By Rolf Aamot
Published in “Spillerom”, Norwegian magazine for dance and theater, nr.3.1990
Our strategies of survival are the basis of visual drama.
Our survival is the purpose of experience.
Perceiving and feeling we shape the life supporting
thoughts of our actions. Our inner and outer energies and
moods are the framework of visual dramaturgy.
The alternatives are clear:
Visual communication or violation of the eye.
Time and space control our actions. Surviving with
self-respect requires readiness of perception, feeling and action.
Our economy has its ground in an economy of love.
The purpose of power struggle is, first of all, the domination of others.
In this struggle the entertainment industry are weapons
of mass destruction: Human beings facing each other in a battlefield.
The media and city centers are the meeting place. Keyword: Communion.
Where people meet visual theater is found. Every place of assembly is a stage.
We meet and part in the visual dialogue of the Theater of Love.
We create and seize intensities. A play of simultaneous and synchronous action
where we give and take – time and space. Economy of love.
All energy – positive or negative – signals of life or death – converted into intensities.
The factors being interchangeable. Power over self or others takes place
by control of speed, momentum and connections of streams of intensity.
Visual drama originates in, and returns to, the scenography of the human
face and the performance of the eyes. Body, color, shade and line are the
amplifiers of the eye. The communications of the eye are all embracing.
To our experience, knowledge, action, handling of emotion is given image-rhythms.
Without eye culture, without power to express self or fathom the expressions
of others, without a language of tonal images capable of communicating the
inner visions of another human being we would be isolated and impoverished.
The world will be threatening. We would be abandoned in the purely physical
surroundings in which we were born. Behind it all: Nothingness, emptiness,
all-absorbing darkness. The dramaturgy of the eye is a strategy of survival.
The theater of sight is a social phenomenon with roots in the creation of groups.
Man needs to see the relevance of his actions. The space of the individual
facing space contains the field of tension of the visual theater. Without relating
body and space the personality development of the role turns into an autonomous,
directionless and empty movement. The seer looks past the seen.
Driving force of visual drama: Solidarity of body space of self, openness within
bounds – towards the group and space. The totality formed by line, shade and
color: Organic progress, closeness, nearness, similarity encountering the
intensity of other human beings. Body, bodies, scenography and light as body.
The body of the community is “the other human being”, affirming the seer.
No one exists, and nothing has happened without the visualization facing us in
“the other human being”. The visual drama confirms: We exist. Death is denied.
The primary choice: rebellion or submission. In our mind is waged a war of moods.
The individual is facing 2 – two forms of survival experience: Visual communication
and the violation of the eye. Visual communication and democracy
belong together. Organic visual rhythm carries the pulse of heart and lungs.
The language of the eye braces the personality, and binds us together.
Loneliness no longer seems irreparable. We can share our world with others and
share our thoughts through actions sensed and felt: In this world we do exist
and meet our fellow human beings. Plurality becomes a point of departure
- embracing all oppositions. We are facing the unknown and the dissimilar.
The consensual has become suspect. The heteromorphy is a way out of
terror, we seek the realization of the isomorphic.
Sensitivity towards the different is activated, and the ability to tolerate
the incommensurable managed. One unit of movement represents one “truth”.
By relating units of movement their values are in Play.
PLAY for Visual communication and Violation of the eye:
Communication Combat
Will Coincidence
Identity Mask
Intensity Boredom
Communion Loneliness
Safety Anxiety
Visual dialogue: Bodies meeting and parting.
Gestalt factors giving development of form to the action.
The visual player sees, is seen or overlooked. Focus/Unfocus.
Scenography: The face where eyes act.
The search of its own rule is the rule of visual drama.
Always searching for a rule – rule of visual drama.
The visual dramatist and the visual player seek, test, invent. In short: Experiment.
Artists direct their attentiveness towards the decisive question of the ensontology
of the unities of movement: How can one unit of movement be related to
another unit of movement ? Experimenting is relating – units never related before.
The question turns out to be: Does it happen ? What happens ?
The Goal: Winning time. Mastering the insight. Anywhere.
Visual communication drama is action. The dramatist shapes time and space
keeping his self-respect. Without the language of the eye not even nothingness
can be fathomed, grasped and understood. The limits towards the world
cannot be set, the elements cannot be set apart. All imagination becomes
impossible: An omen, everywhere and nowhere; man cringes in the cave and
only ventures out when hunger forces the situation. Through the language
of images the distances of time and space were removed. We are humans.
The violation of the eye, the eye violence drama, we have in common with
other animals. The struggle between us animals first of all: A visual struggle.
The negation of visual communication, eye violence, raises imaginary borders
of time and space. The slave and the pray senses hidden barriers around
their lives. The moment of the sublime glare paralyzes. The dramaturgy of
Violation-of-the-eye is the dramaturgy of advertising language, the enslaving
“here-and-now” of all commercial entertainment.
Man: Object. Spaceship disconnected from earth.
The role of the driver/enforcer consists in the intense search for final suspension
of the eternal avalanche. Searching for the shapeless: The Sublime. All
things enforcing terror are sublime, transporting the mind into momentous
paralysis, inspiring dread, and in the next moment releasing a strange lust.
But all of it originating in terror, the measure depending upon the bracing
of self of the individual human being.
All things filling our senses beyond every measure are sublime, or from the
opposite end: “filling” them with a measureless emptiness, everything eternal
and unmovable, and from the opposite end: a blitz like movement, in short:
Everything exceeding the domain of apprehension of the individual – over and
under the threshold of pain. In the sublime experience the individual is made
subject to a power, a power stronger than the subject. A Process is conducted
– against the individual. The subject is given the sentence: Non-being. Object.
The experience of the sublime arises in the gap between the images that can
be seen. Deception of the senses and inner reality escaping attention can call
forth impressions, releasing the sublime. Every significance of imagination
are annulled. Fed and kept – entertained – in the “here-and-now” of
the momentous glare where meeting other human beings mean: Now or Never.
The Individual caught in the dizzying power play swindle of
art, culture and religion. Power play and entertainment are synonyms.
Eye comedy reduces the world to nothing. Glancing askew, upward, disconnected
from our surroundings for a while, we are kept-entertained.
All interest, all compassion and all identification are wiped out. The routine and
boredom of everyday life finds its resonance in a contrapuntal Play: Disconnection
from everyday life – nullifying responsibility. “The King” and “The Scapegoat”
serves as bolt and lock in this upside world where every boundary disappears.
The dramaturgy of violation-of-the-eye fluctuates between two poles, both of
them being there from the very beginning, unfolding in an emblematic pattern
of space and time: Converging and diverging. Our longings for convergence and
divergence cohere in intricate ways, that cannot be dissolved, but only slowly,
as time passes, exposes the “truth” of eye violence dramaturgy, perceived as
faith. We encounter two inseparable tendencies: Reconciliation/hope – the
growing tensions of the leitmotif – the great story, and on the other hand:
dissolution and fragmentation followed trough to its ultimate conclusions –
no causal dynamic interconnection – instead: static parallel movement,
primarily consisting of context less “climaxes” (maximum intensity). Compounded
fullness dissolved and replaced by parallel scenes of conflict/combat,
coincidence, masks, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, displeasure and chaos.
Boredom/death converts everything into intensities of negation.
The subject is deprived of space and time. The eye kept – entertained by terror.
And suddenly: It’s all over. The hard and ordinary days when the world is set aright.
In this state of transition depression acquires a liberating force with
possibilities of rebellion and massacre. Still: The monopoly of brutish power/
violence leads the individual into rosy rituals. Boredom reestablished: Enforcing
the respect of the unity of time, place and action. Escapism as only hope:
Once again – bewildering the roar of the masses in the One Week of
The Slaves, the One Day of Slaves, in the “here-and-now” of a TV-second.
But: The dream keeps on living – always. There are powers in metaphors.
Published in “Spillerom”, Norwegian magazine for dance and theater, nr.3.1990
Our strategies of survival are the basis of visual drama.
Our survival is the purpose of experience.
Perceiving and feeling we shape the life supporting
thoughts of our actions. Our inner and outer energies and
moods are the framework of visual dramaturgy.
The alternatives are clear:
Visual communication or violation of the eye.
Time and space control our actions. Surviving with
self-respect requires readiness of perception, feeling and action.
Our economy has its ground in an economy of love.
The purpose of power struggle is, first of all, the domination of others.
In this struggle the entertainment industry are weapons
of mass destruction: Human beings facing each other in a battlefield.
The media and city centers are the meeting place. Keyword: Communion.
Where people meet visual theater is found. Every place of assembly is a stage.
We meet and part in the visual dialogue of the Theater of Love.
We create and seize intensities. A play of simultaneous and synchronous action
where we give and take – time and space. Economy of love.
All energy – positive or negative – signals of life or death – converted into intensities.
The factors being interchangeable. Power over self or others takes place
by control of speed, momentum and connections of streams of intensity.
Visual drama originates in, and returns to, the scenography of the human
face and the performance of the eyes. Body, color, shade and line are the
amplifiers of the eye. The communications of the eye are all embracing.
To our experience, knowledge, action, handling of emotion is given image-rhythms.
Without eye culture, without power to express self or fathom the expressions
of others, without a language of tonal images capable of communicating the
inner visions of another human being we would be isolated and impoverished.
The world will be threatening. We would be abandoned in the purely physical
surroundings in which we were born. Behind it all: Nothingness, emptiness,
all-absorbing darkness. The dramaturgy of the eye is a strategy of survival.
The theater of sight is a social phenomenon with roots in the creation of groups.
Man needs to see the relevance of his actions. The space of the individual
facing space contains the field of tension of the visual theater. Without relating
body and space the personality development of the role turns into an autonomous,
directionless and empty movement. The seer looks past the seen.
Driving force of visual drama: Solidarity of body space of self, openness within
bounds – towards the group and space. The totality formed by line, shade and
color: Organic progress, closeness, nearness, similarity encountering the
intensity of other human beings. Body, bodies, scenography and light as body.
The body of the community is “the other human being”, affirming the seer.
No one exists, and nothing has happened without the visualization facing us in
“the other human being”. The visual drama confirms: We exist. Death is denied.
The primary choice: rebellion or submission. In our mind is waged a war of moods.
The individual is facing 2 – two forms of survival experience: Visual communication
and the violation of the eye. Visual communication and democracy
belong together. Organic visual rhythm carries the pulse of heart and lungs.
The language of the eye braces the personality, and binds us together.
Loneliness no longer seems irreparable. We can share our world with others and
share our thoughts through actions sensed and felt: In this world we do exist
and meet our fellow human beings. Plurality becomes a point of departure
- embracing all oppositions. We are facing the unknown and the dissimilar.
The consensual has become suspect. The heteromorphy is a way out of
terror, we seek the realization of the isomorphic.
Sensitivity towards the different is activated, and the ability to tolerate
the incommensurable managed. One unit of movement represents one “truth”.
By relating units of movement their values are in Play.
PLAY for Visual communication and Violation of the eye:
Communication Combat
Will Coincidence
Identity Mask
Intensity Boredom
Communion Loneliness
Safety Anxiety
Visual dialogue: Bodies meeting and parting.
Gestalt factors giving development of form to the action.
The visual player sees, is seen or overlooked. Focus/Unfocus.
Scenography: The face where eyes act.
The search of its own rule is the rule of visual drama.
Always searching for a rule – rule of visual drama.
The visual dramatist and the visual player seek, test, invent. In short: Experiment.
Artists direct their attentiveness towards the decisive question of the ensontology
of the unities of movement: How can one unit of movement be related to
another unit of movement ? Experimenting is relating – units never related before.
The question turns out to be: Does it happen ? What happens ?
The Goal: Winning time. Mastering the insight. Anywhere.
Visual communication drama is action. The dramatist shapes time and space
keeping his self-respect. Without the language of the eye not even nothingness
can be fathomed, grasped and understood. The limits towards the world
cannot be set, the elements cannot be set apart. All imagination becomes
impossible: An omen, everywhere and nowhere; man cringes in the cave and
only ventures out when hunger forces the situation. Through the language
of images the distances of time and space were removed. We are humans.
The violation of the eye, the eye violence drama, we have in common with
other animals. The struggle between us animals first of all: A visual struggle.
The negation of visual communication, eye violence, raises imaginary borders
of time and space. The slave and the pray senses hidden barriers around
their lives. The moment of the sublime glare paralyzes. The dramaturgy of
Violation-of-the-eye is the dramaturgy of advertising language, the enslaving
“here-and-now” of all commercial entertainment.
Man: Object. Spaceship disconnected from earth.
The role of the driver/enforcer consists in the intense search for final suspension
of the eternal avalanche. Searching for the shapeless: The Sublime. All
things enforcing terror are sublime, transporting the mind into momentous
paralysis, inspiring dread, and in the next moment releasing a strange lust.
But all of it originating in terror, the measure depending upon the bracing
of self of the individual human being.
All things filling our senses beyond every measure are sublime, or from the
opposite end: “filling” them with a measureless emptiness, everything eternal
and unmovable, and from the opposite end: a blitz like movement, in short:
Everything exceeding the domain of apprehension of the individual – over and
under the threshold of pain. In the sublime experience the individual is made
subject to a power, a power stronger than the subject. A Process is conducted
– against the individual. The subject is given the sentence: Non-being. Object.
The experience of the sublime arises in the gap between the images that can
be seen. Deception of the senses and inner reality escaping attention can call
forth impressions, releasing the sublime. Every significance of imagination
are annulled. Fed and kept – entertained – in the “here-and-now” of
the momentous glare where meeting other human beings mean: Now or Never.
The Individual caught in the dizzying power play swindle of
art, culture and religion. Power play and entertainment are synonyms.
Eye comedy reduces the world to nothing. Glancing askew, upward, disconnected
from our surroundings for a while, we are kept-entertained.
All interest, all compassion and all identification are wiped out. The routine and
boredom of everyday life finds its resonance in a contrapuntal Play: Disconnection
from everyday life – nullifying responsibility. “The King” and “The Scapegoat”
serves as bolt and lock in this upside world where every boundary disappears.
The dramaturgy of violation-of-the-eye fluctuates between two poles, both of
them being there from the very beginning, unfolding in an emblematic pattern
of space and time: Converging and diverging. Our longings for convergence and
divergence cohere in intricate ways, that cannot be dissolved, but only slowly,
as time passes, exposes the “truth” of eye violence dramaturgy, perceived as
faith. We encounter two inseparable tendencies: Reconciliation/hope – the
growing tensions of the leitmotif – the great story, and on the other hand:
dissolution and fragmentation followed trough to its ultimate conclusions –
no causal dynamic interconnection – instead: static parallel movement,
primarily consisting of context less “climaxes” (maximum intensity). Compounded
fullness dissolved and replaced by parallel scenes of conflict/combat,
coincidence, masks, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, displeasure and chaos.
Boredom/death converts everything into intensities of negation.
The subject is deprived of space and time. The eye kept – entertained by terror.
And suddenly: It’s all over. The hard and ordinary days when the world is set aright.
In this state of transition depression acquires a liberating force with
possibilities of rebellion and massacre. Still: The monopoly of brutish power/
violence leads the individual into rosy rituals. Boredom reestablished: Enforcing
the respect of the unity of time, place and action. Escapism as only hope:
Once again – bewildering the roar of the masses in the One Week of
The Slaves, the One Day of Slaves, in the “here-and-now” of a TV-second.
But: The dream keeps on living – always. There are powers in metaphors.