Last week I met Mr. John Spitzer, a theatre director who staged multiple works of Peter Handke through Fraudulent Production, an avant-garde theatre company active in DC for 18 years. Although the company doesn't seem to be operating anymore, he is still performing, directing, and writing. I met him as a part of the preparation for the upcoming production of "Kaspar" at my school in March 2011. While we discussed the play and Handke, one question he pointed out kept ringing in my head. This was also the question one of my students in the class 'Ensemble Theatre Lab' raised after 7 weeks of exploring "Kaspar". The question was, ' if something doesn't have a name, does it really exist?' This is an extremely curious question on many levels. We name things so that we can use these objects as references in order to communicate our ideas. So if we cannot name something, it makes us very inefficient. For instance, if we don't have a word for 'beer' and we have to describe it to somebody, how would we do that? "Can you get me that brownish slightly bitter liquid that sparks and gives you buzz? " The status 'beer' had under its name diminishes significantly. Plus there might be another 'thing' that fits this description. What makes 'beer' beer becomes quite nebulous at this point. Or what if none of these words I just used were available? Can I still talk about this thing and feel like it really exists? This phenomenon acutely points to our desire to define and be defined through labeling. What drives this desire to make things exist? Is that our fear? Last year during "Paraffin" rehearsals, one of the performers described that what's undefinable is eternal. So is it our fear of the eternal? Or is it our fear of disappearing and losing? In Kobo Abe's "The Wall", the protagonist loses his name to his own name card. His name card assumes his identity and takes over his life. The man who lost his name wanders around the city, not being able to claim his existence to anything or anyone. This story suggest the absurd nature of our identity. The only means to prove our existence comes from external definition. But if, if we didn't know that things are supposed to have names, labels, then we might not have such fear. We just exist and things just exist. The only way to get to know something is to experience it. The identity of the object is only proved by its own life.
Kaspar (3)
My friend Ryuzo Fukuhara told me what happened when he tried to make his students articulate their feedback after viewing someone's dance. "I liked this dance." "why did you like it?" "Her arms were ..." "What about the arms?" etc, etc. As he pursued the question, the student who was giving a feedback started crying. He explained that it was because something she had at the core resonated with the dance she was watching. She was just not realizing that until she was pursued to articulate her instinctive response. I was experiencing something similar to this episode. The play I'm working on now, "Kaspar" is about the possible reversal power relationship between language and thoughts. It is about the phenomenon of idiomized use of language. It is about the loss of subjective language and subjective reality. It is, really about human rights and freedom. I was starting to remember how my process of English language acquisition went in the past twenty years. In the initial stage of acquisition, I tried to speak like Americans because I wanted to reach that freedom which seemed to be there if I could only speak the language. As I acquired the language further and further, I felt more and more powerful. It was shocking how it works. All of a sudden, you rise from the inferior to the superior because you can speak the language. You become someone from noone. Pretty soon, language starts walking by itself.
There seemed to be a transition in my acquisition about the time I started exploring the body. I noticed that the accent I tried to lose so hard was revisiting me. And I was actually enjoying my accent. I was now speaking English from a Japanese person's point of view. I'm not sure if it was a survival instinct. Or perhaps it was the embodiment of my further inquiry about freedom. At the same time, I was increasingly interested in 'non-speaking body' vs. 'speaking body'.
When we lose the subjective language, we lose ourselves. We lose our subjective reality. But where does the subjective reality start? How much is our world colored by other people's thoughts? A Japanese body-worker I acquainted with said something intriguing about this. "What is thinking? Thinking is to apply yourself to someone else's thoughts." Ultimately, the question is, where are 'you'? And it has to go back to the body, the most immediate, where we hope we are, where we hope we feel our subjective reality.
Kaspar (2)
The more we get into the material, the more we realize how deep this issue digs in and how wide it extends. We started getting into the physical/vocal work. They can get hot easily, but can they get others hot without getting hot themselves?
Kaspar (1)
The Ensemble Theatre Lab class to explore Peter Handke's "Kaspar" started on Thursday. Fourteen young courageous student actors started this process with me. This is an extremely challenging material to deal with. However, despite my concerns, the students responded to the materials with deep, honest thoughts and feelings. I can't wait to see how this journey with them will proceed from here.