"And so hopefully, if our humble little show touches you in any way, you might walk out of this theater a slightly different person."
Eric Bogosian, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

natural beauty: a performance

Exploring Seoul during Chusok, I encountered this small child:
Now, obviously this small child is being posed to be in this picture. But no one told her to make that expression. Think about it. Next example:


Now through all these four pictures, I think that I can prove three points: 1) babies are cute. We strive so hard to be "cute" or "pretty' or "hot" in our lives, and children are just cute, untouched. I honestly believe that there isn't a single child that isn't cute. 2) Young children exhibit curiosity at its peak. They poke and taste and smell and lick and examine everything with a wonder and excitement that if we are not careful fades at a frightening rate as we age. 3) The human body is a wonderland. Along with the theme of curiosity that never ends, babies examine themselves as well as other humans with a newness that most do not maintain for much longer than their first couple years. We must be reminded by babies that there is never enough time in one's life to fully explore your own body, let alone anyone else's.
What does this all mean? Well I summed it up in my title. Thinking about babies I often wonder, "Is there a way to possibly capture this unique state of being in a performance?". I ran this idea past my friend and she said it wouldn't be possible unless the children were trained, and they would have to do it willingly otherwise its borderline pedophilia. While I think that with a lot of thinking it could be possible, a more sensible alternative currently exists: bring the child back to the adults. Jerzy Grotowksi has beehives, which resembles almost organized chaos, and often incorporate a lot of going back to basic human instincts and curiosities. his experiments in paratheatre work with this concept, and I think that we could perhaps bring this child-like innocence back to theatre in a new way. A different type of children's theatre.

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