Furthermore, the energy that holds the theatre event together is based on significant human capacities both audience and performers possess and share. These are our capacity for reflection and self-authoring on the one hand, as well as our innate empathy and capacity for seeing contexts or “the whole picture” on the other.

Consequently, in the practice of theatre art we both create a ‘performance complex’ ie text, performer, scenic elements etc as well as gather an audience, and then together share these re-presentations of our actions and behaviours, along with the content and movement of our minds. In this we mirror how we create our own characters, or personalities, and then modify them as a result of our experiences in various relationships.

That the spectacle in theatre of set, costumes, and sounds be aesthetically pleasing and entertaining are the most prominent aspects of theatre art, but they are not the most important.

As Aristotle noted over two thousand years ago theatre’s essential aspects are plot, character, and theme. As it happens, this is also an accurate description of how every audience member experiences their lives! Namely, that we are conscious of being in a plot both of our own making through our choices, as well as influenced and sometimes directed by others’ choices; of experiencing our life in all manner and degrees of intensity in relationships with other ‘characters’; and that we ultimately survive because of our fragile abilities to attempt to make meaning (themes) out of the non-stop urgencies of life.

The art of theatre arises with the act of attention- the attention of the theatre artists to their craft, as well as the attention of the audience to the performance. Through the ongoing revelation of life in a performance’s plot, character and theme the audience member’s attention moves them potentially from casual or ordinary seeing/observing to the art of witnessing. Witnessing is seeing in detail and depth which activates our innate capacities for sympathy and empathy, that in turn leads us to experiencing our innate compassion towards something or someone other than us. It is the common aspiration of theatre practitioners that the experience of compassion in the theatre will then be extended to the audience member’s life and understandings in their realities.

As well the audience shares the perspectives, or societal frames of thought, that contributed also to the making of the play. If they didn’t share these perspectives there would be no theatre. But sharing these societal perspectives does not insure that both performance makers and audience members are interpreting those perspectives the same way, or arriving at compatible meanings that ensure some degree of common understandings in the relationship- as we experience daily in our personal relationships and communities.

Hence the importance of getting together as a community to share areas of interest, ideas and issues in greater detail. Theatre is one of the ways we provide ourselves these ‘places’ for sharing. And it is based on how we make community for ourselves in the real world, through participation and consent, even though it may sometimes appear that the person or persons with the loudest megaphone and most alluring or potentially lucrative message is doing all the making.

In the end there is an essential democracy built into our lives because human beings like talking to each other – in one way or another- about anything and everything and sharing their experiences from the silliest to the sublime. And this sharing has always led to the making of communities despite the apparent dominance of tribal chieftains, kings and queens, institutions, or oppressive systems of thought for varying periods of time in history. But ultimately any community is based on its people and their associations, then following on these the institutions that arise from these associations. This has always been so and will always be so despite our recent liking for leading with institutions, organizations, information and other forms of disembodied thought to build our communities.

These aspects of the art form, namely of empowerment through the exercise of compassion and the experience of recognizing profounder meanings in all our plots and themes, (think our values and purposes) and characters, (think ourselves on common ground with others) are essential theatre…as well as essential to the development of our humanity.

Surprisingly, for something so essential to our lives, compassion is very fragile and it does not always arise in our lives and communities, nor in theatre.

But it has happened. In the past.

It happened with Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus as they responded in the 4th century BC to embodying that spirit of inquiry, free thinking, and necessity of community in their creation of tragedy at Athens’ community festivals

It happened with the late medieval clergy who wanted their parishioners to experience a deeper feeling for the story of the first Easter and risked playing out the scene of the Marys encountering an angel at the empty tomb- the text of Quem quaeritis? or Whom do you seek?- in front of their gathering

And it is struggling to happen in theatre in our own era but something has changed.

The world has changed. We have changed.

Men and women in diverse fields of endeavour are struggling to achieve social justice and environmental justice based on greater compassion for ourselves and all of Nature- and they don’t appear to need traditional theatre to do this

And this is happening side by side with men and women who are struggling to ensure the supremacy of certain races in various governance structures, or guarantee their benefits in economic systems despite evidence of their systems potential detriment- and see the arts only as either forwarding or threatening their narratives

While diverse people everywhere, who apparently have little interest in cause or governance, are nonetheless striving to create equitable relationships and live in communities that forward their sense of home and provide opportunities for productiveness, and delineate ways to peacefully settle their differences, acknowledge their interconnectedness globally through existing channels of charity or advocacy, and do whatever they can to heal our broken partnership with a now endangered Earth

And into this societal ‘drama’ traditional theatre’s attempts at empowering its audiences through compassion and recognition appear to be less and less effective as they are crowded out by increased emphasis on entertainment values in production. Theatre itself is becoming an increasingly minority interest in society as it appears to be losing audiences to an assumed competition with film, and now with the audiences ability to video their own ‘dramas’ and circulate them to an apparently insatiable audience on the internet film going is facing a similar decline!

And so it was time to take the essentials of theatre outside theatre and explore how they could be applied more directly to our lives and communities

We set out in 1982 from the established forms of traditional theatre and went to the streets and markets, the churches, the schools, and business, government, and nonprofit organization’s conferences, wherever people gather to share their lives and create meaning

And holding fast to the necessity for empowerment through the exercise of compassion, and of recognizing meaning in our lives and communities, have deconstructed the elements of theatre to de-emphasize the primacy of presentation in its traditional shape and take a closer look at presentation-audience dynamics

All happening in a world that has been increasingly in the midst of ongoing destruction in wars, indigenous genocide, economic fundamentalism, new/old denials of womens’ rights and gender diversity, and cultural atrophy all round

And too busy to notice or care what was new onstage- or compassion?

But inspired and so sustained by working side by side with educators, students, clergy, nonprofit organizers, workplace trainers, and community activists all of whom like us were striving to create relationships and live in fair and tolerant communities that forward our sense and need for home Empowering ourselves in our particular places Recognizing how we belong to this particularly complex world of diverse cultures With compassion for ourselves and this now endangered only earth we have and share

creating a theatre beyond theatre that helps us to live in the non-stop rush of phenomenon our senses bring to us from all quarters, learning to think and feel as clearly as we can in the new ambiguities of person, place and time

our pursuit continues