You must be wondering…

What is CoArts?

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

Context Oriented Arts (CoArts) posits that the arts in general and theatre in particular because it most closely mimics our lived experience, has the power to change consciousness. Consciousness is changing from moment to moment naturally, but the change we suspect is possible through the arts is a profound and to varying degrees long-lasting shift in the way we perceive reality and our place in it. But it can only do this by focusing on the context of experience – awareness itself, and not the content – that which we are aware of.

This, of course, is a paradox because once one is aware of something it becomes the content of consciousness. So while we can use words to allude to what we mean by CoArts, complete understanding is not possible. As is often expressed by audiences and participants, it needs to be experienced and even then it is not easily explained.

CoArts has three facets – approach, practice and integration. The approach relates to allowing that grasping, that trying to contain and control what arises from context, to rest awhile. We do this by inviting ourselves to wonder – What if, all there is, is this? ‘This’ being whatever is happening inwardly and outwardly. Meaning that everything we are currently experiencing is just what it is and there is nothing elsewhere, nothing to be done, nothing to be explained. Also, what if all that is happening is not happening to anyone i.e. experience is not personal. It only appears so to a person who has as much substance as a character in a play.

By practice, we mean the construction and performance of CoArts – the doing bit. Here again, we encounter the paradox because what we are inviting is the possibility of ‘doing being’. In a way, theatre provides the perfect conceit within which we can pretend to be, which is what we are always doing anyway. Only in theatre, it is explicit. So what happens if we perform nothing or rather if we stand on a stage and in that magical pregnant empty space we allow ourselves to ‘be’ theatre.

The main method of performance in CoArts and therefore the main form of practice is Sensory Labyrinth Theatre (slt). Created as an applied theatre methodology inspired by Enrique Vargas’s ‘Poetics of the Senses’; slt ramps up the inherent but suppressed sensitivity of human sensory perception and the suppressed capacity of luminosity inherent in everyday experience.

Individual audience members journey alone through a darkened three-dimensional labyrinth and along the way encounter moments and meetings that provoke subconscious sensory memories (sensory portals) into which they are gently invited to fall. In accepting this invitation constructs such as time and space, me and you, the inner and the outer start to collapse.

Framed for the audience as ‘theatre,’ this space also takes on the added dimensions of the aesthetic space – memory and imagination: so that consciousness and this conditioned process of construction we call ‘reality’ can become an observable phenomenon – observed by the ‘character’ of the traveler in the performance.

Integration is another paradoxical facet of CoArts because the term suggests there is one thing that needs to acclimatise to another: a separate self that must absorb the expanded awareness, or vice versa. Some sort of closure. But there is no closure in CoArts. Chögyam Trungpa is famous for saying “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”  However, if there is a message in CoArts it is even worse than this. Because there is no one falling either! It’s something more like…

Do you want the bad news, the really bad news of the worst news first?

Give me the worst news first.

OK, here it is…There is nothing you can do about it.

So what’s the really bad news?

You have only one function - which is to gather evidence for your existence.

Hmm..and the bad news?

You don’t exist!

So integration in the sense it is used in CoArts is really an open question about what kind of society is created by this nondual consciousness? How does it function when there is a sudden and irrevocable ‘giving up the ghost’ of the process of gathering evidence for our own existence? When the spider disappears from the web.

In the current dualistic consciousness people are a function of environment and expectation. CoArts imagines what environment and expectation arises when there is no longer ‘personhood.’ The language of flow, complexity and quantum physics can perhaps be used to theorize about such a society. But how can it be built or promulgated and how is it governed? Just as Democracy emerged from the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece, CoArts posits that Rheocracy is its emergent property. Rheocracy is the chapter that is writing itself, the path that is formed by its walking, as we continue to experiment with CoArts as a community of practitioners.

What is the mechanism of CoArts?

CoArts recognizing that theatre is an externalization of consciousness and that participating in different modes of theatre brings about different kinds of consciousness.

The Classical Theatre, which most of us think about when we hear the word theatre, represents the Cartesian consciousness - where there is a clear separation between the observer and the observed, the audience and the play.

Participative theatre, such as the Theatre of the Oppressed, where the audience intervenes in the play in order to change it, brings about a pre-reflective or intersubjective consciousness. The spect-actor becomes aware that in some mysterious way that the quality of the attention creates the observed reality.

In Immersive theatre such as Sensory Labyrinth Theatre, there is no easy line that can be drawn between the audience and the players. The stage is everywhere and nowhere, so attention is distributed and the observer and the observed become one. The usual becomes the spectacle!

Perhaps a metaphor the physicist David Bohm used to explain the implicate order of the universe, can help explain this differently. Imagine you are watching two TV Screen in a shop window display. On each screen, which are at right angles to each other, there is a fish swimming. As you look more closely you notice that the two fish, one on each screen, seem entangled. Their movements are connected. This kind of window watching is like the Cartesian mode. In the classical theatre we sit in the audience and identify with characters in a play on the stage. The characters through ‘mimesis’ are reflecting back our own human condition, and we are ‘moved’ by them and we no longer feel so alone. Like the fish on the screen we sense a mysterious belonging.

Imagine now that you enter the shop and you see an actual fish tank inside with one fish swimming around. There are two video cameras trained on the one fish from different angles. The screens outside were showing the one fish…there is only one! This is the Intersubjective model. We realise to varying degrees that we affect each other because on some fundamental level we are one. In participatory theatre, when done skilfully, this sense of oneness, a sublime bond that is often called communitas, arises.

Now imagine the shopkeeper appears next to us and tells us this is a metaphor shop. Suddenly we are aware that we too are nothing more than a metaphor! This is the proprioceptive theatre! There is not even one. There is just the flow of everything emerging from nothing. Mind at Large apprehended directly!