The architecture of the self 2

Here’s a second way in which the ‘self’ can be seen as both physical and external. (For the first, see here.)

There’s an exercise for drama groups in Chris Johnston’s book House of Games which I’ve used in the past in slightly adapted form. I don’t think it has any real value for training performers, but it has interesting psychological implications. Johnston calls it ‘The Identity Zone’ and he introduces it like this:

A volunteer is asked for, who will sculpt her ‘inner personalities’. She is asked to cast individuals from the rest of the group into these roles. She is asked to present these personalities in a line, with those nearest the audience who are closest to the surface and those at the back who are most hidden (181).

Although he uses the word “sculpt,” Johnston adds that “clear instructions should be given to the players about their characters by the person doing the exercise”. In my way of doing the exercise, I would take the idea of sculpting literally. The basic rules for ‘body sculpture’ are that the sculptor should not use any verbal instructions, but should ‘shape’ someone else’s body into the posture required by purely physical means – which should of course be as gentle as possible and should not result in a posture that is too difficult to hold. The reason I preferred this was that the person doing the exercise – let’s call her the ‘self-sculptor’ – could discover the posture required more intuitively through experiment. Verbal commands would rely too much on the ‘already known’.

My second departure from Johnston’s description was that the different characters were not placed in a line. They were placed wherever the self-sculptor felt they should be within the playing space. With the audience more or less to one side of this space, the difference between surface and depth was preserved. But it allowed a much more complex spatial ‘architecture of the self’ to be constructed. Angles and distances also came into play, as well as the degree to which the different ‘selves’ could be presumed aware or unaware of other ‘selves’.

For Johnston, the next stage is to set up interactions between any of the characters who make up the self. I did not do this. Since the ‘self-sculpture’ had been conducted wordlessly, I simply asked the audience (consisting of other members of the group) to interpret what they saw. On one occasion, in fact, this became the basis for an interactive public performance. A group of performers presented three different self-sculptures to the audience, asking the audience to interpret them. These had been pre-rehearsed, but the process, not simply the product, was presented. Volunteers from the audience were then invited to use the performers as ‘raw material’ to construct their own self-sculptures, with the audience then interpreting these as before.

I’m not sure how valuable this exercise is as a means of self-discovery. That’s probably very variable. What interests me about it is its more general significance. In the first place, it’s very clear that you can’t present your self to the world by means of body sculpture with only one body to work on. You probably need at least three. But why? I certainly don’t draw the conclusion that we’re all multiple or split personalities. Rather, the self is dynamic, not static. This is revealed in the relationships between the different characters or ‘selves,’ more than in those characters in themselves.

And this is why space is so important in the exercise. You might use four bodies to express four ‘sides of yourself,’ but between these four there are six different relationships, so in effect you’re sculpting a ten-part self! Relative distances and angles, and the degree to which different ‘selves’ seem aware of each other, all become significant.

If you get the chance (that is, if you find a willing group), try it. But make sure you move on to the following challenging and potentially revealing extension of the exercise. Suppose you have just performed a self-sculpture using three or four bodies to do so. In effect you have taken your ‘inner’ structure of personality and you have set it outside you. You have ‘set it outside you’ in the sense of beyond you, so you can look at it as a whole. What will happen, then, if you now enter into it? To do this, you must first walk among the different ‘selves,’ slowly, intuitively finding the place within the sculpture where you seem to belong. And on finding this place, you must then take a posture which also seems to belong, that is, to be right for that place. What is it?

Is it some kind of ‘real (or core) you’ which you didn’t know existed until your own self-sculpture ‘told’ you of it?