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

Hamlet, directed by Richard Schechner at the Performing Garage in
New York. I often used the rasa karuna (grief/anguish/compassion).
Here’s a description from my rehearsal notes about what it felt like to
experience karuna:
I breathe in karuna, taste it, smell it. [. . .] My body folds on the first
long exhale as my knees sink to the ground, my belly tightens and
rounds my spine/my throat tightens/my breath heaves/my head bows
[. . .]. One hand reaches up to cover my eyes while the other supports
the rest of my weight as it drops further into the floor. I breathe in the
karuna that is all around me. I sink into the feeling, my eyes well up
with tears. I want to surrender my breath to the openness and expanding
relief that sounding this pain would bring. [. . .] I tighten and fight
against that feeling of vulnerability and exposure. The sound squeezes
out anyway, a high keening noise. I breathe again and my mind rifles
through the baggage of remembered and created associations I have
with this feeling: A muscle memory? An emotional imprint? I can see
the image of myself here on the floor. Then I see myself set out on the
ice floe. [. . .] Then mourning the death of my father.
Now I am playing a bit of Ofelia’s “mad scene”:
rasaesthetics 367
The tears stream, I seek relief by crouching closer to the floor, squeezing
my guts trying to support an insupportable sorrow. [. . .] The experience
is as if it were happening to me, karuna is moving me according to its
demands. I am not taking myself on an intellectual journey through my
own personal psychology, to remember a time when I felt a similar
feeling, though those memories may surface while I am working. I am
simply and completely connecting with the rasa, working in relationship
to the rasa, from the outside until it is the inside and back again.