The Big Fear

Writing or producing anything in the arts and theatre comes with a big fear as to what may eventuate ... even kill you

The big dread! Night tremors and vague associations with all that could be wrong and all that might be left unresolved in one's life! The big fear that haunts one's every move and yet has no form and no particular shape. We howl at the ceiling above our beds; shadowed by the glow from the lamps on the streets and pathways of the surrounding units ... and yet we know that our brief encounters with some subconscious mind is but an illusion and something to be avoided; we know it will kill us if we give in to it ...

... and do I know you or what you represent in me?

So might we define all our work on art as that which exists between life and death; that realisation of non-reality of all our existence which means we try to discover our own lives and our existence through the vicarious reality of art. Our theatre is a hologram of ourselves. Yet it pre-empts our own death; our evacuation from the realm of our false and delusive life. We delude ourselves thinking it is about a creative response to some stimulus when in fact it is a delving into the evasiveness of the realisation of mortality. When we teach art and theatre and all the work we do, we are simply teaching how to evade and disguise the mirror of death and finality.

Some of our students know this by some innate understanding; as do some of us at various times in nightmares while living. But the fear drives us to create something; some kind of evasion of the finality we must endure and must face. It is like being inside someone's great joke with the answer never obvious. So we evade the question and the solution by creating works the somehow distract or otherwise reveal to us glimmers of that evasion ...

But what is the alternative? A simple waiting?

Better to find pathways of the inevitable distractions! To seek a way through the blurr of life's absurdity, perhaps it is better to create that hologram of the self and the illusory world in order to allay the wild destruction that meets us otherwise. And so is our purpose! We can never claim more than finding ingenious ways passages for investigating and simply passing time ...

In the real world, our passion for serious consideration may well kill us. We may provoke the eye of the tiger too much. The jobs in our fluorescent concaves may well be no protection as those who really KNOW may well decide your work is not conducive to the well-being of the organisation or its clients. And you know that such proclamations may well kill you. If not in the "darkness at noon" ...

And so the fear! The big fear is that all we are is simply all we we can imagine. There is no benevolent god to touch us up. The end is death. The beginning is birth. In the middle is our imagination, dreams, nightmares and physical moments of joy, destruction and pain ... yet there is art!

Joe Woodward