Transmission in Motion

Transmission in Motion

Seminar Blogs

Guest blog: “Everything has a mind” – Anastasia Lata

The Transmission in Motion (TiM) Seminar, took place on November 18th, 2020, under Corona-proof conditions, in a virtual auditorium in Microsoft Teams environment. The title of the online session “Plant-based Dramaturgy” – Manuela Infante, revolved around the artistic work of Manuela’s Infante, Chilean theatre director, scriptwriter and musician. The seminar was moderated by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink with the guest of honor Manuela Infante, explaining to the audience her artistic creation process of the performance Estado Vegetal, a piece that negotiates plant life, living with plants, and how we as humans imagine how plants think. In the seminar, Manuela discussed her aesthetic work, and her principles- strategies that she has created in order to define and construct her artworks (Transmission in Motion, 2020).

The idea of “everything has a mind”, as Manuela stated in the TiM seminar, troubled me to figure out how this argument can be applicable in dramaturgy and theatre. Does really everything that surrounds us have a mind or does everything can be vibrant? Having this as a stimulus, I want to explore the dramaturgical propositions that this thinking provides, having Manuela’s artistic work as a guide for further connections. Mind in this context, is not only about intelligence and thinking but also as an uncontrollable force that pushes us for further growth. The term “mind” as an energy that can create its own agentic relations.

Life is not something stable and still, but a nonstop moving process. Manuela in an interview in 2016 for BAC space fall residency, said “how can you construct a piece that always branching out into something new and never coming back to the center” (Infante 2016). Plants, according to the new field of plant neurobiology, are cognitive and intellectual organisms and thus they have the ability to communicate with other beings (Cotter 2019). The plants do not think of an idea, but they think about a movement, a force that makes them operate in a way that they only branching. The remarkable thing about plants is that if you split them and cut them in pieces, and place them again in different pots, they can still grow and repeat themselves.

If everything has a mind, the branching of the plants as a dramaturgical procedure can help as communicate with “minds” that can be discovered in theatre. In Manuela’s performance Estado Vegetal, we can recognize the “mind” in acting. In the performance, there is only one actor that embodies all the characters. Every character uses the same words to express different things, a looping process, but always in relation to something different, just like plants. Acting as an energetic rhythm, that can create a world of multitudes sounds.

Manuela, just like a lot of artists, does not focus on addressing the audience when creating an artwork. Although, we do have to admit the power of the spectators during a performance. The mind of the audience cannot be controlled and has the ability to lead the show in different directions, mostly through their reactions (ex. transform the piece into a comedy). The same uncontrollable mind can be recognized in the rehearsal process as well. Even a small idea in a rehearsals room can create a whole new perspective for the performance, Manuela explained in the TiM session.

Theatre has a mind itself, that you cannot go against it, but instead you need to listen to it. Theatre as a thinking machine to provide other ways of knowing. We need to bring forward the dramaturgy of the background or better acknowledge that “the outside has burst inside the auditorium; or rather, we are only now realizing that the outside has always been inside” (Corrieri 2017, 250). This will be liberating for approaching theatre in a way that “‘around the production lies the theatre and around the theatre lies the city and around the city, as far as we can see, lies the whole world and even the sky and all its stars’” as the dramaturg Marianne van Kerkhoven express (Corrieri 2017, 450).

References

*Image credits: Figure 1: Panella, Javier. 2017. Estado Vegetal poster. Accessed November 19,2020.  http://javierpanella.cl/