Theatre of Bewilderment
Theatre of Bewilderment is part of my evolutionary artistic and human journey.
Bewilderment:
The quality or state of being lost, perplexed, or confused: the quality or state of being bewildered.
Bewildered:
Deeply or utterly confused or perplexed.
The Theatre of Bewilderment is derived significantly from the perspective of an existentialist philosophy of the unknowability of life, the universe, and everything. (42 being the answer).
Existentialism being a philosophy in which each individual is responsible for finding and creating meaning and purpose in life and not derived from deities or authority figures or entities. Individual purpose is in our own hands.
This is a phenomenological approach to life that can inform art creation. We are not a collection of logic and knowledge but rather a collection of individual perceptual experiences that can be combined with logic and knowledge. Theatre is an opportunity to share that perspective with others.
There is freedom in the acceptance of the unknowability of existence and the focus on our own phenomenological experience and therefore encourages us to create theatre that seeks to share our experience with others. That experience can be small and highly personal or more broad an universal.
Thesis: Existence
Antithesis: Non-existence
Synthesis: Becoming
Our existence is in a constant state of becoming the next thing. We were cells, then fetus, then child, then adult, then elder, then atoms. In the study of physics, mater and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed in state. So we all follow a similar journey in this state that begins at the same experiential stating point we can call zero. Simply stated, “We all start at zero.” What greatly differs is our own perceptual experience. Theatre of Bewilderment encourages us to only understand that our variable perceptual experience can have both universality and individuality. So the stories we share can vary wildly in those dialectical extremes. We should maintain a sense of wonder, enthusiasm, and curiosity. Art is an simultaneously an outlet and a starting point for our wonder.
Create art that says something, whether serious or nonsensical. Theatre should reflect upon our, shared or unshared, human experience. If you try to create theatre without meaning or a clear stance, you do not contribute to our social understanding, or even our individual understanding. Failing to say something is a lazy artists way of saying something, often un-profoundly. So theatre should say something with intention, even when it’s nothing at all. We all start knowing nothing, and we will end knowing next to nothing. Theatre is an opportunity to share our meaning in a blissfully meaningless existence.
Stories and myths have been humanity’s way of sending messages into the future like notes in a bottle guiding us to the shores they tread. But even visiting the same beach is never the same. Sand, waves, and weather shift and change. Sometimes slowly with time and sometimes in sudden tidal shifts. Sometimes we will visit well worn shores, sometimes familiar ones, and sometimes new shores to us. But like the Earth, there are few, if any, new shores that have not already been tread at some point. Let us avoid a colonialist viewpoint of the human condition. Just because its new to you, do not mistake it for undiscovered country. The paradox however is that, as we are talking about shores as a metaphor for human experience, we need to find a way to understand that by virtue of our individual experience, discovery of new shores is a valid perspective irrespective of current inhabitants. This manifesto is not a shiny new concept, but a layering of historical concepts viewed with a collective contemporary perspective looking back over oft traveled areas.
Art is not meant to be a fixed concept and theatre is ever changing. So too does this manifesto encourage flexibility and growth.
The living are soft and yielding;
The dead are rigid and stiff.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 76
