the breath to move however it wants. Notice a little space between your inhale and your exhale. You can leave your eyes closed if they’re closed, or use soft 66 focus, which means allowing the eyes to rest toward the ground, open, without focusing on one specific thing. Notice the sensation of your body contacting the chair, the floor. Notice how the ground supports your weight completely. Notice the sensation of the air contacting your skin, the lights on your face. Can you smell anything? Maybe even taste something? What sounds can you hear? (pause) Sounds inside the room. Any sounds outside the room? The sound of my voice. I invite you to continue to listen with your eyes closed or use soft focus, knowing that nothing will enter the bubble of space you’ve created around yourself. Miriam sneaks quietly around the circle, whispering a secret to the audience. Each audience member gets their own “lines” delivered directly to them. You leave your house alone, walk west, and realize childhood ends when a parent dies: instead of solid matter to push against there is only falling into the well of adulthood, sudden as falling asleep on the chest that brought you into the world and questions simple as mountains: What is childhood but a set of walls raised impossibly around us; a chest to pound upon with closed fists? (rage against, love, prove wrong) Without walls, there is only space vast as a whole life: open space can be filled with anything. Inhale, (beat) exhale and let that go. Give yourself gentle movement that feels good. Maybe switching positions, maybe a neck roll. Maybe noticing how that changes your breathing; a yawn… (Miriam moves her DSC chair into the centre of circle and sits facing upstage) When I was eleven or twelve my dad tried to teach me how to meditate in the dining room. I didn’t get it. It felt like doing nothing, which felt stupid. Instead of meditating, I thought about what we were going to have for dinner that night, what I would do later that day, what I should wear to my best friend’s bowling birthday party, who I had a crush on. 67 Real things. I didn’t notice the sensation of the wooden chair against my thighs, holding my weight. I didn’t notice my hair contacting the back of my neck. I didn’t notice the movement of my breath. The smell of cigarettes smoked indoors. The sound of birds outside, the hum of the air conditioner. I didn’t really hear his voice. (shift) Now I’m going to do a performance for you. Scene 3 Miriam crosses, sets suitcase on the ground, pedestrian. She sits on the upstage chair. This is a performance of me in class while I was studying to be an actor. (Miriam sits at attention, regards C chair as though it is a classmate performing; raises hand, isn’t chosen; listens, nods) Theeeeeeeeee (stretching arms wide apart) end. (clapping them together in front of the body; bow, applause) Now I’m going to do a performance of one of my professors watching me improvise in theatre school. (Disinterested, slouched, low energy) Theeeeeee end. (gesture, bow, applause) Let’s bring it into the room. (upbeat, moving centre chair back to DSC circle spot) I’m going to do a performance of my neighbour. (selects audience member and sits beside them) May I do a performance of you? What’s your name? Great, thank you. This is my, [name of volunteer]. (Miriam mirrors her neighbour) Theeeeeee end. (gesture, bow, applause; gestures to audience member who gets applause also) Now I’d like to invite a volunteer to do a performance of someone who is inside this room or outside it. You could perform yourself, me, a neighbour, a friend. People have performed their sibling, their pet, themselves… Who is feeling brave? Let’s warm up by all doing a performance of ourselves at the same time. I’ll count down and then we’ll all perform ourselves. When we’re done, we’ll say “Theeeeeeee end”, bow, and applaud. Three, two, one, go. (Miriam witnesses performances for a few beats; gesture, bow, applause) Wonderful! Beautiful performances. It’s as simple as that. Anyone willing to volunteer? (volunteer) Great! The only rule is: no words. You can use sounds, but no words. And when you end, you say Theeeeeee end (gesture) and take a bow. Who will you be performing? Great. (two or more volunteer performances, each followed by gesture, bow, applause) Thank you! Beautiful performances. Anyone else feel inspired to volunteer? (pause) Don’t worry – there will be more opportunities. Lights to midnight blue, bubbles fade in. Miriam crosses to the centre of the circle and lies on her back, breathes deeply. Her body is moved by eddies and waves, eventually she rises and sways. 68 Acute grief has a numbing effect. It feels like being underwater. It insulates me from sensations on the inside and on the outside. I sink, I float. I roll, I rise, I fall. (shift; lights to Workshop bright) (speaking directly to audience from centre) “Become an actor if you can’t imagine doing anything else and being happy.” A mentor advised me while I was deciding what to study at university. (beat) “Very few of you will become professional actors.” An Instructor told me in the first week of my studies. I steeled myself to want it more than anyone else. While I was training to be an actor, my dad died suddenly. Solid ground evaporated and was replaced with wide, open, excruciating space. (beat; turning, feeling the space) I narrowed myself in order fit into the shape of a good theatre student. I focused on the outside of my body. (bow and arrow gesture) The effort that went into making my outside narrow made it difficult to connect with my inside, which was convenient, because inside was crumbling, structure giving way to gaping space. (beat) I did the work: Memorize. Control. Perform. I listened, asked questions, and performed. (shift; Workshop bright) I’m performing now… Scene 4 (crossing to upstage chair, sitting, conversational) I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself and my work. I’m Miriam. This is my thesis. This show is an attempt to answer the question: Where does the body end? There’s only one way to find out. So thanks for helping me become a Master of Fine Arts! (Master face-framing gesture; encourage applause) I’ve evolved since theatre school. Now, my inside and my outside dance together. Internal and external sensations dance together like waves: rolling, rising, falling, flowing into the next moment. Now I am able to notice and respond. This is a practice I share with my dad today, beyond his body. Beyond my own. Now, I’m ready to be taught how to meditate in the dining room. Miriam models being available to the moment, demonstrating gestures as she speaks them. When I listen to my body, I notice sensations, memories, images. Then I allow them to float away or I hold on to the thread and unravel the next moment. I notice that my palms are sweaty, so I turn my hand over, palm face up. I notice this gesture makes me feel as though I am begging, so I raise my open palm and cover my right eye. I notice the warmth and pressure of my hand on my face feels comforting, so I close my eyes. With my eyes closed I can hear differently. I notice the buzz from the speaker. It feels like a tight spiral. I make the movement of a tight spiral, I wonder whether the movement comes from the neck or the 69 head, or maybe the shoulders. I notice I stopped breathing while I was wondering. I inhale, I exhale. The whoosh of the air moving sounds like a march: irregular footsteps. A tired solider at the end of the war. I wonder if I’ve ever been so tired. I open my eyes and notice… [series of real “noticings” related to space and audience members, for example: I notice that the reflection of the lights on the stage look like street lamps reflected by water, it reminds me of Paris: walking by the Seine at night with a lover. I notice a beautiful, flowing, polka-dot skirt covering the chair completely, almost as though Lindsay is floating in the air above the stage]. (beat) Let’s try noticing images together. Miriam reaches under her chair with intention, placing the suitcase on her lap. She reaches around, popping the clasp, and slowly opens the lid, revealing a piece of fabric. Delicious. She places the suitcase on the stage and crosses around it, gently tugging the fabric until it is fully released into the centre of the circle. She throws the fabric in the air, it lands on her, covering her head and body. This is the veil between my inner world and my outer world. This is an invisibility cloak. This is a shroud. This is a secret. This is the piece of you inside of me. Could you please hold this? (Holding fabric taut with audience member) This is the distance between us. (beat) Keep holding. Miriam twists the fabric into long rope. She and the audience member lower it to the ground. Miriam prepares for her Olympic balance beam routine and tiptoes across the length of it. Jumps off: flourish, encourages applause. This is the landing! Miriam unrolls the fabric and holds it up high with both arms, dancing it as though it is a large sheet drying on the line on a sunny day with a light breeze. She shows the audience. What do you think this is? (beat) Wrong answers only. 70 She listens to the responses, repeats them so everyone can hear. Miriam makes 3-5 offers, audience calls out what they see. What else could it be? 1, 2, 3, or 4+ ideas from audience. Miriam creates the images using the fabric, playing as a group until… (rolling up the fabric and placing it in the suitcase) This is the place where we’ll keep it. Miriam closes the suitcase with care and slides it back under USC chair. She stands and addresses the audience directly. I wish, to be wide. When I am wide I am generous, when I am wide I am multifaceted, when I am wide I see in all directions. When I am wide I have no doubt that I will be drawn to give and give again and in the giving, receive. All that I give will become wide if I can hold on less tightly. Abrupt shift; bright Workshop lights. Miriam speaks without inviting room for reply. So, how is everyone doing? (beat; “Good”, “Okay”) There usually isn’t time to say much more than that, is there? I find it takes time for me to articulate what I feel. The first step is to actually feel it. I invite you to feel how you’re feeling. Scene 5 Next, we’re gonna perform a “how ya doin’?” scene together. It’s probably the most common “how ya doin’” scene ever. You may have already played it today. It happens when you run in to someone you know, or meet someone new. It happens at the grocery store or waiting for the bus. It usually starts with “Hi” or “Hey”, then… (encourages, all say, “how ya doin’?”) Let’s write a five-line “how ya doin’” scene together. We already have the first two lines: Hi, How ya doin’?, then… (takes suggestions from the audience, we write a scene together) Nice. That’s a good one – it has some nuance. We’re going to play this five-line scene a few times, each time with different context. Scenes like this are sometimes called contextless scenes because we can give them any meaning we want. Are we on the same page about what subtext is? Can someone explain? (someone explains) Well said. Subtext is everything happening underneath the words being spoken. Could I 71 have a volunteer to try this scene with me? We’ll use the lines from the scene we co-created together and play a “how ya doin’” scene. And we’ll get some context: who we are, where we are, what just happened… Could I have a volunteer to play with me? (volunteer) Thank you! The only rules are: we have to stick to the lines, no other words. And we can move in the space, but we can’t touch each other or anyone else. If we get lost, we’ll call Line, and someone will help us out by telling us what the next line is. And when we finish, we’ll say “Theeeeeee end”, bow, and receive wild applause. Okay, here’s the context… Miriam plays scene with a few different audience members, different context each time (e.g. Child out past curfew and caught by parent, Partners about to break up, cafe employee about to quit…). After one or two scenes, Miriam asks audience members to provide context for the pair. If the audience is really into it, she could invite them to play together without her. Thank you for that beautiful work. (beat) On some level, we know when someone is or isn’t expressing what is happening on the inside, right? When someone is saying something other than what they’re saying in words, it’s like words are objects hanging here, (hand out not very far in front of her) stationary, while the energy of our body goes far, far beyond those objects. (shift) Now I’m going to do a performance of Miriam at theatre school, on the inside. Lights to midnight blue, bubbles fade in. Miriam crosses to the centre of the circle and lies on her back, breathes deeply. Her body is moved by eddies and waves, eventually she rises and sways. To be an actor means to open yourself to critique and rejection. The craft demands you are solid enough to withstand the storms of No and Too Much and Not Enough. Aiming at a target far in the distance narrowed my body. When I discovered my first stretch mark, I knew my career was over before it started. Now I’ll never be a famous actor, I thought. Famous actors don’t have stretch marks. No, Too Much, Not Enough. A voice inside told me that if I pushed, I’d plunge into a chasm. No, Too Much, Not Enough. I wish, to be wide. When I am wide I am generous, when I am wide I am 72 multifaceted, when I am wide I see in all directions. If I am wide, I can go beyond my body. If I am wide, I can send energy from the inside Out. To be in this moment with you – really with you – I need to be wide. How is everyone doing? (Real question) We’re going to do an exercise that will tell each other – without any words – how we’re doing. I’ll start by making a sound and gesture that expresses something that’s happening on the inside, then we’ll go this way (gesturing) and everyone will have a turn. When we’re all done, we’ll say Theeeeeeee end and take a bow. If it comes to you and you don’t want to make a sound and gesture, you simply shake your head “no” and we’ll pass to the next person. (beat) Now, see if you can, as my teacher Gerry would say, let go of all your good ideas and when it comes to you, see if you can go inside, feel something, and share it with a sound and gesture. (guides) Theeeeeeeeee end (gesture, bow) Thank you. (receiving gestures; transforms into personal gesture to mark transition into the final Act) Scene 6 Miriam sits in the upstage chair, reaches under to retrieve the suitcase and places it on her lap with intention. She reaches around, popping the clasp, and slowly opens the lid, revealing the fabric. Delicious; conspiratorial. She places the suitcase down on the stage and crosses around it, gently tugging the fabric from the suitcase. In the centre of the circle, she opens the fabric completely, so that it lies like a rug. She folds it carefully, as though folding a shroud. When my dad died, I decided not to see his body. A voice inside told me: His body is not him. You already saw him for the last time without knowing it. (beat) I’ve never regretted the decision not to see my dad’s body. Not everyone gets a choice. It felt important to have a choice. I saw him for the last time two weeks before he died. That was goodbye. And for a long, long, time, I felt that goodbye was final. But was it? Where did my dad’s body end? Eventually, when I allowed my body to be wide, I began to notice new sensations moving through me, causing me to respond, to share what was happening on the inside. Now, I allow myself to be moved. I’m never not moving. The breath falls in and out, moves 73 however it wants. (beat) Images come and go however they want. My dad comes and goes. I conjure him into the present when I am wide enough to hear beyond words. If he’s here in the present with me, has his body stopped? Did his body stop when his breathing stopped? Or is he here? As alive today as he was fifteen years ago? (beat) For me, he’s here (gestures to her chest), here (gestures to the circle), here (gestures beyond the horizon)… (shift) I don’t think I ever truly wanted to be famous. I think I wanted to be seen the way I see famous people: being noticed, taking risks, changing… I’ve read that grief doesn’t get smaller, we expand around it. Miriam gently replaces fabric in suitcase and closes it. She rises, picking up the suitcase with her, and holds it with both hands, offering it to each audience member. Each audience member gets their own “lines” delivered directly to them. You leave your house alone, walk west, and realize childhood ends when a parent dies: instead of solid matter to push against there is only falling into the well of adulthood, sudden as falling asleep on the chest that brought you into the world and questions simple as mountains: What is childhood but a set of walls raised impossibly around us; a chest to pound upon with closed fists? (rage against, love, prove wrong) (tucks suitcase under DSC chair; continues around audience suitcase-less) Without walls, there is only space vast as a whole life: open space can be filled with anything. You inhale and descend into your life, older now; far, far younger than you will ever be. When I am wide, I go beyond my body. I reach out in space. I reach in, toward memories, sensations, possibilities… Where does the body end? At the fingertips? At the edge of our exhale? At the piece of us that lives inside of others? How far does the body go? (pause) 74 We’ll do one more exercise. Let’s all stand if we are able. (If folks all stand and the circle is loose, invite audience members to come closer together) Feel your feet contacting the ground. Let your knees be loose. Allow your shoulders to fall away from your ears, your hands to be heavy by your sides. Give yourself some gentle movement. Maybe a neck roll or a little massage. (pause) Now, blink your eyes open and begin to become curious about the people in this circle. Notice each other and be noticed. Take a look around and if you notice someone at the same time as they’re noticing you, see whether you can hold eye contact for a moment and breathe. (beat) Then maybe you say thank you with your eyes and flow into the next moment. (allow for space) And when we’re all done, we’ll end it together. All: Theeeeeeeeeeeeee end. Bow. Applause. Miriam crosses the circle, removes the DSC chair to the side, exposing the suitcase. She turns on the house lights, and picks up the suitcase. Turns and exits; a breath before crossing the threshold into the house. Continues down aisle toward exit. Turns and catches audience standing, still watching her. Miriam: (setting down suitcase) Theeeeeeeeeeeeee end. Bow. Applause. Gesture to Jenn in booth. Waves goodbye, picks up suitcase, and jogs out. EXEUNT. Appendix C: Script by Miriam Cummings 75 Appendix D 76 Appendix D: Ticket Sales by Plainstage, Managed by Miriam Cummings
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Kenney, Denise
Wide : a live, solo, participatory performance
Text