Have you been to the gym? Your imagination needs exercise too!
Imagination, experimentation and surprise are our most valuable assets as a society. Anne Bogart talks about the theatre being a “gym for the soul” and indeed it is. But I also think of it as a gym for the imagination. What might seem surprising is that this ‘workout’ for the imagination at its best can also involve your body. It’s vitally important to create wonder and beauty to nourish our souls, but equally vital to create safe experiences of the unknown, that defy our expectations, surprise us and require our imagining bodies to participate.
The body is imaginative. If you ask it to recall something - a sensation, it will show you the way and as Martha Graham famously said, the body never lies. If you listen to it, you learn what you really think, how you really feel, what you really want. You can also ask it to imagine with you. In our latest project, an immersive experience called Forgotten Places: Journey Beyond the Stars, we created a space where we invited audiences to imagine with their bodies.
The immersive experience was inspired by local UFO sightings and the marvels of space. We wanted to create an experience that was playful, weird and surprising, but also invited the bodies of audiences to fully participate: to travel physically, prompted by installations, props and performances to journey somewhere imaginatively new.
With a limited budget and tight schedule, we jumped right into play and imagination, experimenting boldly with challenging concepts relating to gravity, lifecycles of stars, the origins of the universe, how things in the universe are made and more. We also wanted to take artistic license to think about impossible things like, if there was sound in space what would different things sound like (which became Jack & Willow’s song); if planets were thought of as extreme experiences (like extreme sports) what might they feel like (which became Freya’s series of solos); and how might one embody the story of the big bang and the way the fabric of our universe (spacetime) keeps expanding (which became Jack’s beautiful dance with a space blanket)? Then there were even more abstract ideas, like creating an experiential installation inspired by the phenomenon of solar winds, and another inspired by the incredible fact that we are made from the remnants of exploded stars.
Jack’s dance piece inspired by The Big Bang theory and the relationship between gravity and spacetime
In creating the immersive experience, as the director I was thinking about what the audience journey could be from the very first moment, in collaboration with designer Stu Brown. Audiences were asked to follow one of two assigned paths which created an oval shape around a couple of structures in the space. We asked the audience to imagine they were a moon orbiting a planet, a planet orbiting a star, or a star orbiting a black hole. This imagining required movement that was supported by otherworldly installation pieces, atmospheric sound with questions about the universe overlapping (by Imogen Cygler), lots of smoke and spacey lighting (by Rachel Lee). The senses were supported to enter into an imaginative experience. The movement is key – unlike traditional theatre experiences where your body is more or less stationary, this immersive experience asked people to move through the space, to engage with the artworks and installations, to touch things, sense things. Even whilst viewing the performances, people would stand. It is not something we are accustomed to, imagining with our bodies.
Audiences captivated by Willow’s song about orbital resonance and the poetry of space
We tend to think that imagination is a mental activity. But I believe strongly that imagination is its most transformative when the mind and body are allowed and encouraged to work together. Imagination doesn’t always have to solve problems immediately or directly. It seems to work best when we can be engaged in a state of play. Play and experimentation have a lot in common here – taking part in something and not knowing the outcome.
Certainly the path to devising the pieces that formed the performances was one of play and experimentation. To fully devise an immersive experience is a bold undertaking because you can only rehearse it up to a point- the rest is up to the audience. It has a different trajectory and a different pace to rehearsing a traditional production. It relies on the audience to play back, to participate, to explore, to engage.
Audiences participating in a parachute activity
As always, the show we are working on contains a learning opportunity in its creation, which is linked to and reveals the core of the work itself. In this instance, it was about embracing and trusting the weirdness of what is. Our universe is bizarre. When you actually start learning about space and all that, it is nuts (the more you learn, the more you realise how little you know). As Neil Degrasse Tyson says famously, “the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you”. Wonderful. But dramaturgically something to be handled with caution. And the way we allowed our imaginations to meet the content of space and the planets was to embrace the weirdness and allow the bodies to speak to this on a sort of abstract level. In other words, we were guided by our bodies’ responses to the content and then found ways of connecting that to ideas or concepts that we could relate to and that audiences could access. We trusted the intelligence of the body to help us understand and explain complex systems and ideas. Bodies are so weird, so I was hoping that they might be able to speak to these equally weird concepts! And they did!
Whether you see theatre as a gym for the soul or the imagining body, both are of equal importance: the gym for the soul allows us to connect to who we truly are, the gym for the imagination allows us to propose, speculate and see who we might become. I hope Forgotten Places: Journey Beyond the Stars helped people connect with themselves and the wonders of everything that surround them, so we can all start to imagine a better future.