News

Large Human Collider

Thursday, 15 April 2010 09:20

I visited Geneva last week on a recce for a new project being developed for The Republic of the Imagination called The Large Human Collider.

It's too early to say much about the prospects of the project coming to fruition, but I really hope it does because this is really such a beautiful place to be.  Check out the view of the Alps below. That's Mont Blanc on the right.

The Large Human Collider interpretation centre, this big round thing, was closed, because it was the Easter weekend.  But I read all that I could about the experiment going on under our feet.  I understood about 1% of it.  Personally, I think smashing things together to see what they are made of...no matter how small and fundamental, is not going to reveal to us our true nature.

David Bohm, the quantum physicist and theoretician for whom it appears there is widespread respect among artists, but hardly any regard in science, pointed out that there were probably three properties in the universe - matter, energy and meaning.  This last one is problematic for scientists because it is we who form meaning in the way we relate to the other two properties.  Of course, this is the domain of art so we're all pretty comfortable with this.

So the Large Human Collider is an offer to work with scientists through Context Oriented Theatre to explore this 'meaning' property by searching for that which at the centre of our sense of meaning - the "I" thought.  Everything which has meaning to us we associate with "I", the rest is forgotten or not even perceived.  It is the dresser where we store all those phases we had while growing up, the dreams and aspirations; and stuffed into the bottom drawer and jammed shut, all those things we don't like about ourselves.

You can read more about the project here

New Look Website

Sunday, 08 November 2009 18:03

So here's the new look website.  Some of the same stuff but with added features and a determined effort to start a conversation about Context Oriented Theatre with the wider world rather than just in my head and with a few colleagues.  I don't want to be a kind of zealot, but I have a sense that this new approach is something that is much needed in the world today and has some kind of relationship with the greater movement in theatre, though right now I don't see it that clearly.

All the colourful graphics are from pictures from the exercises Journey to Now, where people draw the terrain they've crossed to get to the point of arriving here in this moment together in this new group.  I don''t know whose life paths they are but if you see yours and don't want it adorning my site...it having the extra intensely personal connotation to you, let me know and I'll take it off.  They look so beautiful I couldn't help recycling them.