Cryptobiosis

Recently shared a story at Story Parlor in Asheville for Tom Chalmer's series, 'Listen To This.' His prompt was like rain in the desert. Here's what I said:

 

Here's what I had written:

Memory waits in the soil beneath out feet.

The year was 7 B.C. (Before Children) and we headed out on a road trip across the southwest. From St. Louis, across Kansas and the mind-numbingly flat plains of eastern Colorado, over the stunning peaks and nerve-wracking switch-backs of the rockies and down into the great American desert. We were heading for Mesa Verde, the ancient remains of a once thriving cliff-dwelling city of ancestral Puebloans. The name belies the history, for once the land was verdant, but little green remains.
As it happened, Mesa Verde was closed.
So we learned of another, lesser known, ruin in the desert, Hovenweep. The name is Paiute meaning “deserted place.” We set off on a dirt road into the desert of southwest Colorado, across the border of Utah, through an arid land pock-marked with stoney outcrops and clumps of pinyon pine and juniper. Dusty bunches of sagebrush scattered across the open flats, here and there the soil was blackened in charred, burn patches, and the sun burnished over all. As is often the case with arroyos and desert canyons, you do not see them until you are just approaching their edge. Chasms open suddenly before you, great cracks in the tortured landscape.  One such canyon was Hovenweep. A National Monument established in 1923 and currently celebrating its centennial, but at the time, little known and little visited.
Trafficked by humans for over 10,000 years, settled about 1,000 years ago with stone and brick buildings carefully crafted onto the landscape and tucked into cliff faces, home to several thousand people who farmed, traded, crafted, played, and studied the brilliant stars from a high stone and brick tower that commanded one end of the canyon. Now it was ghostly quiet with rippling heat rising from the expectant soil. We learned the charred patches were actually a fragile, Cryptobiotic soil, filled with cyanobacteria, lichen, fungi, mosses, and a vast microbiome forming a brittle crust over the deeper earth; quiescent and desiccated, but ready to swiftly reconstitute in the presence of water.
We walked along a narrow dirt path from the canyon rim down into the arroyo where a fresh stream once flowed and many voices once echoed off the canyon walls. Here and there were shallow divots carved into the bare rock offering secure footing as we descended. Steps carved for ancient travelers we now used. The only sound was the scuffling of our hiking boots on crumbling sand and stones and an occasional “watch your step.” “Give me your hand.” “Look at that.” “Some place, huh?”
We tried to stay on a path along the base of the cliff in what little shade we could find as the sun bore down from high noon. We squinted in the light bouncing off the sand and stone. Everything had a hot golden luster. We came across some brick walls enclosing a depression into the canyon wall, a nice cool room out of the heat. We snacked and watered ourselves and took in the close comfort of this little shelter. As we sat there, the light shifted and the bright sunlight dimmed. A wind picked up and we peered out to see the sky blackening. The wind whipped up dust devils beyond the the canyon and suddenly thunder broke, lightening flashed and a heavy rain poured down.
We fell back into our dry recess and watched as the rain curtained the doorway. Thunderous booms echoed all around us, water gushed and splashed across the canyon. We cowered together feeling the tremendous force of the storm. After about 30 minutes, the booming moved past, the rain let up, and the storm was gone. Water continued to stream down the canyon walls and along the riverbed. The air was filled with the sound of running water. And then other sounds joined in. There was buzzing as some kind of fly or gnats were suddenly swarming, and bird trills - from a wren that was hopping in and out of the sodden rocks. The air was fresh with that ozone crackle of the storm mixed with the pungent smell of sage. Here and there splotches of color appeared. Tiny yellow and red flowers in rock crevices, Juniper trees glistened, a chipmunk scuttled beneath one, collecting berries. There were little potholes - morteros - holes formed from grinding grain - now filled with water. I bent over one for a drink and saw tiny bugs swimming about - those fairy shrimp they used to sell as “sea monkeys.”  I stood in the center of the renewed stream and marveled at the suddenness of the storm and the suddenness of the life it revived. Cryptobiosis, hidden life, was emerging everywhere. The sun returned and brought a sparkle to the entire scene. I remember marveling at the braided ripple pattern in the water streaming past and wondering if that had inspired weavers and potters to replicate the patterns in their crafting.
The canyon echoed with life. I heard a child laughing and felt that the storm had revived the ghosts of the early Puebloans. It turned out to be a small family also visiting the site and hiking along the same trail. But for a moment, I could feel the rich, verdancy of the place, and appreciate the life that was at home in this now-deserted place.
The water flowed past, the sun warmed and then grew hot. Slowly the life receded to its hiding places. I stood there and felt the burning heat return. But I kept standing. Waiting. Expectant. Suffering the drought while hoping for the coming of another rain.
Still today, every rainfall wakens my cryptobiosis and every drought leaves me hoping.

The Storytelling Actor

Inspired by my recent conversation with Steven James (The Story Blender, 2/11/2022) 

I bring back this article from '91. Enjoy.

Storytelling is too vast and varied an art form to be the province of any one tradition or culture. The current profession of storytelling offers a kind of crossroads for many fields of endeavor, each leading into the other through the common ground of the told story. The shaman, the historian, the psychologist, the librarian, the writer, and the raconteur all may find in storytelling the origin of their profes- sions and, perhaps, the apotheosis as well. The stage actor, along with the rest, has a legitimate claim of kinship to the first storyteller; and may also find in storytelling the final fulfillment of his or her art form.

Many theatre artists turned to storytelling in Europe and the United States over the last twenty* years. What has brought them to this crossroads? What do they seek and what do they have to offer? A look at a few recent trends in performance art may offer a means of understanding the place of the actor/theatre artist1 in the vast arena of storytelling.

Theatre and Storytelling are so closely related it is difficult at times to distinguish the one from the other. The soliloquy, the aside, and the direct address of the audience are still prevalent in modern plays and are indistinguishable from traditional storytelling in the West. Other elements less traditional to Western storytelling, such as dance, mask, ensemble and enactment have ties to storytelling traditions elsewhere. The modern actor, therefore, is bound to cross into storytelling at some point in his/her development.

The developmental path of the stage actor often involves explorations in the root forms that make up the modern theatre. Many actors engaged in such a process, are now storytellers. As actors recapitulate the evolution of stage performance, they bring new life to the theatre and become dynamic artists in their own right.

In the field of Embryology, recapitulation theory suggests that “an organism passes through developmental stages resembling various stages in the phylogeny of its group; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”2 The idea, simply, is that the development of the individual recapitulates the evolution of its species. For example, there is a period in the development of the human embryo in which it resembles the aquatic life forms of its ancestors in the primordial sea. The birth of the child may be said to recapitulate the evolution of the species from sea to land. Whether or not this theory still has validity in the life sciences3, it may be useful to describe the way modern actors are recapitulating the history of theatrical art. This recapitulation is leading them into storytelling. In a way, the modern actor is re-evolving into the modern storyteller.

If personal anecdote may serve to tell a collective story, I will offer my own theatrical ontogeny as an example. As a child I studied theatre for children. I received instruction in many theatre skills: voice, movement, improvisation, interpretation, make-up, playwrighting, etc. By the time I went to college I had two major interests: directing and mime. Directing interested me because it was concerned with all aspects of theatre art and was therefore the most general and all-inclusive area of study. Mime, on the other hand, interested me for the opposite reason: it was theatre at its most essential. In mime, everything was concentrated on the actors’ body and the small space it occupies. Here was the beginning of my recapitulation. During the 1970’s I divided my time between these two disciplines. Yet it was mime that lead me to my theatrical origins and set me on the path to storytelling.

The American revival of interest in mime was well under way by the 1970’s, reaching a climax at the 1974 International Mime Festival and Institute at Viterbo College in Lacrosse, WI. There, a new generation of mime artists acknowledged one another, celebrating this essential theatre and, at the same time, evolving away from it. For the rest of the decade, they would expand their mime repertoires to include mask, juggling, circus skills, experiments with voice, and clowning. This period saw the advancement of commedia d’ell arte troupes, juggling ensembles, the arrival of “new vaudevillians”, a proliferation of solo-actor dramatic performances and performance artists.

In the late ‘70’s, as a member of the Theatre Project Company in St. Louis, I was able to experience a synthesis of my many interests. Here, I began to tell stories. In 1980, storytelling came to St. Louis in a big way, with the first St. Louis Storytelling Festival. I brought my early efforts at storytelling along- side more accomplished artists such as Gamble Rogers, Heather Forest, the energetic Jay O’Callahan and the wonderfully eclectic Ken Feit. These storytellers, and many others like them, coming from folk music, education, the ministry and the theatre, were part of a dynamic exchange of energies and ideas in the form of the spoken story. The simplicity of the telling of stories was capable of unifying otherwise disparate disciplines. Entering into this arena, I discovered a kind of crossroads of many traditions.

Yet I continued to work in the theatre, retreating from the crossroads to ply my trade along the well-traveled paths of the modern actor. I went back to school for a graduate degree in a professional training program. Yet now I was convinced that the actor, more than the other artists that comprise the theatre arts family, was at the center of the art. However, the practice of telling stories (though never fully dormant) began to reassert itself in my life and work. I left acting and returned to the crossroads of storytelling.

Such was my ontogeny. Yet it was by no means unique. Many theatre artists were making the same discoveries and the same decisions. With some variation, I have heard my story from scores of other storytellers. All were on the same pilgrimage, though never certain where it would lead. This evolution may be summed up in this sequence:

1. A return to mime, reducing theatre to its essential element: the actor in action. No voice. No word. No character. No story.

2. A reintroduction of theatrical elements at different stages (mask, circus, improvised scenario) bringing back character, object, and narrative.

3. A return to storytelling with the word arising from the speaker, and the evolution is complete.4

This re-evolution was anticipated by one of its progenitors, Etienne Decroux. Decroux developed the foundations of modern mime in Paris beginning in the 1920’s. His students included Jean-Louis Barrault, Jacques LeCoq, and Marcel Marceau. Marceau, more than the others, brought this art form to prominence in America and the world. Yet Decroux was not interested in the kind of pantomime we saw commercialized in America in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. He wanted a radical stripping down of theatre to its essence: the actor in action. In 1931, he articulated a formula for the rehabilitation of the modern theatre, the first three points of which were:

“1. For a period of thirty years, prohibit all arts other than the actor’s. Substitute for the set of the play the set of the theatre, the backdrop of all imaginable actions.

“2. During the first ten years, eliminate all elevation from the stage such as benches, stairs, terraces, balconies, etc. Actors shall suggest the ideas of “above” and “below,” although one partner may be beside the other. Then allow elevations only on the condition that they create greater challenges for the actor.

“3. During the first twenty years, prohibit all voiced sound. After twenty years, allow unarticulated cries for five years. Finally, during the last five years

allow words contrived by the actor. “ (Italics my own)5

From here he continues to prescribe the return of playwrighting and so on, all the while insisting that the actor be the primary artist. Given the modern evolution of mime-actors into storytellers, Decrouxs’ prescription appears to have come about, much as he had envisioned it.

The arrival of actors in storytelling can be viewed as a sincere effort to rehabilitate their art and their place within it. In an interesting discussion of the new storytellers in France, Veronika Görög-Karady observes that “a large number of them (ie. new storytellers) belong to the generation which began its adventure with oral literature after 1968. For many, the years between 1968 and 1978 are explicitly considered to be the critical years of their development. Clearly, significant breaks with other forms of classical artistic professions occurred during this period.”6 Why this break? What motivated it?

Many actors experience the modern professional theatre as restrictive and oppressive. The theatre is increasingly dominated by the director and the designer; most choices are dictated to actors, rendering them artistically impotent. We have seen many efforts to correct this, all closely related to storytelling: the one-actor play (usually a biographical work in which the actor has had some authorship); performance art (which seems to be moving into storytelling at break-neck speed); and monolog (exemplified by the work of Spaulding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Lily Tomlin, and the like.) What do these forms offer that traditional theatre (in its present state) does not? Again, Görög-Karady: “public narration, even in an institutional context, appears to approach the closest to the ideal of an immediate aesthetic relationship.”7

Storytelling offers actors a chance to establish a meaningful relationship with an audience. Rather than hiding behind the smokescreen of ‘high culture’, the myth of celebrity, and the cult of ego, the actor can come back to the real world as a real person. Yet this real person still has the ability to transform, to rhapsodize and to mesmerize, but in a new and intimate relationship with an audience.

Actor-storytellers sometimes come under criticism for their use of theatrical elements. The word acting is often used pejoratively in reference to the storyteller who has in some way distanced himself from his listeners. There is such a thing as good and bad acting however, just as there is clear and muddled speech; one can successfully tell a story while the other fails. Storytelling is performance. Ideally that performance has elements of intimacy, conversationality, and a degree of participation. The persona of the storyteller is largely determined by that teller’s tradition. (Even tellers who claim no traditional ties have a style influenced by their life-experiences and the culture(s) that shaped them.) To require that the actor-storyteller not be theatrical both a misconceives theatricality and disregards that teller’s tradition.

The crossroads of storytelling may well be the breeding ground for a new dramaturgy. Certainly the actor, recapitulated as the storyteller, has the potential to fuse dramatic energies into powerful storytelling which is immediate and original. What does the audience get out of this? Perhaps it is a chance to experience the theatre they were promised they would find at the playhouse, but which eluded them. Perhaps it is a chance to participate in a new indigenous theatre where the actor is celebrant and the audience is a fellow-traveler. In any event, it certainly is a chance to hear again a good story well told.

1 It is important to keep in mind that actors are artists of a kind: their medium is the theatre, their craft works with human behaviors and languages. I use the term “actor/theatre artist” to emphasize the point that acting is more than rote memorization of prescribed language and tasks.

2 McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 3rd Edition.

3It is pretty much an obsolete theory in the Life Sciences, and actually may have been exploited to support racist and sexist views in the 19th century. How- ever, the idea gives a useful analog for the purposes of this paper. For an interesting discussion of recapitulation theory and its socio-political implications, read The Mismeasure Of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, New York, Norton, 1981.

4 At various stages along this sequence a number of important artists have surfaced: the mime of Marceau, the mask work of Mummenschanz, the clowning of Bill Irwin, “new vaudevillians” and now “spoken-word” artists, and so on.

5 Vincent L. Angotti and Judie L. Herr, “Etienne Decroux and the Advent of Modern Mime,” Theatre Survey, vol. xv, no. 1, May 1974. Translated by Angotti and Herr from Paroles sur le mime (Paris, 1963) by Etienne Decroux.

6 Veronika Görög-Karady, “The New Professional Storyteller In France”, ISFNR Theory Commision Paper (1989). Reprinted in Storytelling in Contemporary Societies, Lutz Röhrich/ Sabine Wienker-Piepho, eds. , Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 1990.

7 Ibid.

David Novak is a storytelling actor who can be seen and heard on stages across the country and abroad. For more information contact https://www.atellingexperience.com/

4

The Cultural Pandemic

Culture

Cultures are dynamic living systems that feed on story. Cultures can change; they can be nurtured or inhibited, encouraged to grow or starved to death.  If we are to change our culture in any significant way, we must attend to it as we would any living entity and address the stories that feed it. That is not to suggest that we can manufacture through legislation the official stories of our culture. Organic processes are not mechanical in that way. But listen: the culture is responding to new stimulus, new growth. When an organism is in trouble, its natural healing response activates. [The burgeoning of personal storytelling is an example of culture growing and responding to needed change.] This time of  protests and the stories that accompany them, may also be a sign of cultural growth and immune response. 

Advantage

A year out of college, I took a job for which I was grossly unqualified. I had a degree but lacked the education I needed. Why was I hired? Was it that the other, qualified, candidates were female? Or that a friend in the company had recommended me? I had great confidence in myself. 'I can learn this,' I thought. I did learn. Ultimately the company went through a regime change and in the interim I was promoted to boss in true Peter Principle fashion. What I learned was that I should never have been there in the first place.
Somehow, though, I always managed to land on my feet. I acquired a deep and abiding faith that things will always work out. I often felt my mercurial career was some kind of magical journey, a Homeric Odyssey, wherein I am always in the hands of a mysterious, benevolent, force.
Now I know it isn't all magic, and not so mysterious. Whatever good fortune I have enjoyed must now be suspect, as the "invisible hand" that moves through it all, is white. A corollary to the silver spoon, the white hand opens doors, calms rough seas, rescues, uplifts, empowers, and emboldens.

Country Club

It hasn't all been easy-going. I've experienced abuse and exploitation in my career; (1) I've had an officer of the law draw his gun on me during a traffic stop; I've spent time in jail for unpaid parking tickets! But whatever the trouble, it was ameliorated by my membership in an exclusive club: the Great White American Country Club (GWACC) into which I was born. A club, as it happens, that was invented to divide the lower and servile masses into factions of "race."

"According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first appearance in print of the adjective white in reference to “a white man, a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion” was in 1671. Colonial charters and other official documents written in the 1600s and early 1700s rarely refer to European colonists as white." [https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-2/inventing-black-and-white ]

Race is a social construct after all, hence "whiteness" is as contrived as "blackness." The GWACC co-opted a large segment of the population while conveniently disenfranchising a newly identified group of "color."  Being designated as "white," compounded for men their ages-old prerogatives of gender. "White" women, though still second-class citizens, became club members too, albeit at the bronze rather than silver levels.
The American racial narrative became so atomized as to be atmospheric.(2)  As a result, I am inheritor of ill-gotten gains; a ledger of dividends centuries long and written in blood. I inhabit an invisible  kingdom made of amnesia and reconstructed stories maintained by a power structure that lacks legitimacy. Whiteness is what Kurt Vonnegut would call a granfalloon, a meaningless group identity as vapid and spurious as Star-bellied Sneetches.

Trauma

In a recent interview with Krista Tippett (On Being, June 4, 2020) therapist, Resmaa Menakem, discusses the millennia of trauma carried in Western Civilization and the invention of "white" as a legal term. 

Menakem: … right after the Bacon Rebellion is the first time you start to see in-law “white” persons; not landowners, not merchants, “white” persons *…
Tippett: That language.
Menakem: … at that moment, the white body became the standard of humanity — not merchants, not landowners — the white body, because at that moment, the white body had dominion over, and everything else was a deviant from that.
And then a couple years later is when you start to see white persons show up in Virginia law. By the time they offered that to poor white people, they said, “Ey, you want to be white?” After all of that brutality, white people said, “You mean, all I gotta do is be white, and my babies may not have to go through that? Yeah, I’ll take that. Let’s take that.” And that’s what sewed it in. So now they saw their allegiance more with white landowners than the enslaved Africans that they were rebelling with.
Tippett: You’re also saying that it was actually a way of co-opting poor white people into their further traumatization.
Menakem: That’s exactly right. That’s why what you see now is like the flower of the seed of that. That’s what you’re seeing right now.

History

As far as I know, my ancestors were indigenous to the Rhine valley and the mountains of eastern Bohemia. In the Middle Ages they survived the bloody Northern Crusades by converting to Christianity. I do not know for certain, but it seems entirely likely that they played part in a violent, generations-long game of 'pass on, no pass back' by transferring that trauma to the indigenous peoples they displaced when, in the 19th century, they emigrated to the western United States.
My father and his peers returned from the World War with their eyes brutally opened to horrors they had thought impossible in Western Civilization. They were determined that their children would not know such horrors and that the specter of fascism would never rise again. So they raised precocious children in a protective bubble of ignorance and distraction. They showered us with opportunities they never had: toys and food in abundance, higher and higher education, and the confidence to succeed. I sincerely believe they wanted us to be citizens of a renewed yet innocent society.  
Some of us, that is.

Walt Disney opened "the happiest place on earth" a month before I was born in 1955. Disneyland embodied a vision of childhood and optimism. Yet for all the racial inequities of the era, at it's core was a deep utopian dream of human happiness. A dream that has slumbered in Western Civilization for thousands of years. For the mythic memory of a Golden Age is ubiquitous, and the loss of that Golden Age was the trauma that birthed "civilization." Western Civilization is predicated on trauma, operating on cycles of abuse and alienation, addicted to consumption and dependent on the oppressive vilification of The Other.

Healing

But passing on trauma never gets rid of the problem. Those who respond to the idea that Black Lives Matter by countering that All Lives Matter are missing the point. For members of the GWACC, the message that Black Lives Matter should be heard as a call to stop passing on our trauma to others, to own our actions, our history, and our culpability. That Black Lives Matter does not mean that black lives are more important, but that white lives are no better. It is increasingly apparent that the humans designated as "white" must confront and attend to their own deep-seated history of abuse and abusing. BLM is showing us that if we are ever to heal, White America must first do no more harm.
Can we move away from the false narrative of race and color and shift our discourse in meaningful ways? Resmaa Menakem again:

Menakem: Well, I don’t say bodies of “color” anymore, because what I’m trying to do is, I’m trying to reclaim the idea that I’m actually a human.
Tippett: So you’re saying that you’re formed by the culture —
Menakem: Bodies of culture. That’s right.

If we are not to abandon our received identities as "white" persons, might we re-frame that identity? What if we are to respond as the "white blood cells" of our culture, and gather around the pathogens to eliminate them from our system? This is a pandemic after all.






1. The Price of Admission

2. Color Town