Performance and spirituality in the digital age

Recently a Medium article by Nicolas Berger has been making the rounds on social media, especially among theatre artists. It’s called The Forgotten Art of Assembly; Or, Why Theatre Makers Should Stop Making. In it, he argues that we theatre artists should resist the temptation to put our work online, to perform Instagram songs and monologues, to do Zoom shows - as my company is doing tonight. His article is deeply felt and affecting. “I realize [what] I am really reckoning with is my own non-essentialism” he writes. “Theatre and its practitioners have been deemed non-essential in this moment and our refusal to acknowledge this has resulted in disposable digital work that dismantles the very intimacy our form demands.”

SOME OF OUR ENSEMBLE REHEARSING RECENTLY.

At the center of his argument it seem to me there are two essential positions. One is economic and political and it speaks to a deeply held concern of mine. In throwing our work out into cyberspace for free, we are are cheapening our already marginalized and devalued art form. “Simply relocating existing structures of theatrical art production online doesn’t solve the problems that existed in those structures IRL” he writes. “Instead of rushing at cleverness and temporary solutions, contorting theatre inside out, maybe we ought to examine the capitalist establishment we live under that demands artists, natural-born hustlers, empaths, and problem solvers keep hustling to make a buck online, a field already overpopulated with free content, during an unprecedented global pandemic. Nevermind the fact that, in doing so, we’re ignoring the one defining quality of our field, its liveness.”

The end of of that paragraph hints at his second essential point: that what we do as live performers depends on it being live and in-person. In putting our work and play online we are misrepresenting ourselves in a damaging way by attempting to offer our meal without it’s special sauce: the simple and profound truth of being in the same room, at the same time, experiencing something collectively, what Berger calls “assembly”. And I agree . . . to a point. I have often calmed performer friends of mine who fret that our live performance “careers” will go extinct under the crushing advance of digital forms, streaming media, film and television. No, I say. Deep in our DNA we are a tribal species and we we crave being close to each other the way growing things bend towards the sun.

BIRTHDAY PARTY FOR MY SON WITH FAMILY ”ZOOMING” IN.

One way to view the explosion of “Zoomexperience” during this quarantine time is as a manifestation of that yearning for closeness. We cannot survive without connecting to each other - even introverts like me. So we connect through these strange voyeuristic squares and rectangles on our phones, tablets and laptops. We speak, share, confess, cry and yes, sing, act and perform for each other through this technology, not because we prefer to, but because we have to. To stay alive. To be human beings. And in doing so we discover something mysterious, miraculous. The soul-sustenance of connecting to each other uses a spiritual energy which doesn’t obey any laws of physics, which doesn’t need physical proximity, which isn’t measurable or quantifiable in any scientific terms, but which keeps us alive. And it’s why I for one will continue to look for ways to perform online.

Once upon a time, I wrote a great deal about the connections between spirituality and performance. I had some articles about it published in academic journals. This exploration is at the center of my two books. I actually created a workshop in 2004 or 5 called “Revival: Meetings for Theatre” which sought to blend my twin callings to theatrical performance and Quaker spirituality. I had come across several things which had started this ball rolling. One was the electric performance energy of a person standing and speaking during Quaker meeting for workshop. The other was my discovery through research that the great master fo realism, Constantine Stanislavsky, viewed what the actor does as a spiritual event at its essence.

CONSTANTINE STANISLAVSKY (5 JANUARY 1863 – 7 AUGUST 1938), AUTHOR OF “AN ACTOR’S WORK ON HIMSELF”, THE SEMINAL BOOK ON REALISTIC ACTING, BROKEN INTO THREE BOOKS BY HIS AMERICAN TRANSLATOR AND HER PUBLISHER: AN ACTOR PREPARES, BUILDING A CHARACTER, AND CREATING A ROLE.

LEO TOLSTOY (28 AUGUST 1828 – 20 NOVEMBER 1910)

Most theatre people don’t know this about him. We view him as the architect of “objectives”, “actions”, “tactics” and “beats” - those psychologically based text analysis tools. But did you know that his hero was Leo Tolstoy? That he trembled and wept during his one brief audience with the great spiritual teacher? That his primary aid during his most prolific writing and teaching was a disciple of Tolstoy’s named Leopold Sulerzhitsky (known as Suler)? Stanislavsky’s biographer David Magarshack writes “It is indeed questionable whether he would have undertaken so hard . . . a task as the formation of his ‘system’, if he had never met [this] remarkable man who for over ten years was to be his closest friend and confidant.” Improv sidebar: Suler championed a method of creating plays through - wait for it - improvisation.

In my article called Stanislavsky, Spirituality and the Problem of the Wounded Actor ( Cambridge University Press 2006) I wrote “few subjects in Stanislavsky’s writing will make the theatre academic more squeamish than his relentless examination of the spiritual component in acting.  But it is unavoidable: ‘The essence of art is not in its external forms but in its spiritual content’ he says in the beginning of An Actor Prepares. Then, over the course of the An Actor Prepares and Building A Character  . . . he uses the words ‘spirit’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘soul’ 136 times. The chapter called ‘Communion’ in An Actor Prepares is an explicit examination of the transmission of spiritual energy between human beings, a process he calls ‘irradiation’ using ‘rays.’” For Stanislavsky, the actor transmits spiritual energy, energy which is aroused by human feelings. He believed that actors are people who are trained to focus that spiritual energy on each other, and then by extension, on the audience. In The Player’s Passion Joseph R. Roach writes “[Stanislavsky] sought to create a religion of art, in which the theater was a temple, the audience worshippers, and the actors celebrants in a mysterious rite. A mystic and an idealist, he tolerated his own mechanization of the art he loved only within definite limits . . .”

LEOPOLD SULERZHITSKY (SULER)

What would this father of the acting style which we now simply call “acting” by default, what would he make of this new “mechanization of the art he loved” through iPhones, Zoom and other online platforms? An eternally curious soul, I’m sure he would marvel at the way our urge to create breaks through any restriction, any barrier. But at the end of the day, I’m equally sure he would assess our online performance this way: as evidence that the spiritual energy we transmit leaps across distance, time zones and technology. And while not as directly felt as it is when we are physically present with each other, it never the less continues to link us, connect us in this mysterious rite aroused by human feelings.

It is Passover, and Easter. I am a Christian, and I celebrated a Seder with my Jewish girlfriend this week. We prayed and ate and sang with a virtual community of her faith broadcasting through my computer placed high atop a filing cabinet close to our dinner table. Tomorrow I will sit in worship quietly in my home staring through a mosaic of digital rectangles at the beautiful multi-generational faces of my Quaker meeting, as we celebrate the moment when our faith became unbound from the earth and eternal. Nothing is cheapened or degraded in these meetings. And nothing will be cheapened or degraded when my improv ensemble performs tonight as we attempt to make people laugh and raise some money to feed frontline healthcare workers. I believe the Divine is present in everyone all the time, and as such It doesn’t care how we connect, only that we connect.

Maybe what my Russian acting teacher Slava Dolgachev said is true: “Theatre is for stupid people.” In other words, theatre is for people who don’t need to prove anything, quantify anything, apply objective metrics and thoughtful rubrics to the art they make. Like people of faith, we don’t know things, we believe in ideals. And unlike things, ideals live outside time, space and technology. Still . . . I can’t wait to be close to you again soon.