Flux Theatre Ensemble

I've been writing about Presence on the blog for some time, trying to understand the power of the connection between actor and audience evolving in real time. I've been looking to neuroscience for at least a metaphorical grasp about what might be driving this unique pleasure, considering such ideas of Quantum Darwinism and Mirror Neurons, wondering what impact it might have on Casting Our Audiences and Thinking About Diversity.

Now Livia Blackburne on A Brain Scientist's Take On Writing looks at the impact of storytelling on the brains of both the teller and listeners. It supports some of the ideas I was exploring above, and furthers them with this fascinating discovery:

Some regions in the listener's brain actually predicted the speaker's activity, as if the listener was anticipating parts of the story. Later tests of listener comprehension support this. The more predictive activity in a listener’s brain, the better she scored on comprehension questions after the experiment.

The delight of anticipating the twists of a particular plot is something we've all felt; here, the research catches it actually happening in our brains, and reveals that those with the greatest anticipation - those on the edge of their neuro-seats - have the greatest comprehension when the story is done.

All my favorite plays have created these vivid expectations in my mind; and that special thrill of a plot's maneuvering - sometimes evading, sometimes rewarding - around those expectations is a unique thrill of theatre unfolding in real time, with our responses to those maneuvers feeding back to the teller and changing the telling.

Cool stuff to think about on a Tuesday afternoon... Read the full story

After some good comments from Ian and Steve regarding our last post, Playing Ball, I came across another great TED video regarding the structure and impact of game play.

Speaker Jane McGonigal designs video games that empower players to change the world. When you level up, the world levels up with you.

The idea of video games being a force for good may be strange - Iowa State University recently posted a study pointing to their deleterious effects, hypothesizing extended play may lead to ADHD.

But a recent study from Jayne Gackenbach reveals that game play may actually lead to more vivid, effective dreaming - a fascinating possibility, given Jonah Lehrer's recent musings on the role of dreams.

And whether dreams are good or bad, by the age of 21, the average American will have played 10,080 hours of video games. If that number sounds familiar, it's because it's also the number Malcolm Gladwell posits as the amount of time needed to achieve expertise in anything.

So America is producing a vast number of young, expert gamers: now what do we do with them? This is a variation of the question Clay Shirkey posed with his idea of the Cognitive Surplus - how do we make good use of the 3 billion hours a week we spend playing online games?

McGonigal believes that our gaming experts share certain skills and values they've honed over their 10,000 hours, what she playfully calls super powers:

• Urgent optimism - the desire to tackle a challenge immediately, with the reasonable hope of success
• Blissful productivity - gamers actually enjoy taking on increasingly difficult challenges
• Collaborative social fabric with fellow gamers
• Epic meaning - players really want to save the (online) world

How to harness those powers? McGonigal has created a series of games that involve players in real world changing role playing: a game where players must survive a world without oil, another where players try to avert the predictions of the Global Extinction Awareness System, a third that's about to launch where you level up through social innovation.

If these games are successful, they would represent a profound investment of Cognitive Surplus in real world change. And now the question is, given our musings on Playing Ball about the structural overlap of video games and theatre, how can theatre empower its players in a similar way?

I think the recent Laramie Project's 10 year anniversary event is an example of how this can happen - though local empowerment and national connection, Tectonic was able to use the natural strengths of theatre to affect social change.

And another, perhaps even more pressing question - what if instead of video game experts, the average American 21 year old had 10,000 hours of experience in the arts? How different would our country look then? Is such an audacious goal even possible? Read the full story

Why do we need to dream? In Jonah Lehrer's beautiful essay of the same name, dreams are much more than "neural babble, but are instead layered with significance and substance." The essay speculates that dreams serve three essential functions:

• Strengthening important memories by replaying them and linking them to similar past experiences
• Consolidating memories by deciding what events from the day to forget
• Juxtaposing new memories with seemingly unlike older memories to see if unexpected patterns and connections emerge (hence, bizarro dreams)

This last potential function is inherently connected to creativity. Our capacity as artists to see unexpected patterns and connect unlike things through juxtaposition is at the heart of the creative process. The essay shares several studies that link sleep to enhanced creativity.

And as Jonah Lehrer will be the keynote speaker for the upcoming TCG 2010 National Conference (disclosure: my employer), I wondered if we could travel a little further down this hypothetical road and imagine how theatre connects to dreaming and memory.

It begins with the evolutionary hypothesis that pattern recognition is essential to survival. Our capacity to notice unexpected patterns allowed us to better predict future outcomes. Over time, that capacity to understand patterns became so deeply ingrained in our consciousness (perhaps even giving rise to consciousness) that this capacity became pleasurable. It became what we call beauty.

Our capacity for beauty, for pleasure in the manifestation of a meaningful pattern or design, is linked directly to our capacity to survive. With apologies to Oscar Wilde, all art may be useless, but our hunger and capacity for it is essential.

Back to Jonah Lehrer and dreaming. One thing may have stuck in your mind while reading the above - if dreaming is so important, why do we have to be unconscious while it happens? Lehrer speculates that the conscious mind cannot relinquish enough control to discover unexpected patterns and let go of useless memories.

So evolution told our consciousness to take a nap. The wild and bizarre juxtapositions of dreams are necessary for pattern recognition and memory maintenance; our consciousness would hold on to the wrong things (if it was willing to relinquish any memories at all) and see only predictable patterns.

It's a strange thing: evolution would rather have us sleeping and completely defenseless than have our conscious minds solely responsible for the patterns of our memory. Sleep is like a stern parent, sending the conscious mind to bed so the difficult work and hard choices of assembling the self can begin.

Is it any wonder then we choose to sit in the dark and watch the pattern of a play unfold before us? It is a waking dream, where the artist assumes the role of our unconscious, but allows us to stay up late, juxtaposing unexpected connections and revealing unseen patterns, expanding our capacity to predict what may happen, helping us to remember the right things, and let go of the rest.

Read the full story

(This post contains some small spoilers for our upcoming production of Jacob's House).

One of the central themes of Jacob's House is Harold Bloom's translation of "more life" for the Hebraic concept of "blessing". Like Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Jacob's House also looks at the enigmatic sequence of Jacob wrestling the angel, asking "what would you do for more life"?

In this play, More Life is meant both literally and figuratively. Literally, the characters who inherit the blessing, Isaac and then Jacob, have extended life spans, living two to three times the normal amount. This blessing of long life also passes on to those closest to them, those who are marked by love and belong to them.

More Life also means the quality of life, a certain vitality and intensity of experience the blessing gives. Finally, it connects with the rich Hebraic notion of the Book of Life, with its questions of extinction, eternity, righteousness, and creation as an act of writing and erasure.

This particular vision of the blessing is both tribal and amoral; it is not wholly a question of right or wrong, but hungry or full; and in the pursuit of this blessing for yourself and loved ones, much is permissible. In this sense, the quest for More Life is a distinctly American one, and in Jacob's House, the Old Testament life spans of the characters stretch out over (and mirror) the full course of America's Manifest Destiny.

The play explores the cost of winning and keeping this particular incarnation of the blessing. How much struggle and pain is it worth to win More Life? What is the cost of taking and living it? You'll see this question answered by our Jacob's House and ForePlay - Divine Reckonings artists in their interviews, and their answers thus far have been fascinating.

These are deeply personal questions for me as someone who has always been death haunted. Almost every day I experience the vertigo of mortality, that black wave breaking over me. And so with our process of Jacob's House dominating my thought, I was thrilled to listen to this interview between neuroscientist David Eagleman and novelist Will Self. Please listen to it - though over an hour long, it is a funny, moving, and fascinating dialogue between two men wrestling with life and after-life.

Self's comic morbidity is contrasted by Eagleman's optimistic curiosity. Both marvel at a world that knows it will die, but acts as though it will live forever. They examine various possibilities for what an after-life might be like; they look at the cost of various incarnations of eternal life in the here and now.

In one of the most moving passages, Self promises Eagleman that his hopefulness will change when the younger man experiences the midlife crisis of mortality (ha, midlife!) The neuroscientist responds that his optimism is based in how little we know about the mystery of life; and imagines an aborigine with no knowledge of radio waves finding a radio, listening to it, tearing out the insides, and determining logically that the sound must have come from within the radio, because it ceases when the machine is broken.

Our machine will break; whether our tune still plays in the air or ends when the gears are out, I don't know. But in Jacob's House, three children deal with the legacy of a father who perpetuated that machine at almost any cost. I hope you will join us as we wrestle with the angel of More Life.

Tickets are on sale now; and as of today, there are still $10 tix available for opening weekend with the code "ELOHIM". Read the full story

Previously on this blog we looked at VS Ramachandran's 2007 talk on mirror neurons and phantom limbs. In that post, I imagined how the mirror effects that heals phantom limb syndrome might possibly extend to harmful emotional patterns in the mind of greater complexity, and that theatre, through its use of empathy, could heal these patterns in a similar way.

Well, in November of last year, Ramachandran upped the ante on us big time. NOW, VS says that if it wasn't for our bodies telling us constantly that we are separate creatures, there would be no difference between our experience of our own actions, and the experience of watching the actions of someone else.

Here's the video - watch it.

The ideas are revolutionary enough to need excerpting here:

"So, here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy. Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying don't worry, you're not being touched...

But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons.

And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense, all that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. And this, of course is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, And that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are in fact, connected not just via Facebook, and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness.

And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience."

What theatre can do is push us to the very limits of this dissolved barrier, to feel absolutely the experience of another human being as our own, while still maintaining the skin of our individuality. Read the full story

Three interesting things regarding the brain and how we tell stories:

The Transcendental Social: A Denmark study that found that praying to God activated regions of the brain associated with talking to a friend, reinforcing a theory linking religious faith to theory of mind, the idea that our capacity to imagine the intentions and thoughts of other beings was a defining cognitive evolution. In other words, our capacity for empathy may have led directly to our capacity for faith.

This led anthropologist Maurice Bloch to coin the term Transcendental Social:

Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," Bloch writes.

"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it," says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, "whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead."

It's not a big leap to imagine how theatre connects to the ideas above: the evolutionary need to live in the imagination as a means to develop empathy and balance individual desires within a social framework lives in the practice of theatre. The Transcendental Social may be a direct result of the cognitive evolution of what Arlene Goldbard calls Imaginative Empathy, and an essential part of the relationship of democracy and theatre.

Twitter and the Global Brain: Dean Pomerleau wrote a fascinating article about how Twitter is beginning to mirror the way our brains create meaning. Basically, the way synapses develop relationships is similar to how tweeting, retweeting and following moves information through Twitter. Dean suggests ways that Twitter could mirror our brains even more, reaching a semi-autonomy that would lead to something approaching a global consciousness.

This is an imaginative world, the Transcendental Social, on an enormous scale, with information moving and relationships developing organically in real time. However, this world lacks the Presence of theatre, and it is an open question if true Imaginative Empathy is possible without presence. This may be the essential question theatre needs to ask if it is to survive in a future where connection and story are only a click away.

The Baboon Skull: Michael Finkel's article for National Geographic about the Hadza of Tanzania gives us one possible answer. The Hadza are one of the few remaining true hunter-gatherer societies left. They practice no agriculture, have few possessions, they don't have wedding ceremonies or funerals, they don't practice any codified religion, they don't celebrate birthdays; they hunt four to six hours a day, and spend the rest in relative autonomy, in stark comparison with our over scheduled lives of social obligations (the article makes clear their challenges, though, trying to avoid romantic notions of what is a difficult existence).

But they do have theatre, and it is undoubtedly a theatre of Presence. Here is an edited account of Michael's version of a story told after a successful baboon hunt - read the whole thing here:

With the baboon skull still in the fire, Onwas rises to his feet and claps his hands and begins to speak. It's a giraffe-hunting story—Onwas's favorite kind...Onwas elongates his neck and moves around on all fours when he's playing the part of the giraffe. He jumps and ducks and pantomimes shooting a bow when he's illustrating his own role. Arrows whoosh. Beasts roar. Children run to the fire and stand around, listening intently; this is their schooling. The story ends with a dead giraffe—and as a finale, a call and response.

"Am I a man?" asks Onwas, holding out his hands.

"Yes!" shouts the group. "You are a man."

"Am I a man?" asks Onwas again, louder.

"Yes!" shouts the group, their voices also louder. "You are a man!"

Onwas then reaches into the fire and pulls out the skull. He hacks it open, like a coconut, exposing the brains, which have been boiling for a good hour inside the skull. They look like ramen noodles, yellowish white, lightly steaming. He holds the skull out, and the men, including myself, surge forward and stick our fingers inside the skull and scoop up a handful of brains and slurp them down. With this, the night, at last, comes to an end.

It is always dangerous to infer too much about a different culture, particularly from a second hand account. But the article does remind me of the importance of Presence to story, how it passes on the essential meaning of experience, how often our theatre fails to thrust forward that baboon's skull, and how exciting it is when that call and response reminds us what it means to be human. Read the full story

Two recent breakthroughs in neuroscience seemed worth reporting in the context of our work in theatre:

1. The over expression of a single gene, NR2B, caused a rat to remember things three times longer than her kin.
2. Individuals with a greater expression of a gene that regulates oxytocin score 22.7 higher on tasks that measure empathy.

Empathy and Memory: two qualities of personality central to the work we do in theatre, both linked in part to the expression of single genes, both now capable of being altered in our quest for self-improvement.

Of all the significant challenges facing theatre over the next 50 years, this is the one of the most interesting: if our capacity for empathy and memory are genetically enhanced past a certain line, will we need theatre as a cultural carrier of meaning and agent of empathy? If yes, will a new kind of enhanced theatre replace what we currently believe are masterworks of enduring beauty, reducing Shakespeare's work to drawings on cave walls?

And even if that kind of cognitive evolution doesn't happen, the moral questions regarding neuroscience need to be played out in the arena of theatre, or we will be like the playwrights of Universal Robots, handed a discovery with moral implications past our readiness.

On another note, are there plays that you've seen lately that are breakthroughs in our understanding of empathy and memory? They don't need to necessarily be directly about them, but find new ground for how we think about them. I'd like to believe that Rattlers and Pretty Theft both explored new territories of empathy: for Rattlers, how grief distorts our capacity for empathy; for Pretty Theft, how beauty does the same. And I think that The Lesser Seductions of History explores how we remember, both as individuals endlessly revising our lives, and as a culture, rewriting the meaning of the past to suit our present (in this regard, it is directly connected to Our Town and Universal Robots, two plays mentioned as kin that do the same).

One case that might be too metaphoric to make is that theatre is as much a laboratory of human behavior as the sciences, and as such, deserves funding for research that may lead to both dead ends and breakthroughs. But for that to be true, we would need to have some actual breakthroughs in how our theatre explores human consciousness - what have you seen that's breaking this kind of new ground? Read the full story

Readers of this blog will know I am an avid amateur of science, and unfortunately prone to drawing metaphorical conclusions from theoretical progress. This post will be no exception.

Listening to VS Ramachandran's 2007 TED lecture on what 3 unique kinds of brain damage reveal about the mind, I was especially struck by his work with Phantom Limbs and Mirror Visual Feedback (MFV) therapy.

I was familiar with the phantom limb, the sensation some amputees have of feeling the presence of their amputated limb or organ. I was unfamiliar with the experience some amputees have of a paralyzed phantom limb; a painful, cramped sensation that causes its sufferers years of significant discomfort. Ramachandran believed this is because the mind sends commands to the limb, but notices no results, and so through Hebbian Learning the sensation of paralysis is created, and can not be turned off.

Ramachandran's solution was to jolt the phantom limb out of paralysis with the ingenious visual stimuli of a mirror box. He had an amputee move their remaining arm within the mirror box, which created the illusion that the amputee's missing (now mirrored) limb was moving, and the phantom paralysis disappeared. The pain was gone. Even though the patient knew this was just an illusion, the visual stimuli, called Mirror Visual Feedback, was so powerful it released a phantom clench that had caused them pain for years. Ramachandran's solution is a balm to sufferers of this phantom limb paralysis.

Perhaps you see where this is going. There are some traumas that burn a pattern into the brain more emotionally complex than the loss of a limb, that are narrative experiential in nature, and so would require Mirror Visual Feedback of that narrative experience to release their phantom pain.

Theatre is the mirror box of experience (we know because Hamlet tells us so). And knowing that mirror neurons allow us to experience the actions of others as if we were acting ourselves, I wonder if one of the functions of theatre is to heal our minds from patterns of loss; that through empathy, we see our phantom actions mirrored, and feel our pain released.

This is like catharsis but not quite the same; I remember feeling this experience most keenly myself watching A Moon For The Misbegotten at PSF. Deep regrets and patterns of loathing I felt were somehow released from their clench watching Jamie Tyrone find unexpected forgiveness.

What do you think? Has the mirror box of theatre ever released you from a phantom pain? I think our upcoming play The Lesser Seductions of History may mirror the narrative experience of abandoning, or suffering the consequences of committing to, a particular kind of hope... Read the full story