4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

ethology and theater 249
Wilson’s in workshop was the game of follow-the-leader. Or he asked
people to pick up on rhythms and movements of others. He did many
variations on mirror exercises – but not in a mechanical way: people
improvised on the basis of mirroring.
I’m uncomfortable using the word “patient” for Andrews or for
Knowles who worked with Wilson on The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin
(1973), The $ Value of Man (1975), and DIA LOG/Curious George (1980).
Patient signals stigma, abbreviated or twisted personhood, while it was
by granting whole personhood – or even the enhanced status of protagonist,
of hero, that Wilson created the environment out of which his
extraordinary art grew. When working with Knowles on Stalin, other
performers followed him, imitated him, played with him on his own
terms: in this nest of experiences, people began to come out, showing
idiosyncratic aspects of their own personalities. The gap between them
and Knowles, and between each other, both grew and diminished.
Paradoxically, these deeply private worlds proved “universal,” a widely
shared repertory of actions, many based on recognizable versions/
distortions of ordinary experience slowed down or exaggerated. Individuals
showed each other fantasies they would usually hide or trash as
“unacceptable.” In the actions Wilson received from the performers he
worked with, the private, the social, and the species-wide converged.
Breaking away from the idea of a normative, single world-view, Wilson
opened the possibilities of multiple worlds coexisting and interacting
in the same performance time/space. Maybe this is only a late-twentiethcentury
version of traditional American Utopian projections. It certainly
has a pluralistic ring to it. But may be too it creates on stage the interplay
between genetically fixed (universal) patterns and culturally invented
(learned) ones both as recast by individual fantasy.
Wilson’s method has four steps: 1) creating a secure nest for the
protagonist, making her/him feel that her/his world-view/experience
is authentic and worth sharing; 2) playing with the world-views of
some, many, or all the other performer-participants; 3) integrating
these multiple world-views into the vision of the protagonist; 4)
subsuming all these to the over-view of the auteur, Wilson himself.
Spectators say that Wilson’s work is comforting, even healing. I think
this is because Wilson unfolds his images very slowly, evoking alpha
rhythms, “slowing” the brain down, engaging the trophotropic right