Living narratives description

Broadly speaking, traditional psychoanalytical approaches to understanding and developing character, plot and storyline no longer provides sufficient complexity to satisfy contemporary perception, and increasingly fails to reflect the world as it is. When reductive models based on linear causality inform the mise en scene (selection and organisation of all the elements on stage), the theatre fails to produce a rhetoric that engages an audience and leaves the theatre unable to partake in a contemporary dialogue.

This may be because the emergent patterns of any adaptive, living systems (from gene regulatory networks, to the human brain and the society it creates) represent the behavioural ‘meaning’ of those patterns in the ecological history of that system, and are therefore undefined outside this interactive context. Here we are aiming use such a framework to illuminate possible configurations and operations of theatrical narrative in an attempt to understand, if not define, theatrical narrative.

Description of event

On stage is a uniform circle of light projected onto the ground. Within this circle are 30, 40, maybe 50 people. Their tasks are two: (1) walk and (2) stay in the light. When viewed from above, the members of the group are clearly distinguishable, each following a unique path, seemingly independent of any other. When there is plenty of space (which minimizes interaction), no visual pattern is obvious, just random, chaotic motion. When, however, the illuminated space slowly constricts, eliminating the empty interval between the ‘performers’, this living system of complex human behaviour will not remain chaotic for long. At the point of ‘self criticality’, randomness will give way to self-organisation, and a global, dynamic pattern (an ‘attractor state’) will emerge, a social construct representing hundreds of individual, conscious decisions.

This general image is the heart of ‘Living Narratives’ that will be both performance and experiment; that conceptualizes and tests fundamental ideas in neuroscience, complex systems, and art/theatre; that communicates and explores – in a deeply intuitive way – fundamental principles, and then applies those principles to reconsider theatre and theatrical narrative as process.

Visuals from project

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