| Abstract [eng] |
This research, rooted in theatre making practice, makes use of the idea of Richard Schechner, the pioneer of performance studies, that everything can be studied as performance. Proposing to understand performance as a mechanism for deconstructing power, theatre maker and researcher Milda Al-Slamah deconstructs her own creative experiences as elements of performance in order to identify what constraints, manifested through arbitrarily assumed norms of creativity, have been prevalent in her thinking and work, and to propose ways of overcoming them. Equally important as the creative practice is the immersion in contemporary theories that seek to explain consciousness through the prism of science, as well as the experience of the multiplicity of the states of consciousness acquired through mental rehearsal and other meditative practices. Reflecting on the creative processes of the performances Connections, (in)security, and MIND THE GAP, Milda Al-Slamah formulates a new paradigm of theatre making, which she calls the theatre of consciousness. In contrast to the dominant paradigm of production theatre, which associates creation with construction, the theatre of consciousness proposes to perceive performance as a living and conscious organism, evolving through self-organisation. This new approach becomes the key to overcoming the constraints in authors' creative process. |
