THIRD REALITY /Manifest for Future Theater/

• by: Dr. Levan Khetaguri, Professor Arts Research Institute of Georgia

For centuries serious efforts of self perception have shown to be unsuccessful. Despite large number of schools and movements, generations of philosophers were unable to neither answer the questions of Antique period nor formulate new ones.

Moving through labyrinths of time and history we haven’t opened a single new door – we were competing in giving names to the same events.

More and more we kept diverging from the sacred and esoteric.
More and more a considerable part of humanity was living a better life.
More and more we kept stripping ourselves from spirituality.

To be brief and specific we are in the XXI century – in the age when love is based on religion and in the era when the deficit for love has lead us on one hand to spiritual ice age and on the other to global warming.

We live and exist, but where and in which dimension?

Spanish Golden Age playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca made a following formulation of the historic riddle: Life is a Dream?! /La vida es sueno/.

It is obvious that for centuries there was an idea between the two worlds, offering us paired dimensions:
Existence – Dream
Life – Death
Paradise– Hell

Although religion kept bringing in a third world in the face of purgatory as a third dimension.

Calderon is formulating a question in regard to true reality and our true existence. Is it what we call life or is it what we call a dream?  Where does our true meaning lie?  When looking at it from a simple perspective, we can merely say that we physically exist in the so-called real life and our consciousness reveals itself in the realm of dreams – which is equally real for our consciousness.

Where can the true essence of a man be found? An essence expressed in antique formulation – “Perceive yourself” /Discover yourself/ or “Be who you are” /Be yourself/.

Here or there?  In the so-called life or in a dream?  Psychologists may very well say that it is only possible in a realm of dreams.

A new dimension

Development of the world
Interactivity
Resembling the arts – towards stream of consciousness
From Postmodernism to Neo Intellectualism

Recently a friend of mine told me – “An era of Rudolf Steiner /German anthropologist/ and associated with him Postmodernism is coming to an end” and an era of numerous neo-isms? – What should we expect next?

Post, Post, Post?

In the nineties a Spanish theater scholar from Barcelona Jose Angel Gomez widely used and promoted a theory of “Post Theatre”. Hoping for a new theater he wrote articles and books on Post Hamlet, Post Don Juan or the so–called Post Theater issues.

Art research is art philosophy.
Contemporary art historians could already be considered as being culture anthropologists.
From Interactivity to multimedia expression.

Our perception is interactive, which ensures interactivity to be sustained in the process of our self expression – this can only be achieved through means of multimedia.
We exist in number of realities at the same time – one of the most important amongst them is cyber reality – which requires the use of modern technologies as means of self expression.
We listen, watch, reflect, write and read at the same time. In cyber world we tend to interact with several, maybe even ten people at once without them being aware of it. We tend to disguise ourselves in cyber world with fictional biographies, with borrowed individualities and faces.
(Literally – if staring from Antique Theater we were sublimating our desires through an actor or character on stage, today we are the only ones in charge of this process – cyber reality has given us an opportunity to become what we desire and make it not only imaginary but cyber materialistic).

We are paying for a new life (second life – internet space for second reality) and thus our language of expression becomes cyber language – modern technologies of the world of numbers.
Cyber world is a realm with no time and no boarders, no language and no reality. In a sense we exist in a dimension beyond time and reality.

What does an art of this time look like, what are the means of its expression – Theatre – performance becomes a sole tool for the synthesis of arts, human thought and expression of man’s cyber apparitions. Nowadays as never before art is a synthesis.

Process of self expression is limitless, deep and never ending.
We are no longer in the world of news.
We are in the world of a frozen second, where seconds become infinity.

We are no longer in the world of finished works, but in a never ending world of movements, word, sound stretched into space. We are in an era of sending massages into the Universe.

Traditional ways and forms of thinking die out as never before;
Conflict of generations is severe as never before;
Destruction of the world that started in Babylon– finds ways of restoration in cyber world.
We are becoming citizens of cyber world.

We have knowledge of new technologies if not technique – although technique is a single tool for our self expression.

We might very well be at the end of the last decade of printed books – with environmental issues – all books will start dying off in cyber world and find birth in digital form.
We will soon be born and die in cyber world – our existence will set off in space.
Our existence will be infinite.

What will the theater look like now?

INTERACTIVE THEATER

Theater speaks every language at the same time, speaks to everyone without boarders, speaks a language everyone understands – through sound, noise, color, movement, music, light and shadow; image, projection and live broadcasting, in number of directions at the same time, at the same time in entire space.

There is no such thing as a theater space anymore. Space has spread beyond theater walls. It has become limitless. With high technologies, theater becomes more secret and mystical. As never before theater is closest to revealing spirit and thought…

If in the past theater was showing life and people living in it, now theater is more focused on what is happening inside people through life.
It reveals stream of consciousness with its rows of associations and ongoing processes in mind.

Expression of dreams has become a reality, depiction of thought has become real – theater can show our most hidden thoughts, our actions and what we desire to do.
This is only possible through multimedia theater and modern technologies.
Light created colors scattered all over the stage, each corner is transformed into a place of projection – everywhere we see projections of our thoughts and images – we reach deep down into the processes of human’s soul – not through a narrative but through a mere gaze, through penetration in secret labyrinths.

Theater has never been so close to expressing the mystical world – theater becomes global and at the same time very intimate – performance resembles a session of meditation and magnetism.
Theater starts to resemble a visual projection of a mystical world.
Theater starts creating an everyday ritual – theater prays for the universe through revealing human mind.

Light, music, color, noise they all become means of disguising a naked human body.
Nowadays people express themselves through naked bodies instead of words.

Today as never before theater is in need of a new language and this language is a human being – an actor, who can be taken as a measurement unit for a thought transfer in space, a superlative value.

A value of contemporary highly developed civilization – a human being has become an artwork for this very civilization and everything he comes into contact with can just as well become an artwork.
A human being as a measurement unit for freedom, a human being as an example of beauty, a human being as means of nature’s and world’s self expression.
In the world of culture – God is Absolute, which unites all religions despite their name variations, people despite ethnic differences – today God is Absolute – God is art, and art of making, process and result.
Today realities are relative to each other.
Timeline is replaced by one huge infinite dimension, without beginning and end, seconds and minutes are only part of infinity, digital infinity.
Absolute is Zero and plus one, simple truth.

Just one jump from Pythagoras /Greek philosopher/ to the Present.
World is encircled by numbers.
Base of the Universe is Absolute Harmony – Zero and everything undergoes change and creation by simply adding One.
Universe is just Zero and One.

Zero as an infinite Universe and One as every individual in it.

2008-2009, Georgia

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