Lyrical empathy and Optimistic Humanism

Ideas are brewing over at MattJ's blog. We got to talking in comments and started to put forth ideas of moving beyond the deconstructive. This reconstructive art, built with the fragments of culture left after deconstructionism has gone home to rest, is part of the New Optimism. It is seeing a wasteland and building a Utopia.

Dorothy's Mash-up Theatre is one vector upon which this Re-Visioning can and very likely will occur. MattJ calls for a new empathy and echoes Zay's New Lyricism.

Form and content have both been called into question. A radical Re-Visioning is being asked for. We find ourselves, after the decentering of post-modernism, searching for a recentering. A new core. In a time of such turmoil where political discourse has turned farcical and no one knows which way is up, we need a new vision of art to save us. The soul of our culture has become corrupted, or the corruption that has always lurked has taken over. We must resist.

Perhaps this entails a new Humanism. A return to the basic Human form as yardstick for all analysis. Not in the sense of seeing our superiority over all other things on this planet and destroying them for our consumption. But rather appreciating the beauty of the Human precisely because we are part of a highly developed and complex network of plants and animals and earth and air and water.

A small show I am working on attempts a bit of what George talks about. Since the main characters are Gods or near to, we decided to try a lighting design that reconfigures based on who is on stage. Aphrodite brings her own light, Apollo his and so on. It will be interesting to see how it practically plays out. Of course we have very limited resources, but then at some level that is always the case.

Lighting is practically about illumination. But the design becomes a question of how, not what. How do we illuminate this scene or character. How do we see them. How do they see themselves. It is the light, but also the air they breathe, every inhale and every exhale. It is the sun or the moon or a lamp post, but it is also the energy emanating from the characters, made tangible to our eyes. The collective soul of Human transformation.