One evening, without much premeditation, we ended-up discussing the young history of our performing company around a large table. This was the first time we would talk rather than practice on a Friday night in the year since the company was born.
Performance practice was research and development for me and every one around the table had their own motives for talking part, but we all loved the work. Running the performing company was mainly my job and I had complain that I could do with more help. We reflected in no particular order on what had been achieved so fare. Twelve months with ups and downs.
It turned out that the best performances we gave were the first one, a year ago, and the last one, just a couple of weeks earlier. The company was in a constant state of flux as people were coming and leaving all the time. The work would be best served by long term commitment but, in London, something that doesn't pay your rent is not a priority for long. And the advantage of sitting on a global nexus of travellers tracks has its in-build inconvenient. The merits of our artistic output was acknowledge as fragile still, and something that could stop fresh talent from joining or staying with us.
But something new had happen during that last show. A new way of being together, a new pleasure, and we were trying to get to the bottom of it. For me it was the first time for a long time that I simply felt like one of the boys. That I didn't feel the urge to save everyone and everything. To cut a long story short it turned out that almost none of us was judging the output at the time. No one was afraid of seeing the all thing fail. This is something I'm teaching day in day out in my classes. But one thing is to teach it, and another is to experience it collectively, in the round.
There's this thing we call ego that makes us blind and deaf to other people ideas on-stage. That makes us stick to tested formula and well-known tracks. That turns us into control freaks and produces the biggest cliché in our desperate search for originality. We agree around that table, on that evening, that this form of ego was born out of fear, and the mother of all fear, the fear of rejection, the fear of not being loved. But with no ego at all we wouldn't get out of bed. So there's a good ego too. The one that set us in motion in the first place, the one that make us thing that we can stumble upon something true and original if we just keep trying.
So what kind of yoghurt or margarine can help us reduce “bad ego”? The closest thing I found for that is the oh so simple mirror game, where two people simply mirror each other in a bid to achieve perfect synchronisation. I've been playing and teaching this game for years now, and the results has never stopped to amaze me. I think the company is at its best when it came muster this effortless power of synchronisation on stage. It doesn't necessarily look like everyone is talking and moving as one on the outside. But inside everyone is immersed in the same waters. It's leadership without a leader. Religion without gods. Discipline without rules. The cheer pleasure there is in experiencing our collective mind in motion.
Picture from Wikimedia - source: http://www.retas.de/thomas/travel/vietnam2004/index.html
