VISUAL DRAMATURGY

(By Rolf Aamot)

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.