— It Endures

Every night, the lucky among us sleep somewhere sheltered, safe and warm. And when economic or social circumstances outside our control demand it, we don the conventional costumes and we leave. Preparing our exodus for food, work or escape, our preoccupation might be the security of our surroundings (“Cats fed? Lights off? How about the oven? One should hope. Plants look thirsty. Lock the door?”) But rarely do we envision this upstage exit as a performance. After all, we are shutting this stage down. We are destined for a new theater. So, how strange when the camera pulls focus on the threshold. And stranger, playing the audience to the act of our own parting glace.

The challenge

Take an everyday movement and create an intervention that changes that movement and transforms us into actors.

The approach

The movement is the act of leaving your house. When the door opens, binoculars rigged to a pulley system descend to your line of sight. Their position invites you to look out into the landscape, where you find a mirror. Through it, you see your own reflection as you are ready to present yourself to the world.

In recounting the ancient Chinese fable of Xua-Xua, Boal describes humans as able to simultaneously observe and perform as daily “spect-actors” employing verbal and symbolic communication. Unlike actors on a stage, the everyday performance is subconscious, done without awareness but not without effect. Consciously or not, the spect-actor’s behavior and appearance has been tailored for the situations and the audiences to whom we present ourselves. So in holding up the mirror to our own image, we are over-dramatizing, making a scene, using these phrases synonymous with reality’s distortion. As Boal distills this essence of theater, it is “the capacity possessed by human beings — and not by animals — to observe themselves in action” (11).

These situations constitute performance frames where the transmission of certain messages are expected, and transmissions of messages unrelated to the situation’s basic reality provide an opportunity for the evolution of higher levels of communication and meaning through abstractions of language and action. Gregory Bateson, in “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” emphasizes these frames are psychological constructs rather than physical or logical ones, so the swath of possible communications within a frame invites paradox (unlike the physical and unchanging picture frame or the logical and exclusive data set). A physical frame like a mirror provides a metaphor self reflection, and in probing to discern the details of our own identities, it is “as if” we shatter the reflective material that delineates the boundary between a basic sense of self and an abstraction of identity.

Whether on the street or under the spotlight, the frame provides a venue for people to move fluidly between different modes of participation. An individual may go from a willing bystander to an actor who dictates the rules of engagement.  This level of “wittingness,” a term borrowed from Sheridan, describes levels of awareness of the performance context. Here, recognizing the ability to control the binoculars’ appearance by opening or closing the door implicates the unwitting bystander as a witting audience member, one who is now aware and willing to engage with the established protocol of interactivity. Ultimately, the willful act of breaking the mirror with her mind is an act of frame construction, a transformational declaration beyond the cognitive bounds of the frame. Formerly a willing participant, now an actor with the expressive power and control to alter and author a new performance frame.