Final Thoughts

Final thoughts

I continue to contemplate my SNM experience, going on two weeks later. In Maxine Doyle and Felix Barrett interviews, they say that’s one of their goals – to have SLEEP NO MORE still burbling around in people’s heads and guts long after they attend a performance. I think I may ‘boil and bubble’ into infinity, and that's not a bad thing! I think, however, that I am done with public forums for my SNM thoughts and feelings.

As the creators keep saying in interview after interview, SLEEP NO MORE is mostly about the individual spectator’s journey through the performance space, their interface with the spectacle found there, and their cogitation about it later. I thought that was a cop-out the first time I heard it. It sounded condescending, something to keep us plebeians from knowing too much and to keep us in our ever-aweing but uncomprehending places. It also sounded suspiciously evasive, perhaps to keep us from discovering the lack of substance both in the creative process and in the final product. Also, as an academic, I felt driven to dissect it, to deconstruct it, to simplify it, to own it so I could hold it ALL in my hands in a tangible form I had thoroughly scrutinized. I thought that would lead me to full understanding and explain to me why the experience got so deeply under my skin. I wanted to conquer it!

It’s not that the intellectual is bad. I think it gave me more insights and causes for appreciation than I would have had without it. I believe, for example, this show is a realization of the mad genius Antonin Artaud’s notion of “Theatre of Cruelty.” Even Artaud himself didn’t have a clue exactly HOW to do it, and his writings were more theoretical idealism than practical, I think the SLEEP NO MORE people have done it. I also think, perhaps, the ‘theatre of cruelty’ experience isn’t workable on a sizeable scale, but possible only on a spectator to spectator basis, which is why SLEEP NO MORE’s mantra of traveling the space alone is so instructive. I thought I could write a book on that, and someone still may. I also think SLEEP NO MORE is a realization of the ‘Holy Theatre’ spoken of by both Peter Brook (THE EMPTY SPACE) and Jerzy Grotowski (TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE), and I think the actors in SNM are or try very hard most nights to be ‘holy actors,’ as described by Grotowski. My experience I would certainly characterize as “sacred.” I think Nietzsche’s notion (from THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY) of the most potent theatre having both the ‘Dionysian’ and the ‘Apollonian’ in equal, complementary quantities is a rare and crowning achievement of SLEEP NO MORE. There are academic papers and explorations to be had along all these lines. I also think SLEEP NO MORE will eventually become a chapter in an Oscar Brockett book, (or whoever is *the* theatre history textbook guy in the coming years.) Even while I was seeing the show, I thought: “This will get written about in the future, and I WAS THERE! I saw it with my own eyes.” And I wanted to be one of the academics who wrote about it!

But I have realized that this quest is wrong-headed, for me anyway. As I continue to process, it isn’t primarily ‘academic’ things that pinball around in my waking hours or tango seductively in my dreams. It’s the emotional, the visceral, and the personal, the deeply personal in some cases. It’s not that I am incapable of producing scholarly commentary; it’s that I don’t really want to, not about this. It’s too special. Engaging solely in deductive inquiry compartmentalizes, reduces, even cheapens what was ethereal and soul-invigorating. Like a picturesque tapestry – if you continue to pick and yank, the thread unravels and what you’re left with is a boulder-sized ball of multi-colored string. The artwork itself and the enchantment it induced are both gone forever.

Some amazing things just don’t ‘translate.’ They cannot be quantified or fully explained to the rational mind. That’s why words like ‘sublime’ and ‘miraculous’ exist – to describe the indescribable. And that was SLEEP NO MORE for me.

Sublime.