“The future of philosophy lies in architecture.”
— Madeline Gins
“You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”
— Louise Bourgeois
Sometimes in theatre, particularly within the proscenium, theatremakers build environments to paw at bruised and insecure humanity like a self-entertaining feline.
What if we instead consciously built emergent ecosystems with the goal of creating a prismatic penetrable world, akin to what anthropologist Arturo Escobar would call a “pluriverse,” a world “where many worlds fit”?
As world-builders, we are now morally and socially obligated (dare I say: required) to radically dismantle live art design norms that imperil our spiritual and collective health. As performance-makers, we must release ourselves from the notion that we build entertainment. We must render and promote experiential environments that encourage and develop an interpersonal connection through inclusive interactivity, sensorial confluence, and responsive fellowship. (And it can be fun.)
Otherwise, we are just cats playing by our own devices.
As engineers of lived experience, how might we position and design theatre as an essential space for healing, pleasure, and connection through an intertwining and interdependent realm of the senses?
1. Position Theatre as a Salve to the Moment
Humans, as a collective species, are sick. Off-balance at best. But theatremakers have the opportunity to build healing environments.
Here is what we know about our collective well-being:
→ The climate is at a critical tipping point.
Humans, with increasing scale, are nature deficient. And in pursuit of gratification, dominance, and capital, humans have inherited the grief-stricken outcomes from ongoing violent atrocities on ecology. Disaster porn surrounds us, and humans have accumulated a profound “species loneliness” amidst the collapse. Divorced from nonhuman life and nonhuman systems, humans exist in a kind of solitary confinement on Earth. We are out of sync with naturally occurring mutualisms. Let us reattach our outcomes with broader systems beyond the human realm.
→ In the United States, our arts organizations and performance spaces are driven by capitalist market demands.
Audiences have shrunk. Or, alternatively: as a field, we have shrunk the audience, in that theatre companies and venues have too long made visible a narrow nexus of “relatable” stories, thus alienating theatre from maintaining pronounced cultural relevance and encouraging myopic and safe programming that suits the bottom line. Let us continue to decentralize our storytelling norms in organizational frameworks while shifting what spaces are “sanctioned” to hold which stories.
→ Healing and design are linked.
According to Evidence-Based Healthcare Design, facilities that prioritize psychologically supportive environments reduce patient anxiety, blood pressure, postoperative recovery time, use of pain medication, and length of stay. This means that the following elements generate positive health outcomes: a focus on natural light, increased color, crafted auditory experience, olfactory curation, access to nature, tactile and versatile materials, and spatial layout that encourages social engagement. Let us build environments that boost collective health.
→ Our young people are in crisis…
… and the schools in which they approach maturity claim to facilitate things like social-emotional learning over rigor, equitable learning environments, community engagement, and whole-child/student-centered project-based education. And yet... Standardized testing in the United States remains acceptable practice (though that might, at last, be shifting!) and we haven’t moved to implement national proficiency-based reporting instead of using grades as the standard measure of success. Let us model how holistic values inform on-the-ground practice.
Beyond this, school buildings are uninspired. Consider what might happen, though, if the government prioritized a broad renovation plan for our public school buildings, which tend to be long overdue for updates and often mirror the architecture of prisons: long hallways, closed doors, muted colors, small windows (or none at all), sterile seats, linear/hierarchical room arrangements. This is the social learning environment of origin for our most formative years. (Yikes!) Let us generate spaces that upend fixed notions of where and how learning will take place.
By using theatre’s practice of placemaking as a springboard, makers and leaders have the opportunity to recenter institutions, venues, and happenings as responsive, activated spaces for collective healing and empowerment.
→ Our elders are alienated.
Is it because we fear expiration, failure... irrelevance? American culture exalts youth, glamour, and genius but death comes for us all. If we are lucky, age and wisdom will, too. As the obsession with prolonging life (and the frenetic capitalist construct that supports it) rages on, the elephant in the room is that we don’t give our elders platforms or visibility, nor are we literate in how to frame the final moment of a life—for others, for ourselves. Let us make space for reflection and celebration of life and give well-traveled bodies and stories space to roam.
→ User experience dominates design.
We are in the age of embodied first-person perspective and immersion. Individuals want to matter. Apps and devices are structured to amplify that desired value. On a related note, inclusive design within technology and spaces has come a long way, yet society remains steeped in traditions that construct dominantly for two senses: sight and sound. Let us expand the entry points for empathetic encounters through tactile, multi-nodal, and mutable relationships within constructed experiences.
→ Immediacy is equated to power.
Notions of success are increasingly tied to results-driven data, brevity, bytes, and viral capacity. All this, and at a quick clip to boot. We have become habituated to this capital-centric pace associated with white-dominated culture. Yet, time unfolds in various scales: architecture is experienced through movement, music experienced in sequence, memory skips, and holds. Let us nurture the capacity for making, stretching, and cultivating space for time and impact.
By using theatre’s practice of placemaking as a springboard, makers and leaders have the opportunity to recenter institutions, venues, and happenings as responsive, activated spaces for collective healing and empowerment.
2. Design Theatre as a Pleasure-Informed Forum
Let us design for a social and sensitized body.
Let us design for the realm of the senses.
Let us design for unabashed liveness and heightened connection.
If not now, when?
Already, there are countless examples of methodologies used by artist collectives, organizers, architects, and designers, plus therapeutic and educational professionals, that generate powerful reverberations in their fields and in the audience they aim to stimulate toward vibrant relational engagement.
One could argue that the joy of working in theatre is not directly reflecting our world but, instead, in bending its perceived limits. The vibrancy of theatrical form relies on makers’ dedicated obsession to mixing elements of the known world and generating a superlative one that relates to and challenges real life. Utopia is what the making is after, either in the narratives we construct, or in the aftereffects of experiencing them.
As theatre practitioners, we are in the business of spiritual gathering: we stretch metaphors, spool speculations, and reach toward transcendence. We seek to extend the capacity for empathy in those who enter our worlds. If not this, then what are we contributing?
As an educator, my work requires me to be swift, adaptable, and generative with a wide array of learners. One methodology that I’ve found particularly helpful is that of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). As a means toward equity in the classroom, UDL broadens the scope of opportunity to engage with material and offers multiple access points and tactics to amplify an individual’s experience in a learning environment.
Now, what if theatremakers also utilized the structure of Universal Design for Learning in order to construct a theatrical environment in which immersive, sensorial, and restorative community-led practices were embedded with the intent to produce healing outcomes?
Instead of using alt-text to describe a song or how a trumpet sounds, make a trumpet that buzzes when held or blasts the scent of a joyous parade while bursting with confetti.
3. Design for a Sense of Connection
Community organizers, activists, and executive trainers will all tell you: the power of why is what gets people in the room. How do you get to why? Your emotional map. How individuals value objects, people, and experience arises from this generative, sometimes narrative, domain.
Designers must work to recruit audience interest, sustain effort, and encourage self-regulation through multisensory and inclusive-design-centered experiences that welcome diverse entry points and provoke emotionally resonant encounters.
→ Consider participants’ first impression first.
Design Justice encourages designers to integrate community by asking what a community needs and involving community in the process, thus holding makers and the work accountable. Theatre can no longer be a tourist destination. It must emerge from the needs of a community. What might remain familiar to theatre participants and what might nudge them toward the unexpected?
→ Offer multiple modes of entry.
Designers must optimize choice in the type of challenges, rewards, and sequences informed by participant needs and interests. Design for connection to the theatrical work’s intent while heightening the sense of the participants’ influence. Embed choice within the context of the larger group. No participant exists in a vacuum. Maximize choice, minimize threats, amplify care, and foster collaboration.
→ Activate spatial and relational exploration.
How might the environment and participation of audience members increase awareness, physically and emotionally, to heighten compassion and collective meaning-making?
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