Singular Moments of Being

In a recent interview, the actress Tilda Swinton, when asked what she looks for in a script or a project, said, “I feel I am much less interested in story than I am in experience, and in atmosphere.”An overused trope or buzzword in the American theatre is about how our primary job is to tell stories. This shorthand description of what we do has become a cliché and has almost lost its meaning. Of course, humans are inherently storytellers. We create narratives to make sense of the existential blips and bleeps of our daily lives. The construction of narrative, in conjunction with the attendant feelings and the emotions, generated in the receiver, is what leads to the creation of shared meaning and culture. But I feel that the act of storytelling only scratches the surface of what constitutes a powerful artistic experience.A great storyteller begins by casting a spell, by playing with the audience’s expectations, by manipulating time, by employing musicality and repetition, rhythm, and sensation. The storyteller knows that it is imperative to appeal to the subconscious and set up an emotional connection with the audience, stimulating both the sensory and the cognitive. Some carefully chosen information is purposefully withheld and is handled as artfully as what is included. The best narratives are polysemous: rich in complexity, openness, self-doubt, conflicting arguments, hope, and human warmth.But how do we construct experience and atmosphere in the theatre?I was sixteen or seventeen years old when I first encountered Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel To the Lighthouse. What happened to me, while reading, had a tremendous impact upon my life and ultimately determined why and how I engage in the act of directing both theatre and opera. Buoyed by Woolf’s words, sentences, and paragraphs, I gradually felt drawn upwards, lifted into what felt like an ethereal atmosphere. And then, suddenly, abruptly, about three-quarters of the way through reading the novel, at what seemed to be a sudden and precise moment, I was released. I tasted the sensation of freefall into a web of feelings and perceptions that I had never experienced before. The act of reading had done nothing less than alter my habitual sense of time and space and introduced me to what Virginia Woolf described as “singular moments of being.”Woolf’s novels are renowned for their innovative narrative techniques, including stream-of-conscious narration, shifting perspectives, and the exploration of subjective reality. Through its lyrical prose and introspective storytelling, To the Lighthouse provokes a meditation on memory, loss, and the fleeting nature of human experience.Later I reflected upon the moments of flight and ecstasy that I lived through while reading and wondered if by dropping me, by releasing me three quarters of the way through the novel, Virginia Woolf had somehow trusted me, the reader, to proceed further on my own, without her close guidance.The experience of reading To the Lighthouse and other books by Virginia Woolf marked me and determined my direction in life. As a theatre director, I attempt to recreate for audiences precisely what I felt then as a teenager while reading. I try to construct worlds in which I initially guide the audience, only eventually to set them free to experience the thrill of emotional free fall. My task is to create the conditions in which an audience can vibrate on a similar emotional frequency as the characters. I build the tarmac for the airplane to take flight. The plane rushes headlong forward only to be flung upwards and into space for the ariel journey.But what have I done with my life? Thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all those plates. Little strips of old flannel. Oh, of course, she would say, I have had William; I have had children; and as she mused, she held herself deep down into that bright space, and even when she said, “oh yes, William,” of course she felt herself caught up in the maze of his meshes, like a fly in a spider’s web.(To the Lighthouse)Every time we rehearse a play, we are constructing an alternate or parallel universe. Each production requires its own logic, rules, and laws of gravity, and yet must also, simultaneously, feel familiar and intersect with the tangible realm that we inhabit in our daily lives. In rehearsal, we simultaneously apply excitement and restraint. We build, we layer, we arrange and rearrange to find the exact balance of harmony and dissonance. In composing the sound, light, and spatial design, we hope to create the conditions for the audience to experience singular moments of being. We can stretch out time within any common interaction, and we can allow each object, each moment, each character to become thicker and more meaningful. We widen moments of being. We stretch regular rhythms of speech into poetic meters and transform common objects and encounters into metaphor. We turn ordinary people into vulnerable heroes. We extend, we reach, we elongate, we broaden, we distend, we unfold, we expand.In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf proposed that fiction derives its beauty from its ethereal, almost transcendental appearance. She wrote, “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly, perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”Perhaps it is useful to compare what we do in rehearsal to how spiders construct their webs.Recent scientific research discovered that spiders use their webs to sense and to think. A web is an extension of the spider’s thought process and an essential part of its cognitive apparatus. As spiders weave, they show foresight, planning, complex learning, and even the capacity to be surprised. A spider’s thinking is interwoven into its web, which can be seen as an extraordinary form of consciousness.Directing a play in the theatre is like a spider constructing a web because both processes involve complex planning, precise coordination, and interconnectedness to create a cohesive and functioning structure. Both a spider constructing a web and a theatre director staging a play with actors and designers require creativity, precision, and a holistic approach to realizing their goal.Spiders use their webs to catch food, for protection, for reproduction, for circumnavigation, and even for communication. Through the vibrations on a web, spiders can signal the presence of prey, a potential mate, or an intruding predator. The scientist Markus Buehler and his colleagues at MIT recently translated the structures of spider webs into new music compositions. They did so to help them to better understand how spiders spin their complex creations and how they communicate. “Spiders have very keen vibrational sensors,” said Professor Buehler. “They use vibrations as a way to orient themselves, to communicate with other spiders.”Spiders do not follow any pattern or design, but make their webs based upon their immediate needs. Each thread is connected to another, creating a cohesive and resilient structure. If one part of the web is disturbed, it effects the whole system. This reflects the nature of the construction of a theatre production where each element is interconnected. The actors’ performances, the lighting, the sound, the architecture, all are tuned and in concert to create a unified whole. A change in one area influences all the others.In rehearsing a play, we are like spiders constructing intricate webs and/or traps. A spider web is stretchy, which is what makes it so strong. In the case of a play, the stretchiness is palpable both in time and in space. We build complex and intricate systems from simple building blocks. In our temporal and spatial arrangements, we construct flexible, elastic webs that can capture the audience’s attention and nothing less than the essence of a moment of life itself. Singular moments of being.Through Virginia Woolf’s novels, I learned that to receive these singular moments of being it is often necessary to lose myself. Released within these vertiginous new webs of experience, the borders of myself begin to dissolve. As I find myself in the web of something larger, my brain stretches into perceiving new and novel foreign terrain.Stories are certainly the conduit to these new sensations, understandings, and experiences, but the stories themselves are only the entry point. It is the treatment, the elongation, and the handling of these stories that lead to their intrinsic power.Nowadays, it seems that everyone claims storytelling as their primary terrain. Storytelling is in vogue. Every business declares that they are in the business of storytelling. But according to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his new book The Crisis of Narration, storytelling has been co-opted by capitalist interests and robbed of its intrinsic power. He calls this new commercialized aberrant version of storytelling, “storyselling.” Han distinguishes between information and narration. Storytelling, he says, has been robbed by the proliferation and ubiquity of information. The massive influx of digital content has created a deluge of data where bits of information quickly replace each other. The stories on social media do not narrate, rather they advertise. They display. The art of storytelling has been co-opted and transformed into billions of bits of information in the digital world.Storytelling, according to Han, used to bind us communally, connecting us to our past via oral histories and from generation to generation, allowing us to envisage a future. But now, streams of constant updates on social media no longer allow for rich and complex storytelling. He writes, “This smart form of domination constantly asks us to communicate our opinions, needs and preferences, to tell our lives, to post, share and like messages.” Intelligence, he says, computes and counts. Spirit recounts.The essential spirit, the DNA of the theatre, is to recount, to redescribe, to dismember, and then to remember. We cast our spider webs in time and space, inviting audiences into a realm that is at once slower, richer, and more complex than what can be found in contemporary storyselling. At its best, the theatre creates a space in which community can find itself and flights of fancy and poetry are possible. Narration allows for ambiguity and gaps wherein the audience is asked to take over the storytelling and apply their own associations and imaginations. Without spelling everything out, narration can create the space for multiple perspectives, lingering, and layering. Deeper engagement. Singular moments of being.