My Practice
Contemplation. life, death and the thin line that divides them. What comes before, how to
live the middle and most importantly, how to get past the end. I Join a long line of people who, for thousands of years have tried to figure these things out. It has led me here. Eventually it will lead you here too. For most of us it's too late. There's too little time to prepare for the inevitable when there's so many "things" to to do first, right?
Mission
The bit at the beginning is hard, but there's nothing we can do about that. You will scream your way into this world. The idea is that we don't have to scream our way out.
The middle bit is tough too, so much to learn and not enough time to learn it. Theatre, not the buildings, not the places with abig arches with plush red curtains attached to them, but the act of theatricality is one of mans greatest tools for understanding. We have used it for millennium to try and comprehend the middle bit, in all its facets. slices of it, handfuls of emotion, situations both brutal and beautiful, real and fanciful. Wild and free.
Theatre is born of ritual. Rituals that inform us, help us to live, understand who and what we are, help us become something else, something new. something deeper, more in tune. Rituals ultimately help us get through life with the innate knowledge that we will reach the end of this journey and we had better be prepared for it when we do.
This has all become clear to me through the development of my physical practices. Martial arts have taught me about ego and letting go. Acrobatics have taught the power of concentration, awe and wonder. They have shown me what spectacle can achieve not just in the practitioner but in the viewer. Theatre has taught me how to make this all relevant to the people. The people who perhaps haven't been led down the paths I've been led down but can't help but wonder what I wonder. The people who see a play, or hear a beautiful piece of music or dance and find tears in their eyes and they wonder, how can this be? it is not me going through this, how could it affect me so? This is the power of ritual. That is what I aim to bring back, even in a small way, to our culture.
That is my mission.
Vision
To allow life deep scope to be seen and felt by as many people as possible. But I don't want people just to watch it and be moved. I want them to MOVE! I want them to create with me, personalise their rituals and journeys. I want people to work. I want their feet to pound the floor and for sweat to drip off their brows. I want the power of ritual to seep into their bones. I want them to dance and Sing and laugh and cry and know that one day it will all come to an end and that that is okay because you will know that there is "other" that there are shapes to this physical universe that you inhabit in one way and there are places that you go in it in another.
My vision is to show people, to teach them what has taken me a life time to understand in a matter of hours, or at least jump start the process.
There are stories of people sitting at the feet of great sages and just by merely being in the presence of a being who has put in so much work to understand the "other" the "what else" you can't help but join them, even just for a moment, in the space they inhabit.
I am not one of these great sages. but I don't need to be, because the work does it for me. In the same way that an actor doesn't need to possess the genius of Shakespeare in order for his words to take your breath away, I don't need to be a great guru for theatrical ritual practice to be life changing.
It can work. I've seen it work. I've seen faces split into smiles, I've seen people weep. Ive seen strangers become brothers in a single session.
This is my vision.