Theatr Cynefin began as a Millennium Festival project called Cynefin 2000 which I started as Co-Director of Theatr Fforwm Cymru in 1999 in the town of Fishguard in West Wales. Working with Community Artist Mike Hotson we created a sensory labyrinth in an industrial unit with the folk of Fishguard. Many projects followed all over the world and in 2004 I left Theatr Fforwm Cymru to focus on Cynefin. Mike and I parted ways in 2006 and Cynefin became Theatr Cynefin and a limited company. In 2009 another organisation came into being, a network of 15 European companies that had...
“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...
My youngest son has gone through some kind of transformation over the last year. Previously hidden in his bedroom hunched in front of a screen all night, railing against the injustices of the world (not unlike his father), he now strides fresh faced into his adult life, upright with shoulders back…and rails against the left. Initial relief and gratitude at this metamorphosis changed to a terror once my son started to argue against Marxism and social justice. Had my son become a young tory? And so I set about trying to understand how he had come about this new map...
I would like to write about this paper and pen problem. It’s a curious sensation to write that sentence. In writing about the implements that allow me to draw these lines, I am rendering them abstract. Of course, I’m actually reading the original sentence from my notebook and typing it into the computer, a further abstraction. And the whole thing feels like an artifice and a paradox, like the sentence ‘I always lie and that’s the truth’. Such artifice succeeds to make sense only through the act of ‘unasking’ and it feels like we have become masters of it. Robert...
This is the only post about 9/11. I promise. So by now you might already suspect that I’m wearing a hat made of tinfoil and about to tell you that ‘That’s just what they want. They want you to think I am a paranoid freak.’ Perhaps it will placate your fears if I tell you that this post is really about mindfulness. That means the art of simply being aware of the present moment and what is unfolding within us at each moment without judging it. And context, which mindfulness leads towards like the river leads to the sea. Now put...
I've a confession to make. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a huge influence on my life. It convinced me as a teenager that life is an adventure and that I should be fearless in my pursuit of um...adventure. Another action movie that has now inspired new insight for me is the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, The Edge of Tomorrow. It a sci-fi movie that steals the Groundhog Day premise of a character having to live the same day over and over again. Cruise plays a cowardly soldier who is reborn every time he is killed on the battlefield, back...
Put yourself in a position of power. The kind of power - wealth, political or religious office or public adoration, that gives you influence over very many people. For most of us it is difficult to make the imaginative leap to do this, so distant is the prospect. A crude analogy might be to imagine you are playing poker against a table of players and you have in front of you an inexhaustible mountain of chips; or you are about to play a game of chess against an opponent who has one king and only pawns on his side of the board while you...
When Muybridge strung together photographs of a horse taken at different intervals of a gallop his aim was to settle a bet about whether all four legs of the horse at any point leave the ground. What he discovered, apart from proof that the horse was indeed suspended for a fleeting moment, was the medium that has become known as film. Separate images moving so fast in front of the eye as to deceive the mind into interpreting it as a continuous, unbroken movement. The function of Context Oriented Theatre is to use theatre to suspend the continuous movement of thought that...
My grandmother used to say 'everything bad comes from America'. I didn't agree with her, of course. But then I was young and foolish at the time. America then was just a few years ahead of us in the great capitalist experiment, given its natural resources and the devastation the world wars wreaked on Europe and Russia. Now, just like the great communist experiment that came to an end in the USSR in 1989, the Capitalist experiment is coming to an end. Only where here are the walls to be breached, the iron curtain to be torn down, the governments to...
There's an old Sufi saying that Hell is where you receive everything you want. Well how about the prospect of a shiny new, sweet smelling hell where you receive everything you think you want, because that thought has been implanted in your unconscious by the neuroscientists who have been paid to market the product that’s suddenly caught your eye. It’s a closed loop and a done deal for the market driven world in which we live and it’s already happening – Why Marketing minds have turned their heads to mind-reading by Hannah Kuchler in the Financial Times 12th April 2010 Hmm…I feel like I...
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