Like Burnt Paper

"When we get out of the glass bottles of our own ego,
and when we escape like squirrels from turning in the cages of our personalityand get into the forest again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh,
and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper."

--DH Lawrence.

What a quote. I like to think that this is the kind of work and exploration we are doing at Dell'Arte. No mater how grandiose the idea. How to know when we've escaped the glass bottle that is ego? So difficult to say --the quality of that experience. Can one still conceive of self and be free from ego? There have been a few moments here that I have been able to free myself from this ego experience through art. One is when we were exploring elements and I found fire in my body. The other was when we did our Nature Day performance lab and we were performing waves crashing as a unit of bodies. There were a few fleeting moments exploring neutral mask and finding my Punch character Squirm as well.

It's a space where there is no mind and I feel like a receptacle for a creative energy. It is difficult to sustain and tricky to describe because in this space there is very little analysis happening. And these examples are not the only time I tried to reach this space of egolessness performance. In fact, it is about one in every fifty attempts at most. The other day in class I tried it and was mixing and speaking from all sorts of different characters and could not land on any. In that moment I needed to make a craft choice to commit to one perspective and play deep into it. That is craft there, more directly from the mind. The ability to commit to one perspective of a character. To make a choice of who gets my attention and then to listen. That is to say I think there is some necessary ground work before diving into egolessness.

I am understanding now more than ever why theatrical performance is an art. It is the merging of the infinite space with deep craft. And while one can perform with complete wonder without the deep craft, one cannot transform the space with craft alone. Craft offers for a closer connection and shapes the daemon.

And tying back to the last line of DH Lawrence's quote I can't help but wonder how does this process connect with institutions curling up like burnt paper?

Currently the main connection I find there is the idea that the institutions that once held such power in my head like my old universities or any NGO's...I see them as less powerful. They seem weak in comparison to the great power available in nature. However it is also with the understanding that these institutions were mostly formed from the seed of this power and then boxed and organized and compartmentalized and the magic and life of the original seed dissipates with time..something to think on further.