Go into the other

I said in the last post that we need to make something comprehensible for a whole bunch of different people with completely different ideas about stuff.

Let's think through the first problem that arises when the question is asked: "How do we make theatre that is 4 every1?"

B/c theatre is only for a few people, usually they are of a certain category which gets defined by the theatre and the world it exists in. This is how it works, it divides people up and then talks only to certain people and excludes the other people. The tools for this division are usually:

1) Language (includes all form of language, including gesture, sceneography, cultural reference, technology)
2) Physical location
3) Price

Physical location is solved b/c I am going to everywhere to perform the show.

Price is solved because I perform for free or for small fee or in exchange for conveniently given niceties which are no skin off anyone's nose like a place to sleep or a little food or transport.

So there is just this third one of Language which is potentially unsolvable. Because although every theatre thing which is good has transcended language somehow, I have never seen a really "pure" bit of theatre which did not rely at least a little bit on exclusion of the "other". I don't think it exists, even though it has been a project for theatre for a long time.

I don't want to exclude the "other" I want to go to the other place and let's make theatre there, let's make theatre about it.

So it seems the first and maybe only real problem of this theatre can be summarised in the following:

"How do we make theatre that leaps over language?

A few possible solutions arise. The most obvious one is this:

1) We can be limited to language that's universally understood, like certain English words, or phisical gestures, or abstract forms like music or images, Jung or would call them "archetypes".

But there are a couple of other interesting options.

2) We attempt a performance without language
3) We can build a new language together with each audience
4) We can "not perform" (or "un-perform" or "refuse to perform")

5) We can make something that is incomprehensible to everyone

This runs against the usual authorship thing that's done by theatremakers which is:

"I am the master"
"Here is my show. It's great"
"Now I will teach you"

And in some ways this is the an attack on that colonial idea.