We are starting to look in more detail at how the mappa mundi TOOLKIT will suggest people work to produce their own drama from their own stories of change. This immediately brings up the question of the relationship between individual change and collective or social change.
Is the division between these kinds of change real? The optic that dramatic art offers is that we do not develop in isolation. We are a part of each other. We make each other. So it may be more truthful to say that change is experienced in different ways, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively.
The reason why this is such an interesting question is that in attempting to construct stories in a group process it is first necessary to explore the lived experience of the different members of the group individually. This is the only way to get at the truth of people’s perception of change. This means that people need to reflect on their lives. And they do this together in a group. In so doing they get a view of their lives as a story.
They are being asked, in our creative sessions where we are planning to formulate the guidance for mappa mundi participants, to consider what have been the moments of change in their life. As these moments of change are considered they are being asked to choose a particular moment. This distillation is a part of the making process.
In order for the story to be capable of being expressed in the ‘aesthetic space’ of the drama, in other words, for it to become capable of being shared, it has to be capable of being performed. So for the individual participating in the drama work the defining process, the distillation process and the embodying process happen synchronously. This process accomplishes itself with all the participants putting their story in front of the rest of the group.
Change is continuous and multifaceted. It becomes manifest though time and space. For example, in Taoism this all-embracing movement is called ‘The Way’. In one of the key books of taoism, the I Ching: the book of changes, this is expressed as a constant interaction of two energetic components, the yin and the yang. One facet of the yin is the yielding or receptive and this corresponds to the facet of the yang that is assertive or determining. Each of these components has different interconnected modalities.
So if change is continuous how can we find a story that can express it? We are in the midst of change and sometimes this can be expressed in biological, sometimes in psychological, sometimes in sociological, sometimes in ecological, sometimes in economic, sometimes in historical terms. For it to be expressed in dramatic terms it has to be actable.
What makes an action (or process or series of events) actable is that it can be embodied in the perceptual space of theatre. This means that it can be communicated in the ‘here and now’ space in which actors and spectators are brought together. We associate drama with moments where the rate of change increases or where a number of different facets of change come together. Of course there are dramas in which very little happens and there seems to be no change and events seems to be circular, like Becket’s Waiting for Godot but this example only shows that the expectations that are brought to a theatre event are a part of that event.
If drama is concerned with an increase in the rate of change in life processes then this is often expressed by the irreversibility of the events or perhaps by quantitative processes yielding qualitative transformations. These moments, of which stories consist, are like turning points, decisive or defining moments. In order to tell people what has happened to us we often have to find these instances.
So in the work of devising a drama video the first part of the work aims at putting on the specific stories of change from each member of the group. What form this ‘putting on’ takes is important. It has to be a distilled moment from each story.
The next part of the making process has to generalise these specific pieces. These specific stories need to be made into one story. The participants have to find a way of putting all the stories together in one story of change that captures the crucial movements in all the stories. It is this respect that Augusto Boal‘s work in The Rainbow of Desire (Routledge London 1995) is helpful. He describes, in a different context, how a group can be actively and collectively involved in this process.
I am not here going to describe what I understand these techniques or procedures to be. There are many suggestive ways of looking at this process. For example, if each individual story had a key image, as if there was a photograph of the key event or scene in the story, and you could superimpose all these images from the individual stories onto one another, an image that expressed what was common to them all could emerge. The common feature of change derived from all the stories could emerge.
This would then be the starting point for the next part of the making process. So it is that something collective is made from individual elements. This reflects the dynamic of the mappa mundi process. A changing image of a changing world is made up of stories of change from different participant groups.