Come September I’m like a “whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school”, Act 2, Scene 7, As You Like It. The only difference being it’s not back to school but back to filling out applications for funding for next year festival instead of attending PACE (Performing Arts for Crisis in Europe) who are meeting this September in Portugal. Sadly I can’t attend as I’ve got other things to do and can’t afford to in any case. There doesn’t seem to be either the time or the funding to do half the things I’d like to do and I guess to some extent this is due to how difficult it is for me to keep apace with the world I live in. So I guess my thoughts this September are a reflection on the direction we’re heading as cultural creators on our world stage.

Last Spring, as I was saying goodbye to the people I met in Dublin at PACE - a learning platform associating artistic organisations from six EU countries - a brawl broke out beside us where a man under the influence of alcohol had attempted to write something on the window of the premise, by way of protest, from which he had been evicted. Our collective hug ended abruptly, captivated by the violent and negative scene we increasingly see on our world stage due to socio-economic uncertainty. PACE’s objective is “to fuse theatre aesthetics and politics as a channel to face this current crisis at a European level.” One of the questions I asked at that meeting is “whether representing the negative is positive?”

We all know the effects of the crisis by virtue of its existence in seemingly random acts of violence induced by substance abuse or a sense of desperation and disseminated all around the world thanks to the media and technology – In Spain people in despair waited for the media to arrive before jumping to capture their suicide, thus transforming their death into a protest performance so we, the passive spectators, can witness how meaningless life had become for those without the means to provide for their family. Judging by the media coverage of the sad last acts of many who cannot cope within our society we seem to be addicted to the negativity. And I wonder by dwelling upon all that is wrong with the world are we not in some way reinforcing or perpetuating the misery? I don’t watch the news in general, nor do I read the paper because I find it void of content most of the time and yet the radio is nearly always on in my parent’s house and I am obliged at times to listen to the noise.

I’m not suggesting we bury our head in the sand and hope that it will go away. I think we are more so like children who replay the same traumatic situation over and over again until we can create a happy ending. However before our present crisis there seemed to be little reason to question the aesthetics of the theatre of modernity in a European context. We were coping rather well with prosperity and our personal performance. Now, in times of austerity, with funding for the arts among many other sectors greatly diminished we need to revaluate our role and responsibility in the context of this crisis.

Ironically, social art has taken off to voice our disempowered society’s desperate cry for social change: It seems like when something ails our society someone or some group takes it upon themselves to seek a remedy. Let us assume that PACE and of course the Non Prophet Organisation have chosen to perform this heroic role to seek a peaceful solution for humanity.

 But do we need artists to solve this crisis?

 Well, not really. However in times of austerity artists like most of us come into conflict with this antagonistic ailing environment and are forced to fight or flee this stark reality. The artist's way is to create through conflict works of art that not only reflect societal problems but also seek to transform this reality and to provide an elixir for life’s woes.

Why?

To quote the Artist in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead “It’s what we do.”

In social art, the artist's medium is ordinary life. When there is something rotten in the state, like Hamlet, we feel it is our “curs’d spite” to have been born to set it right. At least I do because I believe artists seek to restore harmony. This heroic quest, which embodies our personal beliefs and artistic ethos, entails a physical and spiritual journey fraught with doubt and conflict as we strive to create a thing of beauty that will last forever. Though not necessarily an enviable life it is often an admirable one because our ethical concerns and cultural values may be something worthy of emulation and to some degree it is the arts  through the media that shapes our society’s culture and helps define what makes life worth living.

So what makes creative artists and social activists, or “Artivists” to use the term Annika B. taught me, think they aught to be transforming the definitions of our society when Plato in The Republic tells us:

The cheap, imitative wares of artists, kaleidoscopes of color and sound, disorient and seduce us, breeding irrational emotionalism and false opinion. … Artists and lovers of art share the fate of Plato’s cave dwellers who toil away, distracted and misled by images, never knowing of the sun-filled world outside the cave, never realizing the existence of the higher world of forms.

However the late pope John Paul said:

The Church does need art, in his Letter to Artists. But his conception of art is radically different from Plato's. Art images the mystery of divine creation. Painters and poets imitate not a sterile, impersonal form or idea, but a Creator who is pure activity, bringing the world out of nothing, shaping its valleys and hills, filling its oceans with water and its skies with stars, breathing it all to life. The Creator becomes incarnate in the world, making the invisible visible, making the Word flesh. And from the mystery of God incarnate comes "a flowering of beauty." Painters and poets, who echo divine creative activity, producing incalculable treasures, little resemble the artists Plato depicts, purveyors of cheap tricks, illusionists, twisting our perceptions of reality. True artists are not merely imitators: because they imitate God, they are also creators, and transcend the realm of the material in a way Plato (imaginatively gifted as he was) seems not to visualize. They tap into the source of transcendence. And by their art they provide for the rest of us an approach to faith…

Each of us faces that challenge. John Paul exhorts us all to make our lives works of art; to produce masterpieces out of the materials we are given. Many of us, as we labour over these masterworks, have—as part of the task—another job. Acting in imitation of our creator's gift of life, we have "scatter'd [our] Maker's image through the land." We are procreators, and thus in the business of producing, and modeling for, young artists. As painters and poets, as philosophers and thinkers of various stripes, as authors of our own and our neighbors' destinies, as mothers and fathers, we help build up the Church, the body of Christ. We build the City of… Introduction to "From a Logical Point of View" by Sandra Lee Menssen

 I would say we build the city of tomorrow’s society where often decisions are made and actions taken that decide the fate of humanity. Every choice we make as concerned citizens should be shaped by our responsibility to the cultural values of our society, which frames all creativity.

 So what are the concerns and values of PACE?

 “PACE has been designed in the context of the European Debt Crisis and its consequences throughout Europe.  They strive to empower European citizens through the creation of performance techniques to tackle political and geopolitical issues that concern us all. Linking the trainees and the local communities to this learning process will make of this renewed relation between theatre and politics a weapon against the withdrawal of the European cohesion.”

I spent over four days in the company of performing artists from all over the world attending the IETM conference in Dublin and in the spirit of generosity and inclusivity, was graciously invited to participate as an observer in the PACE workshop that preceded this conference with other theatre-makers who stayed on. One of the questions that continually pops up at these events is, what do you do?

That’s a question I have great difficulty giving a definitive answer to.

I’m uh… a theatre-maker. Well actually I’m doing academic research in alternative theatre practices. I’m also a performer though I really just like to write about how I experience life. But if truth be told I sometimes feel  from a taxpayer’s perspective like a parasite with a peaked cap to mask my eyes from the passer-by as I stand in line to sign on once a month for social welfare and yet I put in more hours than most thinking about how we live life.

Of course this is one of many ways in which we can define ourselves but to those who seem to control the definitions of society poets, performers and non-profit makers are persona non grata, especially when we question the socio-economic political system we live in which we don’t seem to be contributing.

However before type-casting lets consider:

1. If you were limited to just words, how would you define the word red or Performance Artist? Do you think someone who was color-blind or who had never been to the theatre or an Art gallery would understand your definition?

How would you define your role as a performance artist or theatre maker in the context of our present socio-economic crisis to a visiting alien from another planet?  Or to someone who had no understanding of the bits of paper and metal we call money that we can’t seem to live without.

Recently I watched a documentary called Camp 14: Total Control Zone at Guth Gafa International Documentary Festival 2013 about Shin Dong-Huyk: born in captivity and raised as a political prisoner in a North Korean re-education Camp where he was forced to witness the execution of his mother and brother.  At the age of 23, he managed to escape, the only known North Korean to have fled a Gulag. Now he travels the world to speak out against the political regime in his country. He has seen all that western society has to offer and yet his wish is to return to his country. He can’t understand why we commit suicide due to lack of material wealth. He said though they were often tortured to death nobody committed suicide in the gulags. Life was pure.

2. What are the things of most value in your life right now in the context of our current crisis?

I believe the really fundamental questions of our lives are not questions of fact or finance but questions of value. What is it that gives something genuine value? What is worth striving for, and what makes life worth living? Are there values that transcend cultural differences?

A definition of value:

In terms of festival and theatrical events, my overlapping strands of thought relate to the value of every individual’s contribution to the definition of society’s cultural values. Culture shapes every action we take and sound we make.We as performance artists are agents of culture but so are we all in some way through action or inertia responsible for the world we live in.

To ask and answer the question: if all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players do we really need artists I would say someone needs to step out from the crowd or chorus of protesters and suggest a way to act and assume a personal responsibility for the future of humanity.

The two days with PACE were spent coming up with questions to define how their role as pedagogical performance artists in the context of crisis could best be of value to society. Although the groups come from different countries, as theatre-makers, their common territorial background is the stage while the people we wish to work with are not necessarily public performers. They may be passive spectators who just want to observe, like me. However what I discovered after only a few hours in PACE’s company is how hard it is to remain silent at a forum that concerns us all.

I wanted to intervene to help articulate what we were all striving to define through questions before we could even attempt to seek a solution. I could identify with what these people were, not so much attempting to perform but trying to overcome as representatives from different countries and cultures coming into conflict on a daily basis with reality:  We had opposing points of view about an economic crisis but what we collectively agreed on is that it is more so a crisis of conscience and a conflict of values and different perspectives as individuals living in a dysfunctional democracy.

What is important to point out is our interdependency. Though we may come from different cultural backgrounds, brought up with different beliefs and values we depend on the same natural resources. These resources are not shared equally due to the economic monetary and capitalist system most of humanity willingly or unwillingly is forced to accept, as there seems to be no alternative. At least we didn’t come up with one in the short space of time we were together. 

A simplistic and brief definition of our alienated society:

The fundamental and over-simplified reason for the present so called crisis seems to be that the profit-oriented capitalist and monetary system we live in is flawed because it destroys rather than creates a sense of compassion and human solidarity.

In a capitalist economy the bottom line seems to be the profit margin. In order for an individual or any institution to be “profitable” it needs to persuade people to become consumers and part with their money to purchase goods or services created though not necessarily needed to live, let alone survive.

However, it is the seductive power of performers within the labour or leisure industry that create within the potential customer’s imagination this need or desire and then fulfill it with products made so some can profit regardless of the cost to our world’s human and natural resources.

Particular cultural values are perpetuated through mainstream media, such as our notions of happiness and misery; success or failure; ethical and unethical practices; codes of social behavior; what we deserve as a form of recompense for our labour, which is provided to placate our waged-slave society.

Ironically, it is our fear of not being a member of this society and its value systems, which makes it extremely difficult to exist outside such a socio-economic system. Even if one were ready, willing and able to reject what John Stuart Mill’s describes as the tyranny of the masses, one couldn’t without a self-sustaining island of your own.

But above and beyond the question of sustainability we are social creatures and even Robinson Crusoe, the master, had his man Friday, though no money. In brief we are not dependent on money, as it has no intrinsic value, we're dependent on each other and the planet's resources. Nor are we necessarily happy even when we have more than enough to live on. We often desire the company and recognition of others and indeed emulate the cultural actions of others to feel like we belong to our society.

Individuals or marginal groups who don’t share mainstream values are tolerated provided they don’t attempt to destroy the hierarchical class system, which privileges the so-called possessors of the earth’s human and natural resources. Possession gives them the purchasing power to control other natural and human resources such as artists and armies to protect as well as disseminate the cultural values that greatly influences how we define our individual selves as valued members of a society based upon a hierarchical system that we perpetuate.

However in our highly automated world there is less need of the wage slave, even on stage. The leisure industry relies more and more on technology to create the stories and special effects that flicker before us on our screens. Like the fire for the chained figures in Plato’s allegory of the cave, many artists also dwell in darkness transfixed by the image of their own shadows, mistaking the limelight granted to them as representatives of the gods for reality. But ‘As flies to wanton boys are we [artists] to th' gods, they kill us for their sport’ when we no longer support or entertain them. Basically we’re puppets on a string helping the gods maintain control by provoking fear and fascination through our creations that keep us all in caves, renovated and transformed over time from the great Greek amphitheatre to the artificially lite spaces we dwell in today to be entertained.

The cultural values propitiated by artists through the medium of the arts, which we all inherit are accepted as natural due to the dominance of Aristotelian dramatic practices: an “extremely powerful poetic-political [self-perpetuating] system for intimidation of the spectator [consumer]” (Augusto Boal). In brief it perpetuates the master and slave class system, which still exists today in many different forms.

Why do we accept this system?

Because a few corporations possess the majority of the world’s natural resources with greater GNP than many countries:

We borrow money supplied by banks to pay for the material and energy we need to survive. We are expected to pay back this money or else forfeit material possessions purchased such as our house or place of business where we live and ply our trade. To generate money in order to sustain ourselves and pay back what we’ve borrowed we must work, thus becoming slaves working to attain money from others to give back to the lender in a perpetual cycle based on the supply and demand of the earth’s resources.

It's a simplistic defintion because I don't want to dwell on the subject of resources and our insecure society but on the power of humanity to overcome our fear of change.

When PACE had reached an agreement on the questions rather than the causes or solutions we considered of most importance we played a game of choice where we answered either yes or no to these questions. For example:

Is representing the positive negative?

Yes or no?

Once again it was evident that we couldn’t agree to disagree but in the spirit of friendship and our common pursuit of a solution we were able to go on despite individual discord.

In PACE’s ability to create unity despite individual disagreement is where I see hope for humanity. To give you an example of how I see the microcosm of this group representing the macrocosm:

In these frugale times we shared a last meal together. When the bill came round and we all had handed over what was our share we were still 18 Euros shy. How could this be? I had handed over more than the cost of the food that would sustain me, plus a tip and saw no reason why I should pay more. Through a sense of obligation and common generosity engendered by being in the company of this European community I handed over another two euros although somewhat reluctantly at first.

I thought about it some days afterwards in relation to the value we give to money and how often that word cropped up in the two day workshop. I discovered that it wasn’t the money that was really bothering me. It was the thought that someone among us had enjoyed “a free meal” so to speak at the expense of others. This was not fair and I was not guilty so why should I have to pay for another?

But I was guilty of giving too much value to a couple of metal coins and not enough to what I had received from the time spent in the company of these people: the food for thought I had received, the cups of tea and coffee I had drank and eaten while others go hungry. I had forgotten about the sense of community and shared responsibility and how this whole debt crisis was in some ways a fallacy because of the value we give to money instead of what really matters: our natural resources. I was reminded of Veronika, one of the Artists and guest speaker’s at PACE, who gave away most of her worldly possessions and who tries not to be ruled by material things. It was another deeply personal performance, which was not meant to impose her values upon society but her way to say no to a life measured by money. People close to Veronika thought she was going to commit suicide, such is the value we give to our material possessions that the idea of giving them away leads others to think that we’re giving up on life. I believe “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” Henry David Thoreau

 The other guest-speaker, Dylan Tyghe talked about his issues with mental health, notions of a successful performance and how sometimes it’s better to fail than to fit into the four or five week rehearsal structure actors are forced to accept as a reasonable amount of time to learn to regurgitate their lines, as if for the first time, to entertain a paying audience night after night. This is the embarrassing fallacy of the theatre of modernity and the leisure industry and that gets to the heart of our society:

We as performers or passive spectators willingly suspend our disbelief and accept and do things that are not natural or even self-destructive as well-adapted members of a poorly structured and highly automated society I barely cope to keep apace with.

For what and for who?

Who defines what theatre or life aught to be and why perform in a way that makes you physically and mentally unwell? Is it the tyranny a few bankers or of the masses or because we as individuals are afraid to be free, knowing that could mean a marginal life of austerity, instead of the opulence we assume as well adapted members of western society? To be honest I’d rather be happy to be alive without feeling I had to define myself in terms of what I do or don’t do well enough in the eyes of another instead of making excuses for my so-called mediocrity and vulnerability.

There were many questions posed but no quick solutions to the problems which would require many more people to participate in workshops and performances like those of the guest–speakers who dare to step out from their own crowd and criticise theatre’s participatory role as part of the leisure industry which has helped perpetuate a false sense of democracy.

I think our greatest failure is to not appreciate the mystery that is our existence because we are so caught up with seeking solutions in our struggle to not just survive but to thrive in western society, even if it is at the expense of others. In order to really flourish I feel we need to embrace the chaos this crisis has caused in our once comfortable lives and to create from these conflicts reasons to go on striving as performers to play with the possibilities our infinite imagination offers us to entertain a brighter more balanced future.

The philosopher’s search is for rationally compelling reasons for belief. It may not be possible to map the artist’s way of coming to terms with our society’s values from these overlapping strands of thought but what we can try to do is help ourselves and others imagine a way in which we could learn to see ourselves as the heroic protagonists of our own lives through the power of our own performance and to play an active role in shaping ourselves as part of society. It often starts with an empty space, a moment of peace and tranquility, when the incessant and often negative noise of the world cease to be. I’ve heard myself among many others say almost inaudibly ‘I cannot cope’ or ‘I can’t go on’ and then it happens. Something or someone, sometimes silently answers this plea: a creative voice in the void waiting patiently. Paralyzed by fear we stand stage struck, staring into the dead image of a computer screen or the dark abyss where once a community existed where we could see the reflection of ourselves. Where there was less pressure to perform for we were not forced to fill the lack in people’s lives through spectacle. Theatre was a forum for the community whose civic duty was to come and participate in order to create public policy.

Somewhere through the course of time we forgot what theatre was, is and will always be: a reflection of our collective conscience reminding us of the line that runs throughout the history of time and the ethic of reciprocity:

Treat others as one would like to be treated oneself.

 And what happens when we fail? We begin again; fail better as Samuel Beckett once said, for it is better to fail than to be defeated by despair. This place of seemingly no hope is from where the exiled poet Dante Alighieri, depressed in a dark wood, began his divine comedy. From his personal hell to vision of heaven for all humanity - Our lives are made up from the metaphors of these great artists, poets, philosophers, prophets in their own way, which remain etched in our memory and that may transform the sorrow of today into joy tomorrow.

Where their mysterious visions, come from I cannot say. I am grateful to have had the chance to share in them. Their threads of thoughts and ideas weaved together inform our culture and collective conscience. These poets, playwrights, philosophers and the many public performers throughout history are present in spirit when we come together to create concord from our discord. Terms such as harmony and discord we owe to Pythagoras’s theory on musical scales and the divinity of number. I think the notion of unity, harmony and wholeness exists in seeing ourselves as One. Not one person but part of our environment and not distinct from the centuries of thoughts too complicated for me to sum up in a few words that have led us to where we are today.

To give you a better understanding of how this relates to the Non Prophet Festival and our theme of transformation and A Midsummer Night’s Dream I’ve strung together some words from professor Daniel Robinson and many other academic artists and mentors too numerous to mention from the Teaching Company that shape my philosophy:

When sir Arthur Evans excavated the great court at Knossos on the Island of Crete, the court of king Minos he discovered mural paintings the depicted young Greek boys, hurtling over bulls, in tasks that were at once ritualistic and dangerous.

The bull is a significant feature in mythology. It was only after king Minos’ exacted tribute against the Greeks, which called for young Greek boys and girls to be sacrificed annually at Crete that Theseus was sent to kill the bull, the Minotaur who was consuming these young Athenians and in the process of killing the bull he freed Athens from a burden it bore.

For Theseus to get to the Minotaur he had to solve the puzzle of the great Labyrinth that no one who entered could find his or her way out of again. He was able to do so because Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos gave him a golden cord by which he could retrace his steps from the very depths of the Labyrinth and return having killed the Minotaur. Myths are an endless source of metaphor, and the cord of Ariadne is an apt metaphor for history: We solve a problem or a puzzle by retracing the steps that got us there in the first place. Our guide through the history of humanity is recorded and represented from ancient Greece to the 21st century in the history of theatre.

Why theatre?

Because before ever there were academies of philosophy there was the deep psychology of the great Greek playwrights: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides who tackled the same fundamental problems and questions we pose today:

For the sake of economy, these may be dubbed the problem of knowledge, the problem of conduct, and the problem of governance. The first of these would be developed within the fields now called epistemology and metaphysics. The second is the domain of ethics and moral philosophy. The third is the province of political science and jurisprudence. But these developed realms of reflective inquiry were slow to reveal themselves to human intelligence.

Beginning in mimesis, in dance and rituals that encode and explain the world, the questions become more insistent, and as a whole, communities begin to ponder the nature of things. The dance is augmented by song and poetry, by epic tales so vivid that children never forget the main characters and their extraordinary experiences and exploits and that pose, in different terms, the fundamental questions: What is the world? What should I do? How are our lives to be ordered? Between 800 and 600 B.C., such accounts proliferated. Both the Hindu Upanishads and Homer’s famous epics are rich in what may be called pre-philosophical reflections on the human condition and the point and purpose of life. Such works are the background “folk” wisdom of an age; philosophy is a refinement or a rejection of the claims of the dancer and the bard.

A. We begin with myth, which seeks to answer perplexing questions but does so in such a way as to create and preserve a kind of civic coherence. The mythology of a people is the basis on which they recognize themselves as a people and have a coherent relationship, not only to each other but also with their own past.

B. To some extent, philosophy is disruptive in this regard. The enterprise is not an essentially civic one. It does not begin with a settled position on political and moral matters, then seek ways to enshrine the settled view. Rather, the mission is a broadly epistemological one. The search, as we shall discover, is the search for truth.

C. Nonetheless, the questions that mythology must set out to answer are not unlike the questions that philosophy sets out to answer. We can identify three overarching issues that consume much of the subject matter of philosophy: the problem of knowledge, the problem of conduct, and the problem of governance.

1. The problem of knowledge is straightforward. How is it that we come to know anything? On what basis do we undertake to frame and seek answers to questions? Long before the appearance of philosophy, people facing the challenges of daily life were required to seek knowledge, if only practical knowledge. In philosophy, the problem reaches beyond the practical and the everyday to more general and abstract realms.

2. The problem of conduct is nothing less than the problem of deciding how one’s life should be lived. How should I conduct myself in such a way that my life is a satisfying one? How will I be able to act in a way that maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain? What sort of person should I strive to be? What’s the nature of the relationships I have to others?

3. Were there no basis on which to plan or conduct a course of life, there would be no real “problem” to be solved politically. The problem of governance arises in light of conflicts at the level of conduct. On what basis does a people come to understand itself as a people? What is the basis on which modes of leadership are chosen? What is the basis on which leaders are resisted, revolutions staged, radical upheaval fomented?

When frustrated due to the false images we’ve created we look for and sometimes find someone to blame for our poor performance, such as our elected politicians. However we all must act creatively to collectively change the cultural values of our society and free ourselves from the bonds of self-inflicted slavery. I think we can learn that the place to start is by recognizing our reflection in everybody else who shares our world stage and to radically connect with them truthfully.

To communicate effectively is to make new connections with others whom we think we know but really it is our cultural inheritance that prevents us from seeing the latent potentiality in everybody. Ultimately it will be our legacy and gift to humanity to create in others a generous sense of natural reciprocity based on empathy for others and especially our oppressors who unfortunately don’t seem to feel a sense of unity and are cut off from themselves and others by materiali rather than spiritual concerns:

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol the ghost of Jacob Marley is doomed like many other spirits to wander for all eternity without any rest dragging the chains they have forged in life when they could have given more of their time and money to help others. It’s the material concerns in life that rob us of our humanity and spirituality. Their sense of regret is further deepened by the fact that now as ghosts they can no longer intervene to help the less fortunate people in life. It’s that deep sense of guilt, shame and remorse we feel about ourselves when we know we could and should have done more to help others in life. I feel it myself every time I behave unconsciously or unsympathetically towards others who lack control over their emotions and the capacity to reason and contemplate the long term consequences of their actions not only for themselves but for others.

I opened my notes on Existentialism and a couple of lectures on Camus that struck a few chords in relation to this topic of feeling with or for others:

“What is strange about Mersault [the protagonist] in The Stranger is that he seems to feel nothing. He doesn’t seem to think for himself or engage in reflection at all.” The sense of shock of being abandoned or feeling the emptiness of no longer ever seeing his mother again doesn't seem to affect people like Mersault who are spectators or passive performers in their own lives. Such people are not even aware of the consequences of such loss as they don't feel a sense of loss and thus have nothing to mourn. They feel physical sensations or the emotional sensations of ennui but there is no real awareness of the value of life. No sense of absence or longing for what is no longer.

It is only when we grow up feeling as opposed to intelligently knowing what the bonds of love and friendship are as social creatures that such concepts are of value to us and that we could thus mourn the loss of these values or the persons or objects that represent these values.

The idea of representing or standing in for something else implies that these values are already present within us: That somehow they are an innate part of our existence or being human. However if we grow up in an environment without such values we would be unaware that they're disappearing. We would be unaware of what other people feel when faced with the death of someone or something and we would be unable to offer any empathy or sympathy. In other words, one has to feel what it is to be loved in order to feel or recognize that same feeling of love within oneself. It's not a feeling one has towards oneself, which can become narcissistic in its extreme but it is the love for others also and the natural reciprocity of such feelings that needs to be cultivated. I say cultivated although I could say presented or represented when we talk about theatre and the leisure industry. Life may be performing this reciprocity until it becomes natural and as pedagogical performance artists and activists we relish the responsibility to create something beautiful for all to emulate.

We live in an uncertain world that not evens our gods can control. We must turn to the fates, to our destiny and to chance, which operates throughout time. So there are no answers. What we learn from mythological epics from Homer right up to today’s theatre of modernity is that it’s easy to get in trouble but not so easy to extricate oneself. This may happen because we fail to comply with the wishes and whims of the gods or by engaging in a hubristic belief in one’s own divinity or immortality. But we must not forget that we are earth bound creatures for better or for worse, a place where love and heroic aspirations often fail. Anger is often the reaction as in the story of Achilles, an arrogant demi-god who is forced to give up the bully of victory by Agamemnon to appease Apollo the god of war. Achilles refuses forthwith to participate in this ridiculous battle brought about by human vanity and lust for possessions and power over others. This epic tale tells of the terrible things that happen when passion control reason, thematic in all performance.

However when we are provoked or persuaded by the gods or idle rich to do deeds to please them though we may be puppets on a string there is always that one string or chord with which we can resist the unjust or unnatural will of others: that is the golden chord of reason to question why we do what we do.  In the wake of the Celtic tiger we should take time to contemplate the causes and learn from our mistakes. We may leave after us a legacy of greed and oppressiveness for our offspring to emulate simply by failing to be the heroes we may be destined to be  or we may choose to transform our lives in little ways everyday to make the world a better place to be for everybody.