Act 1

We are an applied participative arts organisation that has pioneered a methodology of working with communities, called Sensory Labyrinth Theatre (slt). With projects throughout Europe, in partnership with diverse people of all ages and abilities, Theatr Cynefin has created theatre events that have led audiences to report –

“One lives and thinks differently after walking through the Labyrinth”

“…feel I am complete in some way.”

“I remain speechless… it will remain inside me, settling ideas, and whenever they are activated, everything I learnt will emerge and your work will be transformed into really important actions”.

Inspired by the work of Theatre Anthropologist Enrique Vargas, Sensory Labyrinth Theatre is a participative arts process that leads to the creation of a site-specific installation performance.

Audiences enter the installation alone and journey on a winding path along which they encounter ‘sensory portals.’ These portals are co-created with community volunteers or professional artists through research methods Theatr Cynefin have developed. In the dark spaces of the Labyrinth these encounters help intensify the travellers’ senses and awaken in them a renewed appreciation of the kind of aliveness remembered from childhood.

What we find is that people who engage with our work report greater confidence, clarity, joy, peace and aspiration. But even more than this is a feeling of having touched something deep inside of themselves, something sustaining which was always there but hidden by the day to day debris of modern day stresses. Reacquainting with this inner strength creates a strong and sometimes unspoken bond between people. For the groups who have co-created the event the opportunity to give this profound experience to others allows for a deep sense of connection and a feeling of boundless capacity to grow.

The Social Perspective

The progress of industrial society has unfortunately required communities to forget our connectedness with all living things; otherwise the harm that has been done would not have been permitted. The resulting comfort and convenience of our daily lives in the developed world has further inured us to our connectedness, with great cost to the developing world. But the cost to the developed world has been equally damaging on a psychosocial level.

A sense of community depends on that same sense of connectedness, yet almost all our modern rituals for expressing this are mediated by commercial interests and therefore promote the concept of ‘doing’ and ‘having’ over ‘being.’ One can trace the psychological root of the current crisis facing humanity to a gross imbalance between the having/doing mode and being mode of human consciousness. ‘Just being’ is considered insufficient and uncomfortable because of an ever present sense of something lacking. The irony is that what is lacking is an awareness of our connectedness.

Theatr Cynefin works through the arts to create spaces within communities that remind people of this connectedness, the untrammelled joy of being alive: an awareness of which is sleeping within us. The medium through which this new awareness of an archaic wisdom, universal to all indigenous peoples, is brought about is Context Oriented Arts (CoArts).

The Practical Perspective

Participative Arts are artistic and creative activities which:
• engage and encourage communities to create together as opposed to consuming culture produced by others
• are humanizing and democratic in nature

Applied Participative Arts:
•   involve participants in their own immediate individual experience
•   enable participants to bring new awareness to their lives and rehearse changes
•   aspires to create spaces where there is dialogue that is embodied and manifest through the total sensory and dynamic language of the arts

Intercultural Applied Participative Arts:
• celebrate cultural difference while transcending or subverting cultural barriers
• challenge participants not merely to tolerate or understand other cultures but to embrace the possibility of friendship between cultures in conflict

Context Oriented Intercultural Applied Participative Arts:
• draw attention to the context rather than the content of experience: that which is experiencing rather than that which is experienced.

Theatr Cynefin’s mission is to create a skills base for CoArts practitioners. Where new and creative methodologies can be developed that activate communities and bring about an orthogonal shift in our awareness of ourselves and our world so that “being” is seen to be the source of all doing and having and not the other way around.

The Ethical Perspective

To be present to and present…

“What if” is redundant. All there is is this.

Cynefin creates theatre that is about this moment and contrives only what is necessary to frame an event called ‘theatre’ to attract people called ‘audience’.

Any performances an audience might experience are secondary to what actually happens.

There is more drama in this moment than all that has or will ever happen on page or stage.

…shared moments in space and time…
There are only ever three characters in Cynefin’s productions: the actor, the audience and the moment.

There is only one play that Cynefin performs: the story of the apparent arising and falling of sensations that we interpret as these characters.

…where fear and mediocrity…
Cynefin does not do spectacle. Cynefin embraces ordinary being.

An aversion to uncertainty creates a tendency to channel our consciousness into a ‘mainstream’ groove that Aldous Huxley called ‘the ruts of ordinary perception’. This is a way of seeing, doing and being which is willfully constricted to what we know or think we know. But deep down most of us are numb with fear: terrified by the sense that the real meaning of our short lives is evading us. This double bind leads to a social collusion towards a perceptual regression to the mean and even the extraordinary over time becomes ordinary. Mediocrity has nothing to do with ordinary being and everything to do with being ordinary (while being afraid deep down of not being extraordinary).

…are transformed into awe and wonder…
Cynefin productions embrace the ordinary in circumstances that only appear to be extraordinary. Every day we wake up and step into a labyrinth. Cynefin only imitates the labyrinth in which we are always walking. Within this context the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

…and the inner and the outer…
Theatre is an expression of the illusion of separation. There is the audience, and there is the stage. There are protagonists and antagonists. There is character and plot. There are actors and props.
Life is an expression of the illusion of separation. There is the person inside and the world outside. There is the self and the other. There is cause and effect. There is object and subject.
The only difference between these two illusions is that the first is cause for entertainment the second is this mortal coil…until, that is, when the second illusion is seen to be no different from the first illusion. This is theatre as gnosis – comedy and tragedy…

…become one.
We cannot know the first thing. This is because it is not a thing. It is…isness. We invite our audiences to embrace unknowing and to take the risk of falling awake to the mystery and miracle of being alive.

Friends, colleagues, citizens of The Republic of the Imagination,
You are gatekeepers on the door between the two worlds.
With one foot in being and the other in doing.
You stand on the edge and invite me to fall with you.
Please don't push me and watch me drop.
Stand with me in the circle of fire which burns the illusion that we are separate.
The fire is lit by presence and is fanned by surrender.
Its flames light the mysterious wonder unfolding in every moment.
Sometimes an explosion.
Sometimes a whisper from within.
What is within? What is without?
This world...it calls to you now. Listen through the crack in your wall where it hurts the most.
The pain is life squeezing through.