A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep, or taste not of the Pierian spring.
From Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711)

Over time I have found that my aesthetic sources and models for playwriting tend less and less to be plays and theatrical productions but other artistic disciplines.  I continue to do my reading and attend performances as often I can afford to, but the things that guide me when I sit to write a play are not those theatre resources but the feelings and visions that come from dance, painting, sculpture, and music.

This makes me feel out of synch with so much of what I am being taught about the "rules" and process of crafting a play, which in the instruction manual currently being given to me flow primarily from the starting point of characters and their backstories and entanglements, move on to something called a plot (i.e., the arrangements of incidents that reveal character) driven by conflict (competing wants/needs that shall not be brooked except by either gentle or saw-toothed violence, but violence nonetheless), and end in something called resolution (delivered at the end of something called the "arc").  It's a framework that has "worked," whatever that term means, since Plautus, so it can't be discarded wholesale.

But while it's a flexible framework for drama (including comedy), it is not always pliable for making theatre, a word that to me offers larger playing fields and more generative possibilities for story-telling. Thus, for me, dance, painting, sculpture, and music are sources for creating theatre.  They give me a chance to stretch beyond drama's parched aesthetic focus on "reality" and "psychology" and re-hydrate an imagination cribbed by "shoulds."

The action on a stage is a kind of dance, yet many writers I've met have little or no sense of how to shape space with bodies, how the balancing of the gravities of bodies orbiting one another affects the resonance of their words and thus the emotional reaction of the audience.  For me, watching how a choreographer tells a story, abstracted or narrative, without words give me clues about how to move characters around on the stage to tell the story that needs to be told regardless if those characters are speaking words I've stuffed into their mouths or juggling pie plates. Boal gets to the heart of this in his Image Theatre, where the positions of bodies in space, holding certain poses that have expressive weight for the participants, can generate emotional responses in an audience -- and these responses do not come from the ears filled with words but from the eyes filled with sight.

Which leads directly to painting and sculpture, arts that also re-work visual space and thereby set up new gravities against which we can work our aesthetic muscles.  Painting and sculpture at their best re-train our eyes and by-pass the left-brain gate-keepers.  They spark emotional responses that do not spring from our corporationally tutored sentimentality but instead come from spaces that have not been colonized by advertising, sit-coms, and Hollywood or knee-capped by our own laziness. 

For me, as a playwright, ingesting lots of painting and sculpture encourages me to play at composing a script the way painters and sculptures compose their works, compiling elements without necessarily being constrained by linearity or causality, testing out combinations that "logically" don't work but illogically make a great deal of sense, letting things float on their currents and find their specific links without feeling that I, as wordmaster, have to "make things fit."  Allowing myself to be "unfit" in this way is very refreshing.

And music.  The art that goes right to the solar plexus.  That pries loose the veneer of civility and lets us sense some of that original face Buddha said we all carry within us.  I simply try to get as much music as I can into script, not only to help tell the story -- for underscore, for scene transitions, for atmosphere-setting -- but also for the way music can automatically take an audience out of the mundane and put them into some boundaryless place where all sorts of imaginative possibilities can geyser up and steam away.

In drama, I often feel bound by time and place; in theatre, I don't. In drama I feel restrained by the contemporary; in theatre, time and place refuse to be timed and placed.  And to create theatre, I find I need to go outside theatre to find what is theatrical in the other arts so that I can harvest (steal, if needed) and import it.  In other words, to go to the Pierian spring, the home of the Muses, and see what the Nine have to give me that will outift me for the next imaginative journey.

©2003 Michael Bettencourt

For more commentary and articles by Michael Bettencourt, check the Archives.

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays
produced in New York, Chicago,
Boston, and Los Angeles, among others.
Continued thanks to his "prime mate" and wife, Maria-Beatriz

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