REPORT ON MAGIC THEATER WORKSHOP
THE SIX
by Jon Rappoport
December 13, 2011.
The first workshop was held here in San Diego this past weekend. I am not going to write the few hundred pages it deserves. Yes, you had to be there. I was a participant as well. I joined in the two and three person dialogues. There were six of us. We spent about ten hours acting out various roles.
There’s no substitute for “hours on the job.”
There was much, much laughter and hilarity. A lot of the laughter was falling off the chair stuff.
One of the most interesting sessions involved people inventing roles of their own choosing and just diving in. I watched one of these dialogues for about an hour, and I developed a tremendous fascination, in part because I couldn’t figure out who two of the people were. But it was more than that. The interplay, the sheer improvisation, the wildness of it—yeah, you had to be there.
Spontaneously, at the end, in the last hour on Sunday, two groups who had been carrying on very different dialogues joined up and connected. The six of us invented a super-group whose motives and strategies and plans were preposterously gorgeous. We subverted a corporation, figured out how to take over a country, invented a new religion, launched a film enterprise, appointed a reluctant saint, and that was just the beginning of it.
My life will never be the same. Of that I’m sure. The others in the group would have to make their own assessments. I’m quite sure they were surprised by the effects—beyond what they anticipated.
Time and time again, I was blown away by the initiative of the people there—how they jumped in and played their roles with power, imagination, and a true ability for expressing the absurd.
After a weekend like this, I don’t think anyone can return to his/her central role in life with the same grinding certainty that this is it, this is life, this is all there is. No. We are in different territory.
Trying to explain all this is like saying there is a joke that’s very, very funny and ha ha. You not only have to be there to hear the actual joke, you have to be telling the jokes. And we did.
Without a script.
The workshop wasn’t the purveying of knowledge. It was all in the doing. It was action theater.
It breaks the layer of supposition and pre-judgment and conditioned perception. It gets to the real stuff, which is invention.
Which is so much more interesting and joyous than “real life.”
One of my favorite things about the weekend: no boredom. You start feeling the edges of “sameness” creeping in? Kick the dialogue in a new direction. We did, hundreds of times. And launched ourselves. You want multiple dimensions? Boom.
I felt confident in our group. I knew we were in good hands: each others’. This was and is a piece of cosmic relief. And comic relief.
My admiration for the other five people grew and grew. Ready, willing, and able.
I always knew ordinary life was crazy. The workshop offered living proof. But we were unrolling other worlds and universes in the process. And every new leap implied more leaps. No limits.
It’s like the trip you always hoped you’d take one day. The vacation that’s a piece of sheer synchronistic way beyond illumimation FUN. Surprises at every turn.
You’re galvanized and riveted and intrigued and inspired by your companions. And they’re inspired by each other and you. Alive moment to moment theater.
Dream come true.
There are no major and minor actors. Everybody is major.
“You expand mine; I expand yours.”
I just can’t do it justice. These words are just markers that might point you to clues about the fabulous nature of this enterprise.
I see the faces of the other five, I see them spontaneously percolating the new meanings of what it means to be alive—beyond all the sober baloney of illusion and beyond all the programmatic concocted wisdom.
I’ll take this New.
Yeah, give me some of that. Give me more of that.
Anybody with deep pockets out there who’s freezing into a replica of a replica of a replica? Put me in a building and I’ll give away the Magic Theater for the next 20 years, every day. I’ll spawn branch offices all over the planet. We’ll make it into a flood.
Meanwhile, I’m very, very happy with my six.
Hello, universe: got your number. You’re busted.
Jon Rappoport