A theatre director and high school mentor of mine said that her job as a director was easy: “I just find talented people and let them do their thing.”
Rather than imposing an artistic vision, she saw her directing as facilitation, drawing out the inner talents of each of her team members to cooperate together and create a piece of art from their shared visions.
Such an image of “The Good Director” might seem natural to Ignatian-formed imaginations. Rather than being imposed from without, the “will of God” or “divine plan” or artistic vision is discovered cooperatively, through attentiveness to our own interior life and to the unfolding story of God’s love in our history.
I felt I was imitating this example of The Good Director when Mike Jordan Laskey asked me to lead theatre games at the recent Ignatian Creators Summit. Because, immediately, I asked George Drance, SJ, a master theatre-maker, to help me lead theatre games. (If The Good Director acts a bit like the confounding Dishonest Steward from Luke’s Gospel that priests around the world were forced to preach on a recent Sunday, so be it.)
I described to George what I hoped the theatre games could bring to a group of (one can assume) intellectual, achievement-oriented, spiritual creative Ignatians in one room. He devised a plan to lead some quick Viewpoints exercises with our team.
Viewpoints, we thought, would be a new thing for most of our group. And we wanted to surprise them, to access that creativity that comes from our most instinctive, physical creativity. While theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar analyzed the theological implications of Konstantin Stanislavski, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre and method of emotional and psychological realism that defined most of 20th-century acting, Viewpoints has not enjoyed the same theological exploration.
Viewpoints has its origins in the experimental Judson Church Theatre on Washington Square Park in New York City. The group convened painters, filmmakers, composers and dancers to find postmodern forms of artistic expression that were “liberated from psychology.” One of their group, the choreographer Mary Overlie, introduced these Viewpoints to theatre director Anne Bogart, who developed them for theatrical performance. While Method acting interrogates a characters’ objectives, motives and emotional state, Viewpoints begins creative exploration from the physical environment and the reality of our bodies’ interactions in and with space.
The nine Viewpoints that most exercises use are: spatial relationship, kinesthetic response, shape, gesture, repetition, architecture, tempo, duration and topography.
For example, George instructed a group of participants, who were walking randomly, like atoms pinging around in space, to find “empty space” in the room and walk toward that empty space with the intention of filling it.
The goal of Viewpoints is to ask the overly analytical brain to take a rest and let other forces in our bodies and minds take a front seat.
Already you can see a deepening awareness of spatial relationship — where am I in space? Where am I not? What space is filled? What space is empty — and a kinesthetic response, an impulsive movement, drawing your body to the empty space. “Don’t think, just do,” could be a good summary of kinesthetic response.
The goal of Viewpoints is to ask the overly analytical brain to take a rest and let other forces in our bodies and minds take a front seat. Participants in our Viewpoints exercises noted that there were remarkably few collisions between participants pinging across empty space. Our bodies have their own instincts, intuition and wisdom that we may not always drawn on, but can allow us to work together with our fellow performers in a fresh, surprising ways.
Walkers were invited to “find windows and doors” — that is, gaps between two other walkers — and run through them. They were asked to follow someone secretly and to make an equilateral triangle with themselves and two other walkers.
These exercises sound silly, perhaps pointless. And that is, indeed, part of the exercise.
The Third Method of Prayer Ignatius suggests in the Spiritual Exercises is prayer said in concert with our own breath: “so that only one word be said between one breath and another, and while the time from one breath to another lasts.”
We spend a lot of time not breathing deeply in our day-to-day lives. We spend a lot of times in our anxious brains and in our eyeballs, staring at screens or scanning traffic on the road. The goal of Viewpoints is to get back in touch with our breath, to get back in touch with the rest of our body below the eyeballs.
The Third Method of Prayer Ignatius suggests in the Spiritual Exercises is prayer said in concert with our own breath: “so that only one word be said between one breath and another, and while the time from one breath to another lasts.”
This sort of prayer highlights our soul’s connection to our bodies; it make our body’s work — breathing — itself a part of the prayer. It emphasizes that the spiritual life, where seeking after God is not something that is opposed to our nature, but rather perfects it. The world — our bodies, our breath, our kinesthetic response — .is meant to glorify God. The means to perfection lie already within us. Perhaps sin is that which sunders us from the breath God gave us, that divides soul from body and twists relationships. Perhaps putting the divine vision into action means discovering our breath and body as part of it.
I have always found that collaborating with others in these kinds of Viewpoints exercises is remarkably refreshing and rewarding. There’s an ease and an excitement that suggests that our bodies were, perhaps, made to work with one another. There’s a sense of possibility — tasks that may seem impossible to do when thinking with our problem-solving brains are easily achieved together. Could I explain how we did it? Not really. As we love to say in theology — it’s a mystery.
One participant told me, after the exercises were over, and the 30-some people stood facing each other in a circle once again, they looked around at everyone in the circle and felt: I trust you completely. It wasn’t a decision that led to their sense of trust, it was spending 30 minutes in silence, actively trusting, putting our bodies in space next to one another, making shapes, running around, being silly, working together to do nothing else but work together, communicating without words that built a sense of trust.
So, I invite you, the next time you are feeling uninspired, perhaps a bit disembodied, tempted to believe that you are Descartes’ floating brain in a vat, take a moment to feel your breath move in and out of your body. Perhaps you feel this way right now. What might happen if you placed your hands on your lower abdomen and felt your breath expand down? What if you felt your breath expanding your lungs and collapsing for several seconds?
What is the tempo of your breath? Its duration? Can you speed up the tempo? Expand the duration? What does that feel like?
Where are you in space right now? What other bodies are in space near you? What would happen if you secretly began following them? If you found windows and doors and walked through them, excitedly, without thinking, as though your body were being pulled through them.
I invite you, the next time you are feeling uninspired, perhaps a bit disembodied, tempted to believe that you are Descartes’ floating brain in a vat, take a moment to feel your breath move in and out of your body.
Taking my own advice, I just tried to make an equilateral triangle with my cat and an ant she was stalking in the kitchen. Her kinesthetic response was to zoom away from me, loping into the living room.
We may be pilgrims on this earth, but we are not foreigners to nature. What stories, silliness, play or wonder what might we unlock by making like the cat and bounding off into the empty space?