Somatics and Nature: a rambling essay on the Dancing Wilderness Project

By Karl Frost

’Wilderness’ … we scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all those whose nerves and emotions have not been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limits. -- Edward Abbey

Without experience of nature, humans become mad. – Paul Shepard

Solo in the Olympics

In 1992, I did my first solo backpacking trip … 6 days and 35 miles through the Olympic Mountains in Washington State. The nature left me in awe – temperate rainforests of the Hoh River Valley, alpine fields and lakes of the High Divide, two mountain passes, waterfalls, a few bears, starry nights, 1000s of fungi, enormous old growth trees, and finally Olympic Hot Springs. However, just as amazing was how my senses expanded as the days went by… the greens came to have more and more gradations, the sounds became more vibrant, the smells became more rich and detailed. The forest became trees, and the trees became leaves and branches and trunk and bark and roots. Even my own internal physical world became more and more detailed as I became more in touch with my sensorial body. As I spent more days away from city, people, and the sound of combustion engine, it was as if my head were being taken out of a box filled with cotton -- I was experiencing a more vital and immediate connection to the world around me.

Simultaneous with this expansion of sensation, I observed a change in my mind’s relationship to words. I began to see an ongoing stream of words flying through my head. It had been there all long, but in the absence of social interaction, I was becoming aware of it. I in fact saw it as the manifestation of that which I tended to identify as myself. Who was I then, observing this mind? The changes continued as by the third and fourth day, the stream of words broke up and eventually dissolved and I found myself in a much less hindered state of observation and interbeing with the world around me. It was as if all the motion in my mind had been blocking sensation from coming in. Without the defensive barrier and mediation(1) of an ongoing stream of words filling my mind, I was able to experience a more sensorially rich world. Isolation from social interaction allowed space for an amazing and rich consciousness shift. This experience in the mountains compelled me to a further exploration of the interconnection between wilderness and somatics … nature and consciousness.

The Dancing Wilderness Project

A few years later, while out hiking with my dance buddy, Ben Yang, we stumbled across a scree field of slate, each stone with its own clear tone when struck by another. Out of the dance that ensued from this discovery came the first discussions about what evolved into the Dancing Wilderness Project. The Project emerged in 1997 as a vision to join together in a larger exploration my two big passions in life, wilderness exploration and dance. Not counting my own solo trips and many informal trips with friends, the 8 laboratories and 3 performance projects have encompassed desert (Death Valley, CA, Dark Canyon, Utah), mountains (Sierra Nevadas in CA, Olympics in WA, and Alpine Lakes Wilderness in WA), forest (Big Basin and Ventana Wilderness in CA) and ocean beaches (Pt Reyes, CA and Olympics, WA). Each project has been a very different group and a completely different experience, bringing more insight into the relationship between nature and the self. At times challenging, I have found the projects always worth while, the challenges feeding the learning. The project has evolved around the vision of “an ongoing laboratory into the interrelationships amongst wilderness experience, body-based creative process, and how we live our lives.”

The Laboratories, which are the primary focus of the project, are 2-4 week long backpacking trips. We start with a few days in the studio to establish a common vocabulary and to get to know each other’s individual creative processes. We then spend the rest of our time in the field. We pack in our food and share in the chores of setting up and breaking down camp, emphasizing low-impact camping. Our time in the field is a mixture of hiking days, structured workshop and laboratory days and open time for individual explorations or for just relaxing and soaking in the experience of nature.

The project aims at inclusivity. Ages have ranged between 19 and 70. Dance experience has ranged from 3 decades to a single previous dance workshop. While some come with more experience in dance, others come with more experience in backpacking and outdoor skills. We all share our skills and learn from each other.

The main objective is to co-create an atmosphere in which we all arrive at and follow our own research. I bring material to the group that has emerged out of my own dance practice and wilderness time. I try, however, not to make this material define the project but merely to serve as a useful jumping off point. This article is an attempt to put into words some of that material … some words and theory to help understand what has been found physically. The sensorial world comes first, before language, and the material that interests me most is physical practice.

An example: ‘remembering exploring Growtowski’s plastiques exercises in the Sierras. The exploration emerged from a practice of following each joint of the body, each finding its own way of motivating the rest of the body and its own way of evoking emotion, character, and story. Taking this into an exploration of relationship to the physical world was a real opener. With the whole body activated into a dialog with the surrounding landscape, it became evident how we had been closing so many doors to possible play with our world. It became a deep exploration of the interrelationship of mind and the more-than-human world.

From Feminist Psychology to Ecopsychology (2)

One of the critiques brought by feminist psychology to contemporary western (late capitalist) culture is that the idea of individual autonomy is pushed to an extreme creating mental and social disease. This very modern view of psychological autonomy is a radical departure from human tradition, where the individual is perceived to exist within a social context. Boundaries exist, defining the individual, but rather than sharp and rigid things, these boundaries are flexible and permeable, allowing a fluid interrelationship amongst individual, clan, and community in overlapping circles. The attempt to structure the self in radical autonomy from others leads to empathically damaged individuals, either unable to sense their interconnection with others and tending towards invasiveness or, in the failure to create rigid boundaries, living without clear boundaries and unable to take up space. All of us who have been raised in western society and examine ourselves and our relationships can see the effects of this damaging aspect of late-capitalist mythology of individuation.

One of the things that fascinates me and keeps me in my practice with contact improvisation is how this issue of boundary formation manifests so clearly in the dance. Contact in this way offers a unique route to healing.

An example – one of my guiding passions in contact improvisation is the pursuit of released pathways of movement and interaction … efficient and liquid movement where momentum sequences through and between bodies channeled by intention but unblocked by mind. The clearest manifestation of this is the idea of passive sequencing, where one allows momentum generated by another to sequence unhindered through the body. Someone pushes my shoulder and I allow the shoulder blade to move, which then pulls my spine into a spiral, which then draws my pelvis. “I”(3) remain passive in that I do not help or hinder the movement with muscular reaction. I simply stay in the action/ muscle engagement that I was in while externally originated momentum changes my body’s shape and path through space.

Even for people who have been doing contact for years, a physical understanding of this principle can be extremely difficult, so physically entrenched are the boundary dilemmas imposed by modern culture. The traumatized mind revolts, insisting on either complete control of internal processes or complete surrender. In an effort to maintain control, the muscles engage to either move the body along the unconsciously predicted pathway or to block the momentum, often to the point of “over-blocking” and pushing the partner back with greater force. In surrender, at heart an issue of being unable to take up space and assert oneself physically in the direct presence of another, the ongoing action of the body collapses as the person, to a degree, vacates the body. The middle ground of allowing physical relationship while maintaining physical integrity is disallowed. At root are the fear of over dense human interaction and the unwillingness of the traumatized mind to access and guide movement through proprioception(4).

Peter Levine(5) has developed a neurologically based theory of trauma that helps us to understand this difficulty. He explains how under stress, the hindbrain can get locked into the fear response of “freeze state” while the forebrain takes over movement instead of allowing the hindbrain to unwind itself and maintain its role as primary coordinator of sensation and action. The effect of this is isolation from proprioception and a dysfunctional interaction with the world, over mediated by the more convoluted processes of the forebrain. This unrecognized trauma state can be seen in the rampant ness of back pain in our culture, largely due to the over stimulation of primary flexor and extensor reflexes … an unconscious attempt to over control movement(6). It can also be seen in the difficulty of “getting” passive sequencing. To allow the external momentum to alter the body’s shape is to allow for a wealth of changing proprioceptive information. The traumatized mind mislabels this information as a threat and responds by seizing control of the movement or by vacating the body. However, by building up slowly from the simple to the more complex and with attention to calming the hyperreactive body, we can let go of our over-controlling relationship to physical contact and allow mutual influencing of each other’s internal landscape – we can access the body’s natural tendency towards healing.

These ideas about boundary construction and trauma can be extended from the strictly human to the human interrelationship with the natural world. This exploration is one of the primary investigations of relatively new field of “ecopsychology”. The observations about boundary and definition of self are the same -- namely that we are taught to construct rigid definitional boundaries between human and “non-human” rather than seeing, in the words of David Abrams(7) the human as something existing within and as part of the more-than-human world. Just as the feminists noted that our trauma around interpersonal relations made rigid and dysfunctional boundary construction between people, the ecopsychologists have noted that our rigid ideas of human vs. nature carry immense dysfunction. This construction is not simply cerebral, but manifests in our functional relationship to environment and the world. Try lying down on the dirt.

It is one of my favorite moments in a project to do an exploration where we start with lying down on the ground, whether it’s forest duff, desert sand, or mossy bluff. “…Allow your face to rest on the ground.” For a dancer who hasn’t spent a lot of time playing in nature this simple act can be a revelation of fear and giddy delight as permission is given to do exactly what they were reprimanded not to do as children. We become aware of functional boundaries in our behavior that we didn’t even recognize we had. Moreover, we become aware of the internalized forces of fear that enforce these rules of behavior and this sense of isolation from the more-than-human. The sense of embodied joy and openness that comes to the group through this simple act is remarkable. Through literally bringing ourselves close to the earth, our actions take a big turn towards the more authentic as we perceive ourselves more as an extension of the physical world that we live in as opposed to a separate entity.

I have the feeling that this sense of greater unity is not simply one way effect and that where fear breeds more fear, calm and acceptance encourage a mutual reflection of the same. I am remembering an incident one morning when we had just completed a set of yoga. We had spent the day before playing on the river stones and in the dirt and we were all feeling the euphoria of this opening, only amplified by a leisurely morning spent in yoga. I was the last to return to camp and I almost laughed my head off at what I saw! Everyone was going about their morning tasks of breaking down the camp for the day’s hike, blissed out on their sense of body and immediate surroundings, but completely unaware of the herd of elk that was right across the narrow stretch of river where we had camped! We all had a laugh at the lack of larger conscious awareness of the elk, but what was remarkable was how calm the elk were at our presence and that they stayed around. Ease and acceptance breeds the same.

Nature and the Child

Paul Shepard(8) writes of child development from the perspective of the environment of the infant in the hunter/gatherer culture in comparison to the development and environment of the child in agrarian and late capitalist society -- both exceedingly new when compared to the whole of human history.

In hunter-gatherer cultures, the child is immersed in a world of varied and complex stimuli, living in a physical space that is very much a part of the living landscape. Colors, shapes, textures exist in the incredible array that the natural world has to offer. The diversity of sensual pleasures of the world gives the baby a sense of being a part of a world much greater than its understanding. Later, as the child finds more freedom of exploration farther from mother, the occasional sting of a cold wind or rough surface give the baby a sense of boundary… “I am here!” This diversity of stimulation triggers the activation and integration of reflexes into coordinated movement within the world. It gives the child both a sense of being a part of a greater whole and yet something separate.

In the sting of a sandstorm’s wind in Eureka Valley, Cinzia Sperou-Gloekler and I had a dance that embodied this flow and interplay of boundaries. Warm sand, warm body, softness and dryness everywhere, there is a sense of one dance of soft movement sliding around solid structure as we dance in the dunes. Sand pours out of our pockets, hats, and ears as bodies tumble and roll through the sand’s softness and hardness. Yet when the wind picks up, the sand takes on the aspect of stone and the sting reveals the surface of skin and the tenderness of mouth and eyes. There is the sense of this boundary of skin separating the human interior from the harsh other. These senses of being at one with the world and in opposition interplay with each other in the ebb and flow of the wind. At the same time, there is this dance of bodies -- one flowing motion, yet also a dance of separate wills pushing and pulling. Momentum is delivered from body part to body part. The effect of an individual will extends beyond the boundary of this or that body as she picks me up and tosses me and I pull her into a dive roll down the dune. The English language does not fit into an easy description of the experience, wanting to bend the description into that of separation, when in reality it is not as simple as separate or not. The push and pull gives the feeling of separate wills in motion and of two bodies engaged in play. Yet in the delicate dance of skin and soft flesh and the intimacy of mutual sheltering from the wind-born sand’s bite there is simply the sense of one motion. In the blending of bodies and sand, there is one dance, yet in the challenge of a flashing wind, there is the sense of the insignificant human struggling in relation to the vast physical world.

Returning to our hunter/gatherer infant, the child, born into a world blending the human and the more-than-human, is also born into the social context of a small clan. The faces the baby encounters are small in number. This fact allows the baby to deeply focus its incredible sensitivity to human interaction and at the same time explore its existence as part of the more-than-human. The baby is stimulated to form a sense of self in integration with others as well as a sense of self and clan in integration with a more-than-human world.

Contrasted to this child, the child of late-capitalist culture is in an environment that is at once sensorially impoverished with simplified forms and colors and at the same time overstimulating in terms of interaction with people or the markings of people. Lacking is the diversity of forms that stimulated the child’s awakening and curiosity. The traditional landmarks that help to guide a baby in its integration of reflexes and its discovery of self in interexistence with a more-than-human world are non-existent or woefully distorted. The child learns to see nature as an aberration -- something to fear. Unusual sensation -- bare foot on gravel, body in cold water -- which at first is approached with natural curiosity, comes in its rarity to be perceived and reacted to as uncomfortable or painful despite the fact that no injury is caused . Worse, fear-based reaction sometimes causes, thus deepening the fear and reinforcing the damaging reaction pattern (9). Simultaneously, the child is deluged in human stimulation. It becomes overloaded with the amount of information of which its sensitivity demands an understanding. Being overloaded, it reacts in trauma, either rigidifying its boundaries in an attempt to preserve a sense of self or losing its sense of boundary in the context of others.

Sometime when no one is around, lie down on the street. Notice the sense of fear – even though no one is around our body reacts in terror at this innocuous action. This only amplifies if others are present as our trauma around human interaction kicks in.

My Chinese doctor, Gordon Xu, used to laugh at the misperception of sensation by westerners. I once had a back injury, and he proceeded to give me the most “painful” massage I could imagine. He laughed at my torment and told me how he saw all the time how westerners had their wires crossed around sensation, labeling healing touch as pain. As I let go of my attachment to the sensation being painful, I was able to allow him to go much deeper. The sensation was the same, even amplified as he went deeper, but my reaction and unconscious labeling was different. Afterwards, I could walk, which I hadn’t been able to do in days.

I have often taken this experience into the Dancing Wilderness Projects, leading contact scores on unlikely surfaces -- rolling around on river stones, diving and tumbling on dried pine needles. Playing around with trustful contact on unusual surfaces that invoke fear, one can find that the fear is unnecessary. One finds that river stones have smooth surfaces and their own softness, that pine needles are cushiony and bend well before breaking skin; their occasional sting is merely stimulating and not actually painful. One finds that dirt is soft and comfortable and doesn’t have to get you yelled at. The expansion of the field of play is an unmatched delight.

The Wilderness Effect and Play

There is a secret person undamaged in each of us…We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse. It awaits only an authentic expression. The task is not to start by recapturing the theme of a reconciliation with the earth in all of its metaphysical subtlety, but with something much more direct and simple that will yield its own healing metaphysics. – Paul Shepard

It is less useful to think of the child is an immature adult than it is to think of the adult is an atrophied child – Keith Johnstone

All of this talk of the damage due to city life is not necessarily to say that we should all return to a hunter-gatherer existence. It points more towards the necessity for us to be aware that this is our past, that pursuing a different path has dangers, and that we must address these dangers if we are to live fulfilling and healthy lives in interrelationship with each other and the more-than-human world. A trust in the body’s desire to heal itself can point to the path we need to take.

The effect that my solo trip in the Olympics had is not unique and can be recognized in some way by anyone who has spent much quiet time in nature. Amongst wilderness leaders whose focus is to find healing in connection with the earth, this effect of prolonged stay in nature is common knowledge and has come to be called “the wilderness effect”. It points to the fact that the body/mind knows how to heal itself, given the opportunity. The body knows how to unwind itself from trauma and enter into a more immediate relationship with the world around it.

It is thus not with a goal of “dancing about nature” or of ‘trying’ to heal a connection with the earth, that we go into the wilderness. Instead, we simply go and stay in our creative process, allowing our bodies to move as they want to move and to pursue the impulses that arise. Coming at it from the world of ideas would simply distort the process.

I have found that one of the most powerful factors in helping the body/mind along in its realization of healing is quiet and a break from language. We come from the city as a group and therefore carry with us all of the city impulses of creating constant conversation, afraid to let a silent moment expand. Therefore, one of the most powerful exercises that we do, and a big turning point, is actually one of the simplest: the blind walk. People go for a walk in pairs, one eyes closed, the other eyes open, both silent(10). Take an half-hour or more each. Many have done this as a studio exercise, but doing this in a forest or in the desert is a real delight. For the person with eyes closed, all the other senses amplify and the person gains a new sense of the sensual world in which they exist. Particularly as proprioception opens up, they gain a real sense of physically being a part of this whole. Curiously, in the absence of spoken language, the person with eyes open has the same effect! They experience a consciousness shift allowing the ground to be felt in more detail, the wind to be experienced more clearly, and sounds and the visual world to take on new life. Removed from the pressure to interact socially, the mind clears and the trauma of urban life takes another step towards unwinding. Dancers take on more independence and expand their personal sense of play.

During the rest of the project, we move deeper into our own explorations and also deepen our shared dance. The personal expansion that comes from the break in language brings enthusiasm for spending days in silence and also for going off on solo trips of a few days at a time. Being in wilderness allows more space from the human world than can ever be found in the city, where every aspect of every room is a reflection of human activity in the world.

The personal opening that comes from decompressing from social interaction brings with it a deeper capacity for real interpersonal interaction as well as more of an interbeing with the sensual. The barriers soften as they clarify, become more permeable as they are more acknowledged by self and other.

Doing contact as the laboratory progresses becomes more and more delightful. At first, we are simply stunned by everything that we see in the world around us as during a lift or an inversion, we see mountains and clouds in new perspectives. We play with perspective and view, bringing the attention down to the immediate kinesphere, to the flower growing out of a pad of moss an inch from our nose. We release all sorts of boundaries to play and if the dances had any sense of “this old familiar dance”, they no longer do. Opening of proprioception and presence in the world bring with them a continuous sense of beginner’s mind. Everyone engages with each moment as a new one. Our practice of authentic movement finds more and more a sense of fluid interrelationship between the internal world and the external of tree and stone.

‘remembering one day from the chaotic, challenging, and wonderful first project where we had hiked all day and found ourselves camping in a rainy forest meadow. Rather than retreat to the tents, we decided to dance in the rain. We start with a standing meditation, hearing the patter of rain and the chirping of frogs. We move into authentic and then into eyes open without words. We get wet, but have rain gear and know that there is warm dinner and dry sleeping bags later, so its OK. The rain is a delightful and playful partner. Somehow movement takes on more presence and meaning in the context of quiet rain and frog song. In contact, we are aware each moment’s shift and we follow desire and curiosity without insisting or closing interawareness. Contact moves into sliding across wet grass and wet rain gear. Things start to move faster and rowdier with this wide-open sensual awareness. Bodies fly and slide. Rain gear is something to grab and pull. A rainy day instead of being a downer turns into one of the most exciting and awakening days of our month together. By removing boundaries to play, we are in fact removing boundaries to living.

Performance

The primary concern of theater is the question of how we live our lives. -- Peter Brook

Brooks writes that a definition of theater is simply an actor and an audience. Dance performance is merely a special case of theater -- an act of communication between audience and performer through the medium of the movement of the human body. The aim is the same … an examination of life.

Taking the Dancing Wilderness Project into performance, the aim is to continue the same process that we start in laboratory into the performance. In keeping with the ideas of Growtowski(11) and Barba(12) , we work with the idea that it is not the actor’s role to tell the audience how to live, but simply to examine their own life and share that personal exploration in a dialog with an audience. We aim to stay in our creative process in encounter with wilderness and continue that process into relationship with an audience. It is a question to see where this leads, rather than an answer. We work improvisationally, with our history serving as our score and from which emerges a performance. Strong images or themes that emerge in the field are questioned in relationship to an audience.

In spring of 1999, I drew together a group of performers in San Francisco for Ocean Studies. Performed at 848 Community Space, the piece was an interdisciplinary mix of movement, spoken word, and projected video and sound. The videos were of work done in the field at Ocean Beach and Pt Reyes, and their placement within the piece was improvised. It was a choice then of the performers whether to let the video stand alone or to dance with the video. The process of developing the work was an ongoing exposure of assumptions and challenges, particularly as nature was unflinchingly honest in pointing out false assumptions about cooperation and gentleness. As director, I felt myself strained to keep up with the delightful challenges that were offered by unseasonable rain and wind and by unpredicted tide levels.

‘remembering days and days of rehearsals at the beach in San Francisco being driven back by wind and sand in the eyes or being soaked with cold rain. Our presupposed ideas about celebrating nature came up against the actuality of nature in a foul mood and unconcerned with our existence or notions. We learned another lesson in detachment and retreated into Java Beach Café, wind-whipped and with sand pouring out of every fold in our clothes. This becomes an experience of weathering conflict. We give up dancing for the day and turn to writing over a warm chai. Sand clogs my pen, but words come.

Despite experiences like this one, the dedication of the dancers resulted in a very raw and alive show. There was a wonderful sense of presence that emerged from the work. This group had mostly not participated in any sort of extended backpacking trips, yet still the effects of even a bit regular time spent quietly each week at the beach came through. When we returned to the studio to perform the work, we were all amazed at the spaciousness that was evoked with the simple sound of the recorded waves and wind. The dancers picked up on the sense of quiet achieved at the beach, and in the suspension of everyday tensions, the audience was able to breathe a free breath and feel a moment of quiet.

As important as the theatre communication was, I wish that I could have brought the audience to share moments like the one of dancing with Jon Lustig in a sea cave. From the entrance of the cave came the ocean lapping forward and back. From above came Mary Ann Brook’s. The dance was an open blend of honest awkwardness and of two men’s body’s in contact while the ocean’s spacious sounds contrasted and colluded with Mary Ann’s full-bodied song of fire and resistance. Two white men dancing in a small space to a black woman’s song in the presence of the more-than-human world.

Onward

Thinking of desires for the future, I remember one day coming back from a long canyon hike and finding unusual marks in the soil. ‘Sliding hand across the sand, the marks of two Aikido rolls. The marks of feet moving in rapid succession into gliding spirals, a curious mound of fancifully arranged stones … someone has danced here! I hope that in future hikes, I occasionally run across more light and playful tracks in the sand.

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1 -- See Hakim Bey, Immediatism, 1992. In his essay, An Immediatist Manifesto, he primarily talks about breaking away from the mediation of impersonal economy and technology, but these same arguments can be applied to the internalized mediation of rigidified and alienating western post-industrial thought and the traumatized forebrain dominated mind.

2 -- For an excellent reference on ecopsychology, read the essay collection, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, by Theodore Roszak (editor) This collection also contains excerpts from books by both Paul Shepard and David Abrams, cited in this article.

3 -- Here, the “I” is, roughly speaking, “mind”, although even here, the definition is fuzzy when one considers the interconnections of mind and body and of different co-existing states of consciousness in the “mind”, which is the whole root of the discussion in ecopsychology. The idea of “I” is a very rough one and only a loose approximation to the observed world.

4 --“Proprioception” is the sense of joint space. Each of our joints is loaded with millions of pressure sensors that give us information about the position and configuration of our body in space in minute detail. It is the fundamental sense by which we know our body and immediate environment and by which we coordinate movement through our environment. It is so primary in fact that it is often unrecognized as a sense. It is the sense that gives us a feeling of living in the world, as has been seen in those rare cases where someone has lost or damaged their sense of proprioception through neurological accident.

5 -- For articles by Peter Levine, check out his web page at www.traumahealing.com. He has also authored several books, the latest one by the title Waking the Tiger, 1999.

6 -- As opposed to the popular misconception that back pain is somehow due to “design flaws” in the human back. It is curious that this myth was generated by academics, who are probably as far away from hindbrain processing and integration with the natural world as can be imagined.

7 -- David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous, 1997

8 -- Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, 1982

9 -- for the baby, the construction of good vs bad sensation, pleasure/pain is as much socially learned as it is a part of its genetic inheritance. Anyone who has spent time with children can probably recognize how a child, upon doing something unusual will immediately look to the adults around it for an evaluation of the situation. If a baby stumbles and falls, it looks to the adults to see if it should laugh or cry. If the adults laugh and give positive attention, it mimics the adult and laughs. If the adults react with worry and fear, the baby reacts again through mimesis with trauma and tears.

10 -- The one time that I failed to communicate the idea of being silent revealed the enormity of this restriction in the state difference between those who had talked with each other vs those who had stayed silent … the difference between people who had had an interesting experience and those who had had a major consciousness shift!

11 -- Jerzy Growtowski, Towards a Poor Theater, 1968

12 -- Eugenio Barba, Beyond the Floating Islands, 1985