THE MAGIC THEATER PROJECT
By Jon Rappoport
OCTOBER 13, 2010. Lately, I’ve been looking over notes I made for a project called THE MAGIC THEATER. It’s still on the drawing boards…
This article is a selection from those rather esoteric notes, and it’s dedicated to those of you who’ve stuck with me over the years as I’ve written many pieces on the power of imagination. You know who you are. I appreciate your interest and your desire to explore this vast area further and further. To me, you’re champions.
THE MAGIC THEATER would be for actors, or people who might want to act, or people who are already acting IN LIFE but are bored with the process and the results.
In other words, it’s for anybody.
Most actor-training schools focus on scenes and dialogue and movement rooted in Realism. I have no problem with that. I’m just interested in something else.
Here are some preliminary notes—-you may find these ideas opaque or confusing or puzzling…but I submit that just means you need to think about them a good deal more than you think about the news or what’s on television or the next thing you’re about to do.
Notes—
We need an opportunity to use words, language and expressed emotion that surpasses the expectations of ordinary reality.
For example, if you rehearsed a scene with other actors in which the substance was a DREAM, and the language was an invented poetics in which the usual connections between words were advanced beyond rational and logical discourse, you would be approaching the point where new space and time became palpable.
Most “dream scenes” in theater or film hang on to ordinary language. The setting and events are challenging, but the words are pedestrian.
Language as we use it is ballast. It keeps us rooted in the conventions of reality. It assures us that the relationships between things and events and people are stable in a simplistic context.
According to at least one interpretation of the Chinese language, it posited, in its original form, a vital flow in which process and relationships and action verbs were the primary forces. Objects, positions, nouns, measurable distances were background, incidental.
Poetic drama has the potential to surpass the conditioning that accommodates us to every-day reality.
Rarely has theater seriously transformed the very basis of language, dialogue, and verbal assumptions. In that sense, theater has been a bird with rocks on its wings.
In THE MAGIC THEATER, people learn to speak in different ways.
About 35 years ago, I was a regular in a theater experiment with Scott Kelman, at his Factory Theater in downtown LA. Every week, about 10 of us gathered for something he called The Liars Club.
One by one, we would take the stage and tell a story about ourselves that was a complete lie. The idea was to make it as convincing as possible. We were motivated to tell some major lies. It wasn’t just, I stole a marble from my childhood friend.
The effect of each person stepping up and telling a story for 10 minutes or so was rather extraordinary, and it was sub rosa. We didn’t quiz each other about the “lie aspect.” There was no probing…just one lie after another. Then, turn out the lights, and go home.
It took me about three weeks to realize that I was assuming people were telling the TRUTH about what had happened to them, under the pretended cover of lying. It was that convincing.
Of course, I didn’t know. Still don’t. Lying or telling the truth?
Conscious lies change space.
Not being able to separate lie from truth, AND KNOWING YOU CAN’T, changes space.
The pressure to tell the truth reduces and distorts space. Eliminate that pressure and space opens up.
Dada and Surrealism were efforts to subvert conventional space and truth, based on the alternative prospect of finding new space and time.
THE COSMOS IS A FORGERY OF THE INDIVIDUAL.
People tell or accept a story about the cosmos based on their conception about how the story might suit them. Help them.
In accepting such a story, they create a reductionist version of what they are.
Imagination knows no bounds.
Theater, for all its props and stories, does relatively little to exercise the far reaches of imagination when it comes to language. Even poetic drama tends to center on what is fondly called “the human condition.” The human condition is a convenient set of stories about human nature and motivation which become a shorthand method for cementing people into a limited notion of what is possible.
There are non-verbal “languages.” Twenty years ago, I ran a series of experiments that other people started calling Sounding. I never called it anything. It involved working with a small group (8-15 people) in a room. After a set of warm-up exercises, people made sounds—any sounds—for a half hour or so. The effect was quite interesting, to say the least. Language unhooked from words provoked all sorts of unique combinations of feeling and thought.
It was theatrical, although content normally associated with theater was absent.
It resembled a five-year experience I had with a space in LA called Dance Home. Recorded music ranging from Strauss waltzes to techno-industrial-pop was played continuously for 4 hours a night, several times a week, in a dance studio. People moved in whatever ways they wanted to. At times, the events took on a distinct theatrical flavor.
In the late 1970s, I rented a small theater in West LA and did 3 one-man shows, which were a series of comedic monologues. In certain ways, they were similar to my later experiences with The Liars Club. I was telling surreal stories that became more and more ridiculous as they went along. It was an early attempt to push the audience into unfamiliar landscapes.
Many years later, when I ran for a seat in Congress, in LA, my team and I began to realize there were significant possibilities for a theater of the absurd in mainstream politics.
So…these are some of the threads I’m pulling on here. THE MAGIC THEATER would utilize both improvisation and tight scene-work—using types of language that go far beyond ordinary speech or familiar poetics—to tilt the seesaw of life in the direction of much greater imagination and space for the participants.
Human beings want to reach for more, but eventually they lose sight of what they could imagine and create. THE MAGIC THEATER would function as a powerful antidote.
In my experience, it is at precisely those moments when we, individually or collectively, seem more locked in than ever by external events, that breakthroughs can be made.
JON RAPPOPORT