(Section 9)
Again, the student has to be cautioned against using the western concept of time in the apprenticeship. A contraction may last up to a couple of years. Most last from two to four months. I am just using time here to prevent the student from getting depressed, overwhelmed, and discouraged. For most people, contractions appear to be everything crumbling around them. They despair. They give up. They choose something easier or more glamorous. They get sidetracked from what they want.
But the student now sees contractions are not negative. They are a time of burning down the underbrush so that new plants can grow. They are a time of pushing out the baby from the inside. It is a time of waiting, surrendering, hanging out. Even if you know all of this, even if you know it will end in a happy creation, while you are in contraction, it may seem sometimes to be an unbearable hell. This is one reason why having a teacher is so helpful. The teacher plays the role of the coach in the student’s life. He becomes the guide standing outside the illusions that the student finds himself in. The teacher performs the same role as the guides in the afterlife in the ancient Egyptian and Tibetan religions. These guides tried to lead the spirit who had just died through a series of heavens and hells to the ultimate freedom. This journey was full of pitfalls of deadening fears and seducing pleasures. What usually happened was the trust of the spirit for the guide was snapped by temptations in the heavens or the terrors of the hells. The spirit was thrown then back into a new life. This cycle was repeated over and over until the spirit could finally maintain his trust in the guide to reach complete fulfillment.
The student usually enters the apprenticeship in a contraction at the point of complete desperation. This desperation sets up the most favorable path because the person who knows he has nothing to lose is willing to throw himself totally into the work. He knows he does not have anything to go back to. This gives him a certain freedom. He can put himself totally into the teacher, the director, the coach, the shaman.
The student who comes into the apprenticeship before the desperation point or in a time of expansion usually has a much more difficult time in the apprenticeship. It is because in their frontbrain, they have pictures of things that they think they want and pictures of ways of getting them. Moreover, these ways may appear to be working. Because of the fact they are standing at the door of apprenticeship, it is obvious to the teacher that there is something in their backbrain telling them that the pictures are not real, the ways are not really working. Most of the work of the teacher with these students in the first sections of the apprenticeship is clearing these pictures and misleading ways out of the frontbrain, then keeping the frontbrain clear of new detours.
A common mistake is thinking you should be able to do this work on your own, by yourself. The mistaken logic has it that you are weaker if you have a teacher of living. This logic has it that it is far better to find your own way. Again, we have the rugged individualism ideal. This is an isolating trend that leads to frustration and powerlessness. As the recovering addict knows, to kick the habit successfully, you have to have the committed support and objective point of view of people who have gone successfully through what you are going through. This is because you are in a cloud of illusions. The teacher has been through what the student is going through.
To answer the question, “Can you do the things that we do in apprenticeship on your own?” the answer has to be, “Yes, maybe”. We have said the apprenticeship is a long and dangerous process. But when we compare it to “doing it on your own”, apprenticeship begins to seem like a shortcut.
I did it “on my own”. That is, I did not have a personal guru. The stages of “on my own” process overlapped in linear time, but I will give them here as separate stages. What appears to be a linear process of life is in reality a cord or a cable made up of threads braided around one another. Each thread is a separate reality. The inter-relationship of the reality threads cannot be understood by the frontbrain because it is dynamic rather than linear or logical. It can only be experientially absorbed through performances such as apprenticeship. Schechner defines performance as “ritualized behavior conditioned (and) permeated by play”. This is why the student should focus on doing and experiencing the apprenticeship rather than trying to understand the apprenticeship. This is also why for someone who is just reading this book and understands all the information and concepts contained in it gets only a sixth of what is absorbed through the physical act of apprenticeship.
Back to my “on my own” training. My process started when I was 13. There were five years of being isolated from the reality I was sitting in, not being able to communicate with anyone, except my family. Just watching and listening to the reality I was not in. Observing what worked and what didn’t for those people out there. Objective observing. This was an involuntary vow of silence and of transparency. This was a time of severe contraction, to the suicidal point. The information obtained in this stage formed the rock base for me. This is the purpose of contraction.
There were four years when I was guided out of the isolation into an in-between role in which other people could access information stored in me as an advisor. But I was not in the position to use personally what was stored in me. This period was marked by a series of short expansions and frustrating contractions.
During these nine years, there was an intensive reading of books of all kinds. Many were arcane and occult in many different fields. A few were old, rare books. The contractions made this possible. I stored all of this information in my backbrain and “forgot” it. When I needed this knowledge later in life, my backbrain gave it to my frontbrain. I didn’t know how I knew.
During the last half of this period, my backbrain started channeling arcane information directly from other dimensions when I was reading or lying in bed. It was like reading two books at once or watching a movie with the subtitles of a different movie superimposed. I was tempted to think I was going crazy.
I spent four years watching other spiritual teachers of all types. I learned the moves and the humor of the holy trickster and the focused power of charisma. I also saw what did not work. I saw teachers who tricked themselves into thinking they were the ones who were doing the magic rather than that they were the channels of the magic. I saw them getting sidetracked by wanting masses of students. This changes students into followers, and followers are always dangerous.
The teacher-student relationship is an intimate physical relationship needing continuous one-on-one contact between the student and teacher. The magical healing effect on the world comes from this private relationship between the teacher and the student. This is the way of evolutionary change in which the small affects the large radically on the subtle DNA level.
This runs against the western mindset that to effect change, you have to reach as many people as you can. Gurus started getting seduced into gathering faceless followers around them. Understand, teachers are human. They can be seduced. This seduction happened not only in the West and Asia, but also even in small African villages. This seduction made the word guru a terrible joke in the 1960s through the ’70s. I have found students need one-on-one contact with the teacher at least once a week. Teacher and student are lovers and family.
This period of my training was marked by several severe contractions which were desperation.
The last period of my training before I started creating my teacher identity was three years of direct channeling in the form of writing from spirit.
What I have just described is compacted into the first half of the apprenticeship. I left out the times that I almost physically died. Apprenticeship is a long, dangerous, risky ritual. But compared to “going it alone”, it avoids a lot of extra time, pitfalls and lonely fears.
I have done my public magic work under the covers of “performance art” because in performance anything is possible. A performance can last for a minute or it can last for days. Performance can start in one space but then move to another. Performance can be storytelling, it can be a guy threatening you with a baseball bat, it can be a guy hanging by his skin, or throwing food, or anything. In performance all things are possible. And that is what gives you an extra edge to create dreams.
Performance, like any avant-garde art ... as an aspect of magic ... is the way society dreams; it is the way society expands its freedom, explores the forbidden in safety, to loosen up. Society needs its dream art, just as an individual needs to dream or goes insane. Our moral majority society, bent on going backwards into the violent blank rigidity of a censored mind, needs taboo-breaking dreams to get back to freedom. Performance is perfectly suited for this dream role. I have always wanted to bring dreams into reality.
I always have been lucky. I have a body that is ideal for a performance artist. And I have always wanted to be a performer. When I was a kid, my younger brother used to get mad when people looked at me when he pushed me to the movies or to the teen club. He cried. But I liked people looking at me. That is what I mean by I am lucky. I am lucky I am an exhibitionist in this body. One time, I was working out on the jungle gym outside of our house ... a kid came by and asked if I was a monster. I just roared like a monster. It was fun.
I was lucky. Because of my body, I was never under pressure to be good at anything, to make money, to make it in “the real world”, to be polished ... and the other distractions that other modern artists have to, or think they have to, deal with. So I could focus on having fun, on going into taboo areas where magical change can be evoked.
My personal roots are in the idealism of the 1960s. That was when I broke out of personal physical isolation. I looked for a way to bring about the ideals for me and for the society as a whole. The normal channels obviously would not work for me.
So all I had were my fantasies. What if somebody really could do what happened in The Magus or Steppenwolf ... or live like Huxley’s Island! I wished I could be a hip artist living in San Francisco in a commune.
I started to see my body as a tool. I could get away with things that others couldn’t.
I can stare at people, laugh at them, touch their asses on the street ... because they don’t think I understand. I can park myself next to them and observe them close-up without them realizing or changing. That is being so visible that it creates invisibility. But there are other advantages of my body. People project onto me certain mystical powers ... like seeing through their fronts to their real selves ... seeing the past and the future ... and what they should do. They are reacting to some symbol of the deformed medicine man. They use me as a medium for getting through to other dimensions. It had little to do with me at this time. Because of the slowness of my communication board, they were forced to slow down. They could project whatever they wanted, misread me when it fit them. I was an object as a symbol. And because they gave me power as a symbol, they were afraid of me. At this point, I didn’t fully believe this. But I always have known I didn’t want to be in a normal body.
Most artists are not as lucky as me. They do not have the built-in advantages and shields that I have. They need to resist the real world, the normal world, more than I do. They need to be more sneaky to avoid being seduced by the business and politics of art. In fact, historically, performance as an art form came into being as a reaction to this seduction of formal art. In performance, you do not need galleries or theaters, equipment or tools ... you do not need an audience.
This was what sealed me into a performance life ... I had no money. In 1972, I had just finished taking a very intensive film-making course in Santa Fe. I had no money to make real films. So I started looking for a way to work with people. I wanted to see people nude, and touch them, and to create an intensity between us.
Painting was the first attempt. I used to sell papers on a corner to find people to paint. But once the person was posed, the situation was still, not moving.
So I did what I called nonfilms ... for which I asked people I met when I was selling newspapers to act out intense erotic scenes with me. These were the closest in my pieces to sexual rather than erotic. Because of these scenes, the people started talking about their lives during these sessions and said it helped their other relationships. Not one person minded that there was no film.
But I was not satisfied with these nonfilms because they were brief relationships that did not go anywhere. What I wanted to do was create intimacy ... that is, a situation in which anything is permissible, where people feel that secure. I didn’t want to connect this intimacy with romance or sex because that would set limits. But that “anything is permissible” did mean a wide open erotic freedom.
So I started looking for some other way to work with people. I tried to cast a play, but I couldn’t find enough people. I started thinking of an intimate theatre where the line between audience and actors would be erased. I started thinking about how if that line were erased, it would place much more responsibility on the actors. They would have to dare to trick the audience into the intense magical state.
I divided my work – the word “work” is weird, because it is like playing – into two parts. The first part is played in “real life” ... for instance, I go up to a person on a street and ask him to be in some project which may contain some nudity and physical play. The nudity and physical play as an idea in this context is a great tool to get under the polite chatter surface to the more meaningful things, and often more intimate, more personal stuff ... which is, after all, the aim of the piece. I can see this kind of piece lasting anywhere from a few seconds to several hours.
The second part is a piece in a controlled space, such as my studio, in which there is a form going on, giving the person a reason to be there with me.
This kind of performance is different than normal theatre. In this kind, there is no real script. Even if you have a script, it is really a prop. The real course of action is shaped by the performer so the flow of the piece will go forward and deeper.
What is important is what happens between me as the artist and my audience, how I change them and how they change me, that magical state in which we interact with each other. I, as the performer, must create around the people, by playing for and to them, letting performance take me over and guide me ... even when it looks like the other people are doing all of the action. The ultimate goal in my performance is to create a reality, not an illusion, of the performance which I and the audience are in ... even if I have to use illusions to get to this reality.
This raises the questions of manipulation. Almost anytime you perform to an audience, you manipulate the audience. Let’s get beyond the negative connotation of the word “manipulate”. People go to the theatre, movies, concerts, dance companies, etc., to have their emotions manipulated. They come into the performance area with a willingness to be manipulated by the artists within certain limits. But in my performances, the ones which are not divided from the rest of life by a theater or a stage, there is no way to tell the person he is entering a performance. When I have a formal structure, a theatre space, and a set time ending ... what is really going on is not what is said to be happening. Also it is a reality that is hopefully being created ... people will be affected, infected and effected by this reality.
Performance obviously goes much farther back than 1909 when it became a formal art form. The Futurists were reacting to the bankruptcy of formal art, with its gallery power scene, the elitism of art, the money, the politics, and the social scene of art. This is a true but a one-sided view of why performance appeared at that time.
I think performance came into existence to fill a void in western life. The void was the lack of magic and inspiration. The two areas of creativity that traditionally were the source of this magical inspiration had long ago moved from magic to entertainment and politics. This void also gave birth to psychology during the same time period.
I often get the criticism that my work is really psychology and therapy, and not art. When it is realized that psychology as a formal science and performance as formal art were born at the same time, this criticism can be answered. Performance and psychology are both involved in spiritual healing by digging into the hidden mysteries of life.
It is important to understand the root urge of performance and of art in general.
It is important to go all the way back to the primal fires around which humans huddled, telling one another dream stories ... not to entertain or impress one another, but to keep away fearful demons lurking in the cold darkness just outside the firelight. There was no division between reality and imagination. The gods and demons were real. In this ritual of storytelling, there was no division between the storyteller and listeners. They were all actively involved in the magical battle of survival. The rituals expanded to dance, chant, music. The ritual was to magically affect the hostile world in which the humans found themselves. The audience of these rituals were the natural world, the gods, and the demons. The humans marked their bodies to create changes in themselves. They painted their bodies to achieve temporarily altered states of reality. They tattooed their bodies to create permanent change.
When the humans started living in the caves, they did their rituals and wall-painting in the bowels of the caves where no one could see. The purpose was an active change ... a good hunt, a successful hunt, sexual power, to please the gods, etc. Art was not for watching.
Performance art is rooted in the primitive and mystical ceremonies of initiation which I had read about years before. The goal was to call the magical state from people. The shamans knew how to do this ... they drew their audience into a feeling of unity. I wanted to do that. Their audience knew they were participating in real events. I put this to the test in my 48-hour pieces in which I created an altered reality around the one-person audience.
I was tired of going to movies and plays which said being happy and having fun is impossible ... or at least very hard. I wanted to do a Magus or a Steppenwolf. And to pull that off, I had to trust myself, my motives, and the rightness of my performances. This is idealistic performance ... there is a strong case against this kind of performance ultimately working. But I have made my choice ... if I admit idealistic performance is doomed, I would just sit in my recliner and watch I Love Lucy!
Anyway, once the self-trust is in place, the next issue is vulnerability. Like the performer, I have to be vulnerable ... even in pieces where it appears I am totally in control and have complete power. Without this self-trust and vulnerability, what I am trying to do would fall flat.
That is the difference between theatre and performance art. In regular theatre, you can climb up onto the altar of the stage (even when the stage is a rug or other defined area) and you don’t have to interact with your audience, you are cut off from them. You don’t relate to them directly ... which is the main goal of my performances. In theatre, what also blocks the magic that I am after is the system of rules of aesthetics.
This was also what happened in religion. When the priests climbed up to the altar, not only did they divide themselves from the people, but also from the vital magic.
The theatre paints pictures of “realities”, both inner and outer realities. The audience just watches from the outside, watching a moving picture created by actors. The audience suspends disbelief, sits, and watches with their minds. The actors act. Everybody is comfortable and safe. Everyone has defined roles ... and when the audience leaves the theatre, they know it has been just pretend. Actors just have to put on a good show.
As a performer, I have to be able within myself to do anything that I feel necessary to create the magic of the performance without stopping to check my motives. This is the self-trust. This self-trust creates vulnerability.
The performer has to take responsibility for his audience. This runs from their physical well-being while they are in the performance ... to not taking them out on a limb and leaving them there. A moral grey area is left after the performance, as they go back to the normal world, and they freak out because of the conflict between the two realities. In my mind, the freak-out is an opening of doors ... which is the aim of the performance. But what the person does when the doors are opened is his responsibility.
In the performance, I have to involve myself with the audience person-to-person. I have to follow whatever feeling I have in the moment, doing whatever it takes to draw the audience deeper. This is what I mean by vulnerability. It does have a certain ruthless quality to it.
In the late 1970s we started our public performances by doing long ritualistic plays. Over the years, the group branched out to do many different kinds of live and video pieces, including The Outrageous Beauty Revue, which was by far my most popular work ... in terms of how many people saw it.
But in performance, unlike theatre, the success of a piece should not be judged by how many people see it, but by how far it went beyond the taboos, by its magical power for change. By this standard, my best work with the group was our performances within the workshop and a series of 48-hour dream performances in the late 1970s.
For three years in the mid-1980s, I did a bi-monthly performance series at U.C. Berkeley which gave me a lab where I could let rituals evolve themselves by doing them over and over without the pressures of making money or entertaining ... magical rituals which continue to evolve in my magical work today. The freedom that Tom Oden, then the director of the studio, gave me from entertaining and money focus was why the rituals could develop. The sole purpose of the series was to go beyond limits and taboos ... to blow people’s minds into a surreal state.
Performance art, the art of performance, is rooted in the private games of babies where every move and gesture has its own meaning to the baby ... it is rooted in the creative and destructive games that a little kid does when he is all alone ... games that adults still do, but will not admit doing, even to themselves.
It is rooted in the rituals of magic and religion where people came together to bring a different reality into their reality. It is rooted in the surreal, the private, in madness. It is rooted in direct involvement.
The main purpose for a performance is change, is to create a frame in this reality, a magical frame where something that usually does not happen, happens.
What I am doing is taking nudity and acts that are usually considered sexual and giving them a new, nonsexual context. That creates a tension, a conflict, an examining, a leap into something new. That is what I am after. This leap into newness is why people who are normally comfortable with casual nudity and casual sex sometimes get very uncomfortable with the nudity and eroplay in my work. By taking “sexual” acts and sincerely putting them into a different context, it creates another reality, another way of relating. It also creates conflict with the normal reality ... and that conflict may change, in an underground sort of a way, the normal reality. I think art ... or at least this kind of art ... should create conflict and change. And I like relating with people in this “unnormal” way in this different reality. This is why I do performance.
This is using “art” in the magical war against the forces of fragmentation. This war is on all realities.
The controllers have always tried to fragment us. Fragment us from each other. Imprison us in islands of sex, color, religion, politics, classes, labels, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. They fragment our inner worlds, they blow our individual realities apart, and play the pieces against one another. They are us, or a part of us. They are the controllers, the politicians, the sexists, the women’s libbers, the pornographers, the censors, the moralists, the church, the media, the businessmen, the educators, the victims, and the powerful.
They are us. They have divided us from our power, from our beauty, from our lust for life and pleasure. They have divided us from most of reality ... divided dying from living ... sex from living ... sex from pleasure. We are kept in boxes of fear, of mistrust. We are kept waiting ... kept waiting to do what we want ... waiting for enough money, enough schooling, for everything to be right. We are kept waiting and protecting and hiding and suffering.
Time to do battle with the boxes.
Our tools are magic, our bodies, taboos, and dreams.
This kind of art can be bubbles of childhood ... hidden places where you can play and explore. It is the kids’ under-the-covers world, the playhouse, the tree house, the cave, behind the barn, playing doctor, cars at drive-ins before going all the way, Huck Finn’s raft, tepees. People are afraid of this area of lusty exploring that they think they have out-grown ... but they are sucked into it.
But this kind of art can have a more heavy-duty magical side to it that shocks, offends, and breaks new ground. This side is what is locked in, the subconscious, the womb, the underground, Hell/Heaven, pleasure/torture, the coffin, the grave, birth/death/rebirth, dream/nightmare, the hidden world of taboos.
Artists of this breed need to be warriors who are willing to go into the areas of taboos, willing to push beyond where it is comfortable and safe to explore and build a larger zone of safeness.
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