NEW FEELINGS
OCTOBER 4, 2011. After enough years of experiencing the same path of emotions, people begin to tire. They’ve been through it before, many times.
It’s as if they’re acting roles in a very long-running play. Every day, they’re back on the boards, speaking the same lines, feeling the same feelings.
If they could just switch roles with the other cast members, something new and fresh might happen. But rules seem to prevent this.
We define degree of life by the emotions we have. When we’re satisfied, exhilarated, we’re alive.
In “real life,” we limit our range of emotion, because feelings imply and propel action, and we have principles about what actions we’re willing to take. Therefore, we try to be content with what we feel, over and over.
But on stage, in a play, everything is different. No emotion is impossible, because the action-consequences remain on the stage. The stage is where we can learn new lessons, make new moves, expand our minds and souls. And then there will be a carryover into life off the stage.
Who can say where and when theater was first invented? Apparently, the first free and open theater emerged in ancient Greece. In fact, in those tragedies and comedies, local citizens were recruited to play roles in plays by celebrated authors.
And “the carryover” from stage to real life? It isn’t so much about what the person is willing to do now in his life he was afraid of doing before—it’s about how expanded his range of feeling is as a result of his experiences playing roles on stage. It’s, say, the difference between waking up in the morning with a heavy sensation and jumping out of bed with a fierce joy…
The difference between not feeling alive and feeling alive.
In starting the Magic Theater, this was on my mind.
All roles have a potential range of feeling utilized to express them, act them out—and by improvising these roles, we light up deadened areas of walled-off emotion and energy, and we rejuvenate and embody possibility. First-hand.
I know people, for example, who would love to play, to improvise the role of a dictator. They don’t do it real life, of course. They would never do it in real life. But in dialogue, yes. They would jump at the chance to embody those feelings and express them. And then?
When they “return to real life,” they feel no compulsion to become a dictator. They feel the power of those emotions, and they can transmute and channel that energy into what they truly want to do.
Every possible role contains real emotion—and it is the confusion between real life and “stage life” that keeps people from experiencing most of these emotions. They are afraid to be what they want to be: ACTORS.
We are all actors. We all have the capacity. We all understand, below the every-day level of discourse, that we can act. And we want to.
But, as I’ve said before, where is the venue?
That’s why I created the Magic Theater. This isn’t a repertory company, or a school for training professionals. It isn’t therapy. It isn’t rehearsal. It’s a way of being and feeling alive.
Furthermore, there are paired roles that can lock up each other in a kind of mutually canceled energy and emotion: dictator and victim; king and slave; parent and child; God and seeker…
When two people improvise these paired roles with each other—and then switch parts—new energy and emotion are liberated.
Eventually, daily life begins to look like a pale imitation of the Magic Theater. Fortunately, we all want to live, so we transport our experiences from the Theater back into life and inject it with new feelings. What seemed dead is now alive.
Jon Rappoport
To inquire about the first Magic Theater workshop on December 10-11, email me.