A fleeting introduction to theatre in the dark
Hello all! A brief introduction from Lucy here before I hand you (metaphorically) over to Isaac, as means of providing some background for the insightful read ahead. This is a blog post I’ve been hoping we could get out for a long time because it’s a fascinating topic that’s incredibly intriguing, but it never felt like the right time to ask Isaac to write it or to release it to the public. The first time we ever heard about the concept of theatre in the dark it came directly from Isaac himself, as part of a late-night conversation about theatre in general way back in June of 2021. It was evident, even back then, the passion that he had for the topic and the incredible possibilities it could open up if artists were brave enough to try it. I remember distinctly the conversation I had with Olivia once we were on our own again, and while I can’t quite recall the exact words I’m certain it went something along the lines of “what-an-incredible-idea-and-oh-my-goodness-doesn’t-Isaac-have-such-incredible-ideas-we-have-to-find-a-way-to-show-this-to-the-world”. Or at least something like that. So when we began to look ahead to our 2022 fringe run it seemed like an obvious choice. As a more experimental aspect of the theatrical artform theatre in the dark works perfectly within the fringe scene, we have access to the audiences more receptive to being challenged or shown something new, and the kind of venues that are happy to negotiate with a company coming in with a more unorthodox idea. Isaac is currently finishing off our 2022 fringe script, and I’m so ridiculously excited for what the show is going to become. Keep your eyes peeled for any further information on that front, as I’m sure we’ll start to drip-feed little teasers in the coming months.
But enough from me. I know you’ll find the read as interesting as we do, Isaac is wonderful and I can genuinely say he has one of the most fascinating perspectives I’ve ever heard from a writer. Over to him.
‘How shall I convey to you the meaning of shadow in the theatre - the primitive dread, the sense of brooding, of waiting, of fatality, the shrinking, the blackness, the descent into endless night?’
- Robert Edmond Jones, The Dramatic Imagination (2004)
The theatre is dead. Long live theatre. Such was the claim made by director Peter Brook in his seminal 1968 text; The Empty Space. Centuries of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and ‘the classic actor’ had reduced mainstream theatre to a bastardised ritual of self-satisfaction for both actor and audience. What, thought Brook, was the point of it all?
Even now, this question plagues artists, academics, and audiences alike; what is the point of theatre? Why does theatre continue to exist? You may have your own answer, your own justification for theatre’s existence. I am on the side of Peter Brook, who believes that theatre should induce in its viewers some level of catharsis – some emotional release and spiritual healing – either by creating a feeling of connection amongst an audience through acknowledging our common human identity, or by the more Artaudian method of exposing repressed thoughts and emotions. He had visions of a theatre that ‘aspires to the communication of intangible, universal levels of experience: […] a ‘reality deeper than the fullest forms of everyday life.” Brook named this theatre Holy – after the rites, rituals, and ineffability of faith – or ‘Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible’.
When I was 16, I saw Cordelia Lynn’s Lela & Co. at the Royal Court Theatre. Sold as an interrupted monologue, it follows the life of young Lela as she is born, married, sex-trafficked, and eventually breaks free in an unnamed, war-torn country somewhere in Eastern Europe. It’s a remarkable play, well worth a read, made even more remarkable in its original production when at what is arguably the lowest point in Lela’s life, the lights go out. Not immediately, of course; it’s so slow that at first you think you must be imagining it. But then a silent wave ripples across the audience as everyone sits up that little bit straighter. Because what is happening cannot be happening. This isn’t how theatre is done. Before long we lose Lela to the encroaching gloom, and then everything is black. We hear helicopters flying over our heads, bombs being dropped – the sound moving all around us – and throughout it all Lela speaks; the voice of a young girl stripped of hope in an uncaring, desolate world.
Lela & Co. blew my mind. The play itself is brilliantly written, heartbreakingly funny, and well worth a read (consider this your sign to go and read it). Those 20 or so minutes spent in complete darkness were incredibly affecting: the darkness seemed to heighten the emotions I was feeling; it gave me no escape from the war and trauma of Lela’s story, nothing to distract myself with; and, like a baby under eight months, as soon as I was unable to see the audience, they ceased to exist. In being isolated, I was freed from the very British shame of emoting in public. It was something I’d never experienced before, or even imagined, and yet it was so utterly profound that I, an atheist, came as close as I’m likely to get to a religious encounter. In the years that followed that night I have been captivated by the notion of darkness in theatre and the possibility of theatre in the dark as a new theatrical form.
It’s essential to recognise that darkness does not exist in isolation. Like left and right, up and down, life and death, darkness is defined through its relationship with light. The two are symbiotic; without one, the other cannot exist. This relationship has been exemplified in theatre, where it was not until the introduction of powerful electric stage lighting in the 19th century that directors and scenographers began experimenting with shadow as a method of storytelling. Similarly, the more time we spend in our bright, unsleeping cities, and the more we lose touch with real darkness, the more it becomes an alien phenomenon and something to be feared.
This kind of darkness, one that provokes a sense of unease, if not outright fear, has been termed the dark of the night. It is a kind of darkness that stands in direct opposition to the relative safety of the day, perpetuating a broader and more pervasive fear of the unknown that constitutes part of our collective human identity. Our relationship to this kind of darkness is arguably the most important that has ever existed in the history of our species: gathering in groups; building towns; creating societies; codifying language through philosophy and religion (the Dark Ages/the Age of Enlightenment, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave); and eventually, through the development of technology, eliminating darkness from our lives altogether. Today, approximately two-thirds of Europeans and North Americans no longer experience real darkness.
It is the dark of the night that I experienced when I saw Lela & Co. Any performance that contains within it prolonged periods of darkness alongside light, due to their symbiotic relationship, will elicit discomfort and fear from an audience. If that’s what you want from darkness in your show, then brilliant, but I knew there was something deeper, something more than could be discovered from darkness.
Darkness it not just something to be feared. A shared experience: before any of us were even born, we spent nine months swaddled in warm darkness. In ancient Ireland, the darkness inspired young poets in training, who were kept from light and visual distractions whilst they composed their verses. The cult of Demeter descended down into caves to perform their rituals of fertility. In fact, many ancient religious groups in Europe practiced in caves, believing them to be portals to a spiritual realm. If the earth is the mother of humanity, then caves are the wombs from which we were born. This isn’t simply conjecture; most children in the UK are born at night, peaking at 4:00 am.
This is the dark of the earth. It’s characterised by small, enclosed spaces, warmth, and a feeling of peace or safety. It’s thought that conditions such as these mimic the conditions a foetus experiences inside the womb, and the protection, both physical and emotional, given by a mother. It’s a place of stillness, consideration, and reflection, that is most recognisable today in the form of sensory deprivation tanks, where, in the small, warm, enclosed and dark space surrounded by water and often naked, one may experience physical and psychological healing. In these turbulent times, I think many people (myself included) could do with a bit of spiritual and psychological healing, and it is the dark of the earth – not the dark of the night – that I am interested in exploring in theatre.
But why did religious groups flock to caves to perform certain rites and rituals? Believer descended into the darkness to experience the divine, but it wasn’t the hand of the gods that gifted enlightenment to them, it was the result of sensory deprivation. Whilst awake, the human brain ceaselessly processes all sorts of sensory information in order to maintain its perceived reality. A brain starved of stimulation will, when it receives any kind of stimulation – even imaginary – will produce a much larger response than normal within the temporal lobe – the area of the brain responsible for processing sensory information. One consequence of even mild sensory deprivation is synaesthesia. Scientists Anupama Nair and David Brang discovered that as little as five minutes of total darkness immersion could induce an audio-visual synaesthesia – visual stimulation from an audio signal. In other words, our brains’ ability to interpret reality physically changes.
Martin Welton, a notable academic researching theatre in the dark, documented his experience of seeing War Music – an auditory retelling of Homer’s Iliad – at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1998:
“At times I stop following the story; although I know it, it is not for that reason. It is for the cadences of sound, the subtle shifts of pitch and rhythm. There is “meaning” here, but not in a lexical matching of words to memory. The spoken words become “things” in their own right, no longer yoked to but defined by that which they describe. “APOLLO”; the word describes the god, of course, but in the dark it takes on a musculature all its own; it exists in the space.”
(‘See Nothing: Now Hear This…’, p. 148)
When Martin Welton talks of words becoming physical, existing in the space as living entities, not only has the act of hearing sounds become much more intense, but the way in which those sounds are interpreted has changed. The word APOLLO not only exists in the space but has the power to take on a physical form.
When you enter the world of theatre in the dark, you enter into a space of the unknown. Sight might be gone, but new avenues of communication open up: acoustics; temperature; touch; the shape of words in the air. There’s no partition between actor and spectator: neither have a ‘place’, for there are no places in the dark; one is not placed above the other through a raised stage or a space in the light; bodies aren’t witnessed, so even the term performer loses meaning, for who knows if the voices heard in the gloom are those of actors or of a spectator?
Circling back to the purpose of theatre; at the end of War Music, Welton describes feeling ‘a strange relief, and a pleasure in having shared all this with strangers, knowing that we will leave as strangers, but knowing that we take a little something in common with us.’ The intensity of the experience of total darkness in performance, for Welton and his fellow spectators, provoked a feeling of comradery, of being united against an invisible tirade of sound.
I firmly believe that theatre in the dark is the future of modern theatre. Think about the hundreds of styles, genres, and practitioners that already exist. Now imagine that each style, each genre, each method, has its twin in the dark. The untapped potential of theatre in the dark is humongous. Working with Haywire, I hope to create a show that introduces audiences to theatre in the dark, whilst also refining my own practice to create a repeatable and reliable method.
Brook says that in order for catharsis to be reached, ‘we need to stage true rituals, but for rituals that could make theatre-going an experience that feeds our lives, true forms are needed.’ Total darkness in the theatre is that true form.
Cited:
-Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 73
-Ibid., p. 49
-Robert Hensey, ‘Past Dark: a short introduction to the human relationship with darkness over time’, The Archaeology of Darkness, ed. by Marion Dowd and Robert Hensey (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016)
-Ibid., p. 2
-Peter Martin, Mario Cortina-Borja, Mary Newburn, and others, ‘Timing of singleton births by onset of labour and mode of birth in NHS maternity units in England, 2005-2014: A study of linked birth registration, birth notification, and hospital episode data’, PLos ONE, 13 (2018)
-Yuila Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 37
-Anupama Nair and David Brang, ‘Inducing synesthesia in non-synesthetes: short-term visual deprivation facilitates auditory-evoked visual percepts’, Consciousness and Cognition, 70 (2019), p. 76
-Martin Welton, ‘Seeing Nothing: Now hear this…’, The Senses in Performance, ed. by Sally Banes and André Lepecki (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 148
-Brook, p. 53