Approaching Art

By Theo Williams



Imagine a majestic angel in the throne room of God, arriving with a bucket of water and cleaning cloth. He has been summoned to clean a little crayon drawing off one of the walls where small children sat the previous evening for a story time with God. One can imagine lip-reading the angel’s expression as he silently mouths the words, “humans!”

Art is unmistakably an essential part of our humanity. We “humans” were made in the “image of God” (Latin imago Dei), and therefore we are meant to live out our lives as works of art (Greek poiema). Living this way we reveal a living communio, a loving freedom to creatively express our gifts in service of God and one others. Our art can express and realize this ‘indwelling of meaning’ (Latin perichoresis) by how we express truth, goodness and beauty.

In this way our art becomes dynamic enactments that recall the meaning of their constituted reality in the present moment (Greek anamnesis). Our art embodies story in ways that are engaging while inviting them into participation. Approaching art in this way, we don’t need to rely on mimetic falsities, or struggle with the hopelessness of metaphysical idealism.

Our physical theatre expresses this understanding by starting with the actor/mime as the essence of theatre. In the same way that painting, architecture, music, and text have their own homes, the theatre is the home of the actor/mime. All the stage elements like décor, furniture, lights and scripts serve the actor/mime. The space is kept elementally simple as to focus or benefit the artist’s work. The actor/mime is a person presenting the corporeal artistry of a instrumental body; the dynamic interplay of presenting both the embodied story (personal), as well as its transfigured hope (universal).

Here the body expresses movement, movement expresses action, and action expresses the drama (comedy or tragedy) of our lives. In this way our physical theatre portrays emotion, thought and experience in a way that transcends cultural barriers and passes the many rational defenses our age erects against the musicality of the body. The body of the actor, like the strings of a harp, creates a rhythm that captures the tensions of our existence and opus of our hearts.

Even though this might not come easily, our Conservatory and training programs provide the new and experienced actor/mime the opportunity to pursue technical exactness, repertoire, and improvisation. Combining these elements, we believe the course of study grants our graduates an artistic composure we call “freedom under mastery”. This composure allows the performer to listen to the laws of motion and narrative-analysis while they can augment their expressions with improvisational immediacy. In this way thought, experience, and emotions can be strengthened, nuanced or reemphasized.