Performing Consciousness

Since its inaugural issue in April, 2000, the journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts has regularly published essays on the intersection of theatre and consciousness. Often these essays have seen theatre as a spiritual practice that for both the performer and her audience can bring about experiences that help heal the world, a shift in consciousness. This practice, though spiritual, is not ethereal but is rooted in doing, in actions, in breathing. That is, theatre is seen as an art form understood as part of a whole, as taking place in total Consciousness as well as expressing consciousness(es), making both breathing a source of meaning and shamanic journeying part of the creative process that brings into “being” imaginative resources for the actor that undermines traditional understandings of character/self/ego. All the pieces collected here, then, reveal a concern with consciousness and the theatre, the ways that performance can be a spiritual practice, a means a reaching higher levels of consciousness, as well as the ways the theatre may have healing effects on audiences by engaging them in wider and deeper levels of imagination, the levels where dualities disappear.