Page 119 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II
P. 119
There’s a Wilding Inside: Theater, Ritual and Biophilia*
Karen Malpede
I am a writer and director of plays. Increasingly, I think of my theater as post-
tragic, written in the most dangerous times known to sentient creatures, when the
tragic reversal from good fortune to bad is perhaps already the inescapable
trajectory. Written on the precipice of climate and perhaps also nuclear disaster
(the first, as at Fukushima, could set off the second or vice versa), written with
intent of pulling us away from blind obedience to this ominous fate. Written to
allow a glimmer of clear sight in which we grasp the inevitability of the crisis even
as we act to shake it off.
As a playwright, I am keenly aware of the ritual source of ancient drama. Gilbert
Murray, the great classicist, relates a “tale from Pausanias, that when Aeschylus,
as a child, was put in a field to watch the grapes and fell asleep, Dionysus
appeared to him and commanded him to write tragedy. When he woke up he
tried and found it quite easy.” From which we may conclude not that writing
tragedy is simple, but that there is an inviolable connection between nature and
creativity, between human nature and biophilia, our love of world. Wishing to
retain connection to that same earth-centered impetus I begin by asking what
sorts of actions can I put on stage that might allow contemporary people to
engage in experiences that would help us face our dangerous reality. How might
the intensity of the ritual passage be reinvented so that modern participants are
brought to conscious reassessment of our place in the web of life?
In the back-and-forth exchanges between characters facing the extremes of
modernity, an intensity of thought and feeling might be reached that allows
expulsion from the collective mind of wearying numbness, a breaking-through to
a vision, momentary, fragmentary, nevertheless real and embodied, of a dance of
life, a returned embrace—a connectedness to others, to natural forces, and to
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