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Monthly Update - April, 2006 The British playwright and teacher Keith Johnstone, in his book Impro, tells the story of a psychotic girl who seemed relatively normal when she was with him, but "mad" when she was with others. One day, he had to leave for a few minutes, and he left her in the care of a schoolteacher in a beautiful garden. The teacher picked a flower and said, "Look at the pretty flower, Betty." Betty, filled with spiritual radiance (she had just moments ago seen God), said, "All the flowers are beautiful." The teacher replied, "Ah, but this flower is especially beautiful." In response, Johnstone says, "Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming, 'Can't you see? Can't you see?'" The studio where I was working closed down at the end of March, and I have yet to find another that will let me work regularly. Consequently I am working in bits and pieces, fits and starts, and doing my best to stay in touch with what I was doing in March until I can find another home. I have used some of this mandatory vacation to try and articulate what I am doing and place it in context. One word that came up strongly in this articulation was "nondiscursive." This word has a range of intuitive meanings for me, but I am struggling to more precisely define the "discursive": That which I am actively trying to move away from in my work. There are many theatrical elements that I consciously exclude from my practice: Scripts, props, design, social interaction, publicity, etc. Would it be right to suggest that all these are somehow forms of discourse? For now, I will use this newsletter to pose a number of questions about the nondiscursive. These are personal questions, and I am asking them personally of you. I hope that they will call up some new or uncommon thoughts. If you feel moved to respond to any of these questions in writing, I would be honored to see what you write. The Questions: 1) What do you do apart from words? 2) Do you separate specific places or times for wordlessness? Do you value the limiting or exclusion of words from certain areas of life? If so, why is it valuable? 3) Are there times when you feel the use of language to be ugly or even violent? 4) If there are places or times in your life that exclude language, what do they have in common with each other? Do they form a continuous domain or are they separate from one another? 5) Are you ever paid to do work that does not involve language? 6) If you are paid for such work, do the terms of payment require you to bring the work back to language at some point (for example by writing or talking about that which you do actually without language)? 7) How long do you or can you be without language? Do you ever schedule regular timed periods to be or attempt to be without language? 8) What is the longest you have ever worked collaboratively with a partner without verbal communication? 9) What is the longest you have ever been awake without thinking in words? 10) What is the role of language in your solitude? Does language have meaning for you apart from communication? Is there any aspect of language which is not social? 11) Is discourse the same as language broadly defined? Are there forms of discourse apart from language? What is social discourse, and is there such a thing as non-social discourse? 12) Do you distinguish some things as more real than others? If so, what things are most real? 13) Can language ever be as real as food? In what sense can art or performance be real? 14) Is technology linked to language? I look forward to hearing any responses you might wish to share, including silence. Perhaps next month I will post some of my own answers. Thank you. Ben Spatz April, 2006 New York City