The Holy Theatre

[I]t is the ceremony in all its meanings that should have dictated the shape of the place, as it did when all the great mosques and cathedrals and temples were built. Goodwill, sincerely, reverence, belief in culture are not quite enough: the outer form can only take real authority if the ceremony has equal authority - and who today can possibly call the tune? Of course, today as at all times, we need to stage true rituals, but for rituals that could makes theatre-going an experience that feeds our lives, true forms are needed. These are not at our disposal, and conferences and resolutions will not bring them our way.
The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and the critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony - whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals - but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. . . . And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep children good.
-Peter Brook, The Empty Space

When I lit Medea there was a profound air of the Holy Theatre about it. The space we performed in is a national symbol of Puerto Rico and holds within it a very strong spiritual energy. Every day we rehearsed, as the sun went down, building light cues into an all enveloping darkness. The fortress stands apart from Old San Juan, which itself stands apart from bustling modern San Juan. As the sun went down, we were so far from the lights of the city that the fortress became like a black hole, with every photon disappearing into nothingness. When we would stop for weather issues and cut power to the dimmers one might as well have been blind.

The darkness was palpable. The lighting, while very minimal, had to be incredibly precise. Lighting the show was like carving out of wood, and you could feel the push back that the darkness gave to every lighting instrument. El Morro did not want the light there. In order to get to the performance space, the audience had to cross a vast open field and then descend hundreds of stairs to get into the belly of that stone beast. It was like watching people on a pilgrimage, entering by the hundreds to see in a totally new light a place they had all been to many times in the heat of day.

Being deeply involved in the rave community in San Francisco in the late nineties gave me a special appreciation for the possibilities of the Holy Theatre. One group in particular would hold events in a fully functioning Episcopal Church. Their aim was specifically to use dance as a means of spiritual expression and exploration. The dance events would contain members from age eight to eighty all dancing together all night long. There would be, in a similar fashion to many Japanese cultural activities, an opening and a closing ceremony. These simple meditations would help ground the community and focus the energy for a brief moment on a single activity.

While there were similarities with the Techno Cosmic Mass these events had no particular spiritual path they advocated. Rather by drawing upon any and all traditions a kind of cross cultural dialog was set up. In much the same way that theatre can draw upon various socio-historical traditions from which it creates the universe of the play so too did these events create whole worlds, galaxies and indeed universes to explore. But these events, like any religious ceremony, ultimately act as catalyst to ones own life work. "In any event, to comprehend the visibility of the invisible is a life's work. Holy art is an aid to this, and so we arrive at a definition of holy theatre. A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make its perception possible."

I was looking through my copy of Century the other day. After a while I got this strange sense that I was looking at the same image over and over and over again. Sure there were pictures of joy and celebration, but it seemed more than anything there was war and violence and destruction. The killing instinct appears as strong today as it ever was. The violence and the existential depression that must exist to cause such violence feels like it is at an all time high. This coincides with the time of greatest achievement in human history. We have technological advances beyond anything even dreamt of a few hundred years ago. And yet we remain unsatisfied.

Perhaps Neitzche's victory in the death of God is in some way the cause. I am certainly not advocating the fundamentalism that runs rampant in the Middle East and Middle America. After all, that feels to me more the desperate acts of the faithless rather than a true spiritual movement. The abuse charges against Catholic priests do not point to a social structure that is healthy, no do the repressive tactics of the American Taliban. That someone would even consider treating a woman as pre-pregnant only points to the perverse objectification of the female body by a sick and desperate mind.

No the death of God is not to be found in the churches for God was never, or rarely ever was, there. God, or more precisely the spiritual center of Human existence can not be found in a building or a statue. Those may serve as technologies for aiding one in locating their spiritual center, but it never is the center itself. And that is where God died. Not on some mountain top or in some cave, but in the [heart-mind] of every man and woman who is unwilling to truly look inside themselves. It is in the silence between our breath that we discover our true natures.

Rumi said that only when the Mosques have been smashed to pieces can the dervishes come out and dance. The Buddha said to kill the buddha in the road if you find him. Perhaps in order to regain our sense of the sacred, to once again find our collective spiritual souls we must toss our golden calves back into the furnace to be forged anew.

Perhaps the theatre must die to be reborn. Perhaps we must die to be reborn capable of the tremendous duty the Holy Theatre calls us to do. We must cleanse ourselves of the dirt of conflict so that we may face the challenges of modernity with open [heart-mind]'s capable of anything we put our effort into. Perhaps the old temple of theatre, the gilt balcony and red curtain, are not enough to hold what we must do. Perhaps we must re-envision what it is that we can and must do and then search for the houses of worship in which to create this theatre of the future. The Holy Theatre reborn and given new life by a generation willing to step beyond the daily cycle of violence and aggression and truly step into a future of peace. A Holy Peace. With mankind living as a single organism in harmony with the Earth. A New Humanism and a New Optimism for this new millennium.