THIS MIGHT BE PERFORMANCE ARTS STUFF

Walt Whitman claimed that he contained multitudes and we all assumed that he was speaking metaphorically -- that he didn’t have some kind of multiple personality disorder -- but maybe the truth was neither.  Certainly the counseling work of people like Dick Schwartz, a founder of Internal Family Systems Therapy suggests that Walt had “parts” or “modes” or “roles” he could put to the front of his consciousness to suit the occasion.  Same as the rest of us do.  Few of us actually have the consistency of personality we pretend to -- all of us are different on formal occasions, or under stress, or a bit high either chemically or situationally.

When I work on my “Bone Chalice” project, which is about designing liturgical experiences that will evoke intense experience of meaning without any dogma or institution (most of us call that spirituality or the Sacred but one expert suggests that "performance art is liturgy for the unchurched"), I’m forced to think about what the “individual” human consciousness really is.  I’m trying to integrate the following list of issues and more.  What IS a person? 

1.  The unformed child

2.  The forming child

3.  The child who is traumatized or abused and copes by forming a separate identity or maybe several.  (This can be labeled “dissociation” but it's not all that “dissociation” can be.)

4.  The adult who has separate personalities in different situations.  (ie: at a party, at the store, playing an instrument, doing housework.  I’m big on jokes at the checkout counter, but not at home.)

5.  The adult who has split off internally into separate “named” people who are not necessarily aware of each other and often quite different.  This is the formal “multi-personality” person:  Sybil and Eve and all that.  More usual is an internal “no go” area that one doesn’t think about.  A cancelled identity. We could say "repressed."

6.  The person, adult or not, who while reading or watching a movie “becomes” the character in the story.

7.  An actor who takes on a character as a professional occupation.

8.  A person hypnotized and told to take on a different personality, maybe an earlier version of themselves.  Maybe a chicken.

Because a person is one physical body, we tend to believe that each contains only one personality, but this is plainly not true.  But this is a separate issue than the idea that the brain sorts sensory information at separate matrixes of neurons.  We should not think that one little spot in the brain contains one identity and another little spot contains another one.  Rather, it’s my belief that a brain is like one of those desk-sized light boards or sound boards of switches that manage electronic equipment for stage lighting or for recording music.  That is, the differences of personality are different calibrational mixes of resources available to all the personalities.  The only obvious limits would be curtailed sensory input (deaf or blind) or limited ability to respond (paralysis or missing limbs).   Personality belongs in the academic discipline of Performance Arts because personality IS a performance, not an entity.  It is what the entity can perform.

Therapy or acting training are thus so closely allied because both aim to expand the ability to perform identities.  Performing identity in a technical way by imitating a walk or a way of dressing is not the same thing as the internal creation of a persona, which is the true origin of performance subtle enough to signal authenticity to the onlooker.  This internal creation is best handled through the use of metaphor because it is an economical and natural way to carry “thick” meaning.

Now I’m going to make some flat statements that are really meant to be working hypotheses so they can be measured against established therapeutic counseling and acting training.  I’m going to include my ideas about maturation and social pressure.

I.  PERSONA  FORMATION

I propose that just as the earliest years form the matrix in the brain for sensing and organizing thought categories, the years of the adrenarchy (6 to maybe 10) are normally the period in which identity forms: the sense of who one is, how others can be expected to treat one, and what powers one has to affect others.  Abuse or neglect in these years are deeply distorting.

I propose that when the persona forms, there is a “platform persona” which is the “location” of that dashboard of possible responses, their calibration and cross-actions.  Maybe:  10% pride, 20% aggression, a trace of testosterone, a shot of adrenaline, and 50% protection” -- the result: a big brother.  This is sort of like those joke “recipes” for personality or love or success:  (99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.)   But there is a certain consistency to the patterns that is what we recognize as the person we know.

The Presentation Persona is the face one wears in public, whether meek or bold, animated or stoic, and so on.  It tends to be the aspect of ourselves that will get us what we want, whether polite, aloof, pitiful or seductive.

The Parasitical Persona sounds kind of nasty but needn’t be.  It’s a kind of borrowed identity or one that comes from one’s relationship to another person, maybe a parent or a partner.  One likes to be what one’s loved one wants to present or needs to depend upon.  We all begin as parasitical growths in mothers.  The Dionysis myth is about Zeus allowing his son to be a parasitical fetus in the flesh of his leg.

You could invent more kinds of personas.  So there are two tasks for the client or actor:  one is to understand one’s own “personality board” as used unconsciously and habitually.  The other is to expand or reconsider for future growth.

II.  PERSONA PROJECTION

Transformation of oneself into a new identity can be an occupational necessity, as for a surgeon or a soldier, as well as the stock in trade of the actor.  Social expectations will suppress the hostile minister, the wild child.

The Trickster is a cross-cultural character who embodies the ability to change from one identity to another.  Sometimes Tricksters bring a way of escape from an intolerable situation and sometimes they are simply con-men, swindlers.  It’s not the end result of transformation but the means of achieving it that is managed by the persona control board.

Personal conversion can be quite a good thing for the party concerned as well as for others, maybe for society in general.  But it can be confusing as in the stories like the old man who wants to be taken across a river but must be gripped and borne even as he changes into a leopard, a frog, a flame.  Proteus.  Sometimes a loved one goes through terrifying changes like that and then we have to hang on to them.

III.  PERSONA TRANSCENDENCE

Maybe this is the ground of saints and heroes, when people exceed themselves and all expectations, possibly because of extraordinary circumstances but possibly because of suddenly discovered and activated inner potential.  Or simply intense motivation.  Often it is released by the arts, but it could be kindled by any acquisition of skills and insights: science, law, human relationship as in originating religion.

These are thoughts just forming, still crude and tentative.

"OH, CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN!!"

Sam & Beulah Strachan, South Dakota schoolteachers

My grandmother, Beulah Swan Finney Strachan (1871 to 1953), could reel off poems one after another, dozens in an evening.  She came from the great era when children were required to memorize.  No doubt it was partly a shortage of books, a lack of radio or television, and many long snowbound Michigan evenings.  But also it was the era of oratory, elocution, and artistic self-expression by the “cultured.”  

I inherited some of her books from the pre-WWI era, novels for adults by Gene Stratton-Porter and for children by L.M. Montgomery, famous for “Anne of Green Gables.”  Both kinds of books had plots that honored the person who could speak “literature” of a high class nature, as illustrated in the Canadian television versions that had Anne going to White Sands to hear the famous actress recite heart-rending poems and even to deliver her own passionate and dramatic memorizations.  Gene Stratton-Porter, in her novel “Laddie” portrayed another ugly duckling of a child who entertained herself by “preaching” in the pasture alongside her pet rooster, whom she nudged with her elbow to provite a crow in lieu of an amen.

This is the context in which Alvina Krause started out, winning a contest for oration in her Wisconsin high school even if she WERE freckled, tow-headed, short and countrified!  (Her description of herself.)  It was the bit of culture that took her out into the world with a two year normal school degree entitling her to teach high school English and dramatics.  Oh, and physical education.  (She coached the Seaside, OR, high school basketball team to a state championship.)

The following is from a fascinating essay in “The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies."  It’s written by Paul Edwards.

Having begun my academic career in the now-vanished category of “interpretation teacher,” I suppose that I suffered “the misfortune of teaching literature,” as Jonathan Brody Kramnick (1998) terms it, “. . . in a moment when its founding rationale has been called into radical doubt” (p. 244). English elocution came into existence alongside “the appearance of the category of ‘literature’ in the later eighteenth century” (Guillory, 1993, p. 213). The age that gave us the English-language “classic” gave us as well a use-value for literature, a form of “cultural capital” (Guillory, 1993): the rise of “literature” helped to shape the public sphere and its protocols of communication. So did the performance of literature, which for two centuries (under various names) capitalized on the trained performing body as a communication medium. From its beginnings, elocution’s market-driven goals were divided and sometimes self-contradictory. Did elocution belong in universities or in trade schools? One of its audiences sought enrichment from belles lettres through embodied performance, while another (sometimes overlapping) audience sought training in the persuasive delivery of any text, as a tool for activism or professional advancement.  The manuals on elocutionary delivery that became popular in Georgian England contained training drills on shaping meaningful sounds and exhibiting through gesture the signs of deep feeling. “Passion for Dummies”: I find it hard to read these books and not compare them to present-day computer manuals, designed to help us with everything from simply turning on the “machine” to making us appear expressive for the widest possible audience.

AK’s facility for speaking took her forward, but it was not enough -- far too mechanistic and limited -- so she added the physical body, taking up the equivalent of elocution:  eurythmics.

Edwards again:  Elocutionary training attained its greatest respectability in American colleges and universities with the founding in 1914 of the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking—known since 1997 as the National Communication Association (NCA).  [Northwestern’s School of Speech is now its School of Communications.] Most of the association’s members, at the time of its first convention in 1915, were school teachers whose platform oratory embraced both public speaking and literary recitation.  Yet as “academically oriented” performers (Rarig & Greaves, 1954, p. 499) they were eager to distance themselves from the “rubbish” of popular platform entertainment with which the label “elocution” had come to be associated during the late-nineteenth century.

Not surprisingly, the two schools divided very much along the same lines as denominations, since schools and churches at the time were much entwined, using the same space for the same communities.  One was looking for dignity and scholarship (the aspiring middle class) and the other was looking for the passion that would move audiences (the vulgar folk).  Compare to the “learned” versus “enthusiastic” categories of preachers.

With the rise of performance studies associations from contrasting traditions, scholars like Richard Schechner (2002) have begun to speak of a two-brand model of performance studies pedagogy in American universities: with literature, as exemplified by the academic department at Northwestern University, and without, as exemplified by the NYU department.  

So the Interpretation Department of the School of Speech kept its attention on literature rather than theatre, though Alvina Krause had been crowded over to teaching acting.  (Her Dean informed her on Friday that she would begin teaching an acting course on Monday.)  Rather heroically, she gathered up every kind of humanistic thought she knew (heavy on the Greeks and the Elizabethans -- as were my high school teachers, the same age as AK) -- and set about teaching acting.  As time went on, she became psychologically separated from Interpretation and began to demand the same from her students.  (I’m guessing.  I don’t know for sure.)

The larger society, with its emotional connection to New York and Manhattan, was fascinated by the Method, which fit with their interest in the mysteries of psychoanalysis and the movement of acting to film.  By the post-Fifties people were more interested in movie stars than literature, except by the creation of writing stars.  Brilliance, success, admiration and honor was attributed to unbridled self-expression and soon we were plunged into the Age of Aquarius.  Then along came post-modern thought and overturned the boat so that we all had to swim for it.  Literature was the least of it -- survival was the goal.  What is print or live theatre in the face of television and film?  We were about to find out:  social revolution, that’s what !!  Naked people, sex, plotlessness, outrageous ideas, gaudy extravaganzas.  Possibly in reaction to that, along came the musicals -- at first appeals for social justice (“South Pacific,”  “Oklahoma”) and then pure spectacle and then (off-broadway) social criticism again.

Where does all this leave us?  What do we call this?   Performance Studies, that’s what.  And at NU Performance Studies have swallowed Interpretation but not Theatre.  Theatre is now the musical “industry.”  But also, Performance Studies have now taken on social issues.

This is probably not accurate and not even academic, but it seems to me rather explanatory.  Even familiar.  Like my grandmother, who so loved to attend a really good live show, the kind with skits and then a play.  And she was only in Portland, OR, not New York at all.