Theatre & Post-truth: fracture in the haze
I’m an illusionist. It’s a big part of my job.
Pinned to the inside of my trench coat are maps to worlds that don’t exist.
Or, supposedly they don’t.
I’m a theatre-maker. A story-teller. A playwright. A liar.
Depending on how you frame it.
A lot of us are trying to reconcile what we do and what we believe within this cultural moment. I’m thinking specifically of the new version of double-speak put forward by rising (and now ruling in some countries) right-wing parties. Cultural theorists are saying we’ve arrived at a “Post-truth” age. Donald Trump’s people posit a world that includes “Alternative Facts”, and what we’d normally call “Fascism” and “White Supremacy” are being re-branded as an “Alternative Right”.
How does the artist work inside Post-truth culture? What’s needed? What’s useful? What’s effective? What matters? How can I speak about this cultural moment in which the very meaning of words and ideas are being so ignored, mutated, and appropriated? How can I make theatre when the political arena has usurped the very elements theatre depends on: illusion, entertainment, tragedy, circus, farce, and symbolic coding?
The power of theatre (and a lot of live performance) is in the meeting between the actual and the metaphorical. It is a paradox between investing in what we know to be illusory (the story, the symbols, the characters) and what we know to be real (we are watching real people in time and space performing something). So theatre, performance, is a contradiction: the two truths cancel each other out and create space for new experiences; for new personal and communal truths.
The idea of “new truths” used to sound empowering to me. However, I can so easily imagine a neo-fascist sliding that phrase out of their mouth now that the concept seems terrifyingly manipulative to me lately.
Is my hesitation around this idea my own desire to resist the tides of manipulating double-speak crashing down from governments and media—or is this hesitation proof that the forces of censorship, imagination lock-down, and imperial power are effectively dismantling my creative impulse?
~
I grew up in Canada. The art I was exposed to in my youth was largely from the European tradition and canon. It wasn’t until my senior years in high school that I began to learn about Colonialism and Euro-centrism. Learning about intersectional feminism, postcolonial studies, Jungian psychoanalysis, and battling anorexia throughout my 20’s saw me searching for an artistic voice I could wield as an instrument strong enough to claim my own body back from the Imperial Patriarchal Capitalist Enlightenment Project so much of the world has been subjugated by. Like many, I needed art to survive something I was fighting against before I even knew its name(s).
Art is connected to survival. If it weren’t--we wouldn’t see it appear in some form, throughout known human history all over the world. We reach for art the same way we reach for life, for god, for love, for sex, for food, for each other, and for death.
We live in a time where scientists can comprehensively identify the various ways forces within humanity will wipe humanity out given its current trajectory. Climate change, nuclear arms, over population, desertification, various genocides, the list goes on and on. Humanity has always had survival to think about—that’s not new, but the global scope of how industrialized imperial power has damaged and altered the environment past a point of sustainability is new. If religion was Marx’s opiate of the people, ours is consumerism—insidiously creating and simultaneously distracting mass culture from the unfolding environmental apocalypse. When we break through the haze and think about the various crises we are in—our survival comes crashing to the forefront of our minds. And then what, what do we do? Become vegan? Get a bike? Fight for policy? Take cold showers? Make art—what will that do?
Making and experiencing art empowers us in times when we feel helpless. When facing our survival (physical, spiritual, emotional, cultural) we must confront death in all its forms. Western modernity has never been great at confronting death.
Art is a way to practice death. Art can also resist death. Transcend it.
In this cultural moment, the death knells are ringing for the imperial West, but it would rather take the whole fucking planet down than let power be taken from its cold, dying, white, hands. The art I make seeks to yank at that power, but then again, that power also helps my white hands make art.
~
Theatre-maker Anne Bogart of New York’s SITI group talks about aesthetics as rooted in sensation. A successful art experience engages our physical senses, provoking physical, emotional, and intellectual sensations within us. Art’s power comes from its ability to move us. Our bodies shake and tremble when we laugh and cry, our muscles contract in suspense, we move forward or slouch backward, we hold our breath—when we feel we move. Successful art wakes our senses up, penetrating the anesthetic experience of mass culture.
Mass culture is an anesthetized culture because it is disembodied. The Enlightenment really solidified rational, abstract thinking as the primacy of Western knowledge and systematized the assessment of intrinsic values accordingly. Some extremely valuable leaps in critical thinking, the scientific method, massive medical and engineering advancements, and strategies with which to dismantle abusive dogma we made during this time. But some things got worse. The annihilation of opposing concepts of value, knowledge and experience due to their “inferiority”, had been gendered and racialized for some time—that didn’t change, and if Christian-Patriarchy hadn’t ravaged the Body, the Feminine, the Other, and nature enough, the Enlightenment was finding new ways to sever one’s psyche and colonize these constructs, peoples, and places.
Our collective spiritual-emotional disembodiment is a deep wound we struggle to even name. To name it is to begin to feel it. So we deny, deny, consume more and deny. And we numb. Addicted to power, materialism, fame, and youth, we numb the pain of disembodiment. You can’t choose which emotions you numb—to numb pain is to numb everything. Instead of learning to be curious about our feelings, to feel and manage them, mass culture shames them as weak, feminine, and embarrassing. We learn to “other” our feelings in the same way Western culture has “othered” so many individuals and groups in order to attempt dominate them.
An anesthetic culture cannot afford to feel because it has not taken the time to practice. It cannot afford to feel because it is at war with feeling. Thus an anesthetic culture is at odds with art.
~
A huge dose of cultural anesthesia wore off for the middle class during the 2008 global financial crisis. Millions of people in the global north found themselves waking up inside capitalism experiencing a particularly violent, life-threatening hemorrhage. The pain was sudden, real, terrifying, and vehement.
Like with any addiction, stopping cold turkey initiates a turbulent process of physical, emotional, and chemical withdrawal. The body is thrown into chaos as it seeks to re-calibrate a new normal. It’s a dangerous time, because the body’s ability to mitigate external forces is compromised by the vulnerable internal process underway.
Our numbing culture, unpracticed in experiencing and managing feelings, was now being hit with some of the most unpleasant and powerful feelings out there: fear, pain, betrayal, helplessness, anger, rage. Feelings intricately connected to our survival mechanisms.
Toddlers are unpracticed experiencing and managing their feelings. They often become tyrannical trying to navigate needs they don’t necessarily understand and can’t always communicate in a world they are beginning to realize they have very little agency in. “The Terrible Two’s”. Mass culture has barely progressed from toddler-hood emotionally. As our addictions fall away, the inner tyrants emerge.
Mass North American culture currently looks like a power addicted toddler entering withdrawal with codes to the nukes desperately screaming for anyone to blame, punish, or get us back under the drug.
We have been taught to want and gratify our wants.
We have learned to confuse our wants with our feelings.
When a politician or a social media algorithm can harness our wants with the intensity of our unconscious feelings, we grant them a potent arena in which to reflect and shape our experience of reality back at us.
If “I think therefore I am” has had devastating ramifications on our personal and collective embodiment, than populist relativism is wreaking new havoc with “I feel it therefore it is reality”.
Uninterrogated relativism is a core ingredient of Post-truth. This phenomena reached new levels of normalization and cultural authority with the election of Donald Trump. His administration can re-name lies as “alternative facts” and dismiss verifiable data as “fake news” without judicial repercussions (thus far). When truth, facts, words, and ideas become separated from meaning and consequences, our experience of collective reality and the foundations of our judicial and democratic systems fracture.
However horrifying the normalization of Post-truth may be for some, this horror, or surprise, is also a signifier of how much privilege an individual has experienced via mass culture. The individuals and communities who have been systemically oppressed on the socio-economic, racial-ethnographic, ability, gender, and queer spectrums have been navigating the schism in “collective reality” and meaningless notions of justice for centuries. Despite still being hit the hardest by this recent collapse, they rightfully contextualize that nothing about it is surprising.
Post-truth is also manifesting in some disturbing hyper mutations via call-out culture on overdrive. Power and privilege need to be challenged and redistributed, and we need individuals and groups challenging institutions and each other, but when we move into a climate of discourse that wields post-structuralism with the righteousness of the Spanish Inquisition on cocaine, it becomes supremely challenging for anyone to engage in discourse or action.
And so the Left, unable to agree on anything--since no one's experience of the world can ever be the same, will continue to stagnate.
~
People say theatre is dead, journalism is dead, democracy is dead, and god’s been dead for a while now. Yet I see the evidence of them all—just playing out in the wrong arenas, causing bizarre, chaotic, and surreal transmutations. Democracy has become spectacle--a reality tv show on the scale of greek tragedy, a lot of theatre has become 3D enactments of journalism or democracy, while the ‘democratization’ of the media has yielded everything from mass collective activism to anarchic cyber warfare. And the ease with which we can curate our own op-ed political realities and individual mythologies re-deifies the ‘I’ as god.
In Post-truth culture I see a lot of theatre artists rushing in to resist the fracturing of reality by attempting to put reality onstage. This ‘reality’ is sometimes expressed though journalistic art, documentary style dramas, ‘verbatim’ theatre, naturalism, and educational works. I’m troubled anytime an artist offers me these things in a theatre because reality, morality, knowledge, authorship, and aesthetics are the very things live performance is supposed to interrogate, complicate, problematize, and subvert.
~
Live performance is a time based medium that unites all art forms within it. It is a metaphor for society because it takes at least two live bodies in order for it to happen, and usually requires a lot more people than that working together towards a common, albeit evolving, goal. The language of theatre is symbol, because the theatrical contract is a paradox. If the offered symbol on stage has enough poetic precision, I suspend my disbelief and accept it as true. I hope that theatre and performance, like all travel, will challenge me with a new perspective from which to experience my life, the lives of others, and the universe.
To enter a performance space is to enter the eternal void present within ourselves and the known universe. It is to step into the mystery of being alive. The stories we tell are maps and compass points we can use to locate the scope of humanity within the eternal void. I make and desire live performance that reaches towards the eternal because that is the scale of art that wakes me up and keeps me alive.
Artists are not policy makers. We can seek to provoke, affect, invite, caress, and explode, but the moment we begin thinking that art can stand in for policy, reality, morality, journalism, education, justice, (sanity?) we reinforce the dangerous habit of creating band-aid solutions to be rallied around nowhere near the actual wound. The empowering aspect of art can be a powerful tool of complacency. We can feel good about how badly we felt witnessing injustice in the theatre, while still doing nothing about the injustice happening outside its threshold.
I am wary of any artist with an answer—even answers about what kind of art is needed right now. I am wary of this piece I’ve written. I have suspicions. Questions. Theories. Observations. Dreams. Nightmares. Stories. Illusions and symbols. Because that is my job.
As Post-truth continues to fracture reality and more and more people either wake up or go further under the haze, I perseverate on images of fracture, rupture, and breaking points.
When something is breaking my body begins to tense and I zero in on the sensation. To counter the energy threatening to unleash outwardly, my body counters inwardly with a force and desire that comes as breathlessly as hope.
Where there is no beauty there is the memory of beauty.
Where there is no memory of beauty there is the dream of beauty.
Where there is no dream of beauty there is the idea of something that is other than ugliness.
Break open if it is breaking, break open.
