Drama Tuesday - Identification
/The Experience of Humanity
Key to the experience of drama – as an audience member but also as an actor and director – is our capacity to empathetically identify with characters and situations in drama.
That doesn’t mean that we have to “Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war” in bloody assassination or become a husband and wife team intent on regicide or be an abandoned fourteen year old swallowing a potion to fake death when abandoned by her lover. But, when we experience drama we share some of the emotion and thinking. We laugh or cry; our senses and emotions work in overload.
This is a tricky issue (particularly for some parents and community members) who fret at the idea of children confronting issues and emotions – and fear of losing control.
But at its heart identification is the concept of recognising that drama is experiencing the shared experiences of being human. Drama, particularly great and lasting drama, works directly on our senses of seeing and hearing. It impacts on our focus and attention , our thinking and emotions. It registers with us somatically, our breathing rates, our postures, our muscles. All of this physical action is directed towards the mental and emotional understanding of people (who could be like us, or not) in situations and relationships (that we can imaginatively enter).
As much as I can say, rationally, that what I am experiencing in drama is just an actor representing action symbolically, the significance lies in the connection with the human experience of others because I am standing in their shoes as if it were happening to me.
To put it another way, identification in drama is the moment that has the Ah Ha! impact.
All of this is preamble for the following. An analogous experience in literature – reminding us of the connection between the arts
In a lifetime of reading, a new experience.
I turned page 357 of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and find for the first time a fictional representation of Nannup.
My parents Nannup wedding 1949
Nannup is my mother’s heart land. She grew in this South West Western Australian timber town. In school she won the prize as Dux of Grade 7 when she was 12. She lived with her mother Win and sister Carmel and brother Francis. After her death we found that she was born out of wedlock. (See the investigation by our Historian/Doctor son, Phillip, for that story.)
The black and white photo of her wedding shows her outside the wooden church with my father, Richard (mostly known as Dick). In summers camping at Dunsborough we would make family pilgrimages to Nannup – in scalding heat, of course. It is heart land for me too. Songline contours on my soul.
It is therefore strange to finally come across a fictional telling of Nannup.
