Sandra L. Bloom, Comments on CANY Award,
May 17, 2010 Creative Alternatives of New York
We are here tonight to celebrate the achievements of a group of "artistic therapists" or "therapeutic artists" and I am moved that they have found a way to incorporate my work into theirs. In his aptly named book, Disturbing the Peace, Vaclav Havel - dissident, playwright, fomenter of the Velvet Revolution, and former President of the Czech Republic - wrote, "Every work of art points somewhere beyond itself; it transcends itself and its author; it creates a special force field around itself that moves the human mind and the human nervous system".
Most of the people in this room love going to the theater and many of you have passionately devoted your lives to that work. But why? Theater is meaningful. And political. And provocative. But so is reading a good book. What makes theater unique? Perhaps theater is so unique because it is "embodied". To engage in the theater is to watch, listen, make sense, think about - AND EXPERIENCE other people's stories.
Theater cannot be a purely intellectual experience and still be a living theater because when a gifted actor moves, smiles, laughs, or cries we now know that the neural activation that allows that behavior in the actor is mirrored simultaneously in the neural activation of the observer, - through the mirror neuron system, recently discovered in the brain - and that is the basis of empathy, compassion, and mutual concern - and of course, of good stories.
But why? Why would human beings evolve the complicated machinery of imitation, mimicry, memesis? Why would we want to spend time, energy, and money to emotionally experience other people's stories? What is theater for? To be a part of our evolutionary history, to be selected for over time, an activity must meet three criteria: it must be universal - there is no culture ever known to have existed that did not make use of theater in some form; it must be integral to many activities of life and not to be omitted - you are all a testament to that, but if you visit a Native American tribe you will find that is still the case and for everyone; it must be a source of pleasure- A lot of pleasure!
There are several reasons why theater would evolve. It's fun and the way our species learns best is through play. The ritual and ceremonial origins of theater helped to create group cohesion which was the only way this vulnerable species survived. But perhaps most importantly, over time, we became highly dependent on language as a way of understanding and adapting to the world around us.
But language split us off from our bodies, emotions, and a sense of belonging that predates the development of language. The ancients knew that this fragmentation was a dangerous one for us. One word for the Devil is "Diabolos" - the divider, the splitter-into-fragments.
In Ancient Greece, Asclepius was the God of healing and his symbol of the staff entwined by a snake remains today the symbol of medicine. As the original therapist, he was able to bring "love and reconciliation between the most antithetic elements in the body" and as a result he was the patron of both physicians and artists. For the Navaho, as for all Native American tribes, "To be sick is to be fragmented, to be healed is to become whole". And that brings me back to Creative Alternatives of New York and the important work they do.
The history of our species is a highly traumatic one and the hallmark of traumatic experience is fragmentation. Exposure to trauma literally shuts down our language abilities and the overwhelming emotions, pain, fear and suffering become split off, lodged in our bodies, living ghosts that haunt our present and play far too important a role in determining our future.
As an embodied art form, theater in all of its forms is ideally suited to healing those splits, allowing us to integrate experience, emotions, language and meaning into a cohesive narrative so that the past can become the past. This is a particularly important activity for children, whose integrative abilities are still developing.
But it is a vital activity for traumatized children whose hearts must already carry a burden they should never have to bear. For the Scottish play, Shakespeare wrote, "Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er fraught heart and bids it" break".
It is this work that is the primary work of CANY - toprovide the creative space within which wounded children and adults can give sorrow words and heal their already broken hearts and as our science is now demonstrating, heal their broken brains.
