Freedom Through Motion How
Nina Wise Uses Physical Improv By Jeannine Walston Common Ground, December 2005
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| As the house lights at Theater Artaud go dark, the audience is silent. In silhouette, Nina Wise appears on stage, her arms outstretched, skyward. A subtle shudder animates her body in a wave-like motion. Her performance partner Corey Fischer breaks into a percussive movement. Wise goes still. I lean forward with curiosity. Wise and Fischer’s performance follows a lecture by Dan Siegel, MD, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and an expert in interpersonal neurobiology. As their movement dialogue continues, I see how Wise and Fischer are illuminating Siegel’s explanation of mirror neurons, the actual neurobiology of how our minds respond to the intentional state of another being. Standing side-by-side, Wise and Fischer each make fists mimicking the gesture Siegel used to model the brain. Their faces express perplexity as they hold their fists in front of their heads. The audience bursts into laughter acknowledging how difficult it is to comprehend the complexity of the brain. Wise and Fischer engage in a playful game of verbal ping-pong, repeating Siegel’s scientific terminology. They struggle to remember certain terms, and the audience laughs again, because we, too, haven’t retained every detail from Siegel’s compelling lecture. As Fischer takes a seat upstage, Wise, without missing a beat, launches into a solo recalling a story from her childhood. She is eleven doing her homework after school when she hears her mother sobbing. She walks quietly toward her mother’s bedroom, freezes in the doorway, stares at her mother lying in bed, her black hair wild, her fuchsia nightgown disheveled. Her mother is holding a butcher knife. “I’m going to kill myself,” she says. The audience stills. Wise describes slipping the knife from her mother’s fingers, walking back to the kitchen, and placing the knife in a drawer. Our Stories, Our Lives Earlier in the evening, Siegel has explained that psychological balance is determined in part by the way we tell the stories of our lives. If we can create what Siegel calls a “coherent narrative,” we can then achieve a quality of psychological health that eludes us when our life story is fragmented, partial, and broken. Wise illustrates this point on stage. Before our eyes, she transforms a personally traumatic story into something whole. Her delivery reflects an understanding for her mother’s own suffering as well as her own as a child. Wise’s authenticity strikes a chord of grief inside of me, touching unresolved pain that I hide from the world. This resurrection of my own grief is an oddly welcome sensation. I notice my body relaxing into my chair. To hear Wise’s truth, and honor my own, offers deep relief. Fischer follows with a solo of his own that also mixes the personal and universal. Next, the two create a duet, incorporating images from Siegel’s lecture with material from each of their solo works. The performance is spontaneous, unpredictable, funny, moving, and highly physical. The audience rises to applaud. This is the last of nine shows Wise has performed in September at “Here/Now: A Festival of Optimistic Voices.” Each evening a newly created performance of autobiographical narrative followed riveting lectures by progressive and visionary thinkers on such topics as the politics of war, the future of medicine, environmental justice, the cosmos, and how loving relationships inspire the growth of new neural networks in the brain. Why combine improvisation with lectures on the most complex issues of our day? Here/Now, which was co-produced by Wise, celebrated the call of Berkeley cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff, PhD, for what he calls a “progressive aesthetic.” According to Lakoff, social change requires direct involvement from the arts to cultivate care, compassion, responsibility, and empathy. I saw six of Wise’s performances, and each one made the companion lecture more relevant to daily life. Motion Theater Wise met Siegel this past June at a Buddhist Psychology conference where, separately, she performed and he presented. She learned that Siegel’s work is based in part on a person’s ability to make sense of their life experiences, particularly the stories of early childhood. The capacity to form a coherent narrative is the most powerful predictor of a person’s sense of security and confidence, both of which are essential to the development of healthy and loving relationships. Siegel distinguishes implicit memory — the storehouse of experiences that remain unexamined, unarticulated, and in some way unknown — from explicit memory, the domain of consciously recalled experiences. Making sense of our lives requires freeing memories from implicit memory and integrating them into the part of the mind that makes them explicitly known. While Wise uses different language to explain her work, Siegel’s model is highly relevant to the form of autobiographical performance she calls Motion Theatre. “Motion Theatre,” she says “involves taking the material of one’s own life, including both the traumatic and mundane, and discovering the innate significance that lies at the core of all experiences.” By telling true stories that emerge from body sensations, people recover what has not been previously acknowledged, spoken, or heard aloud by others. The opportunity for storytelling allows people to awaken memories previously lost and forgotten. Along with making sense of the past, Wise explains that in contemporary life, we are so inundated with data that nothing retains significance. In just a few seconds of broadcast news, a flood of information is communicated about the Supreme Court, the war in Iraq, and recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Overwhelmed by an avalanche of information that we cannot assimilate, our lives themselves can lose a sense of significance. “Our
lives seem impoverished when we have no methodology for recovering
meaning,” Wise says. “But, it is not our lives that are
at fault. Our lives are full of meaning. Motion Theatre allows us
to access inner characters, fleeting memories, and stored impressions,
all of which make up our inner life. And when we give that inner life
expression in community, we feel less isolated and [more] visible.
We share what is most troubling and most mundane in a circle of friends
doing the same.” On a Sunday afternoon, I stand terrified in Wise’s beginning level improvisation class. I wonder if I’ll be able to express myself without carefully calculating my thoughts in advance. “Invite an image to arise in your mind that is triggered from the way you are moving,” Wise instructs. My arms sway and I think of a chicken. I begin talking about the farm I visited as a child where every morning I ran to the chicken coop looking for eggs. “Keep physicalizing,” Wise interjects. My torso shakes, my legs jump, and my arms flap outward and upward. I tell the audience I’ve found an egg as I raise my arms over my head into an oval shape and squat down to the floor. My awareness shifts. My story changes direction and I describe food from Thanksgiving dinners at my aunt’s house. I move my arms in circular motions to depict the scent of coastal air in the house from the Long Island Sound. I shift my body back and forth referring to the tide that can be heard from my grandmother’s room. I confess that my aunt and mother are no longer talking, and that I haven’t been to the house in five years. I bring my movement and story to a close. As I finish, the other students applaud. As I sit down, I feel lighter and happy. My glance meets the eyes of another classmate. He reaches out and touches my shoulder with reassurance. “I’m next,” he says grinning. Wise explains that stories told through improvisation can range from the deeply personal to what someone ate for lunch. She refers to a student at Esalen who moved into material about the Vietnam War during a performance. Wise coached him to go deeper into facts and details at each stage. “He was throwing his body across the floor, making sounds of gunfire, describing the showers of blood that clouded his vision as severed body parts flew through the air,” Wise remembers. Until that moment, Wise had not known he was a war veteran. She had only known he ran a successful real estate business in Southern California. Days after the workshop ended, Wise received an email from this man saying that he felt the work he had done in the improvisation class had been of more benefit to him than his 20 years of psychotherapy. Wise, however, does not disparage the benefits of psychotherapy and often encourages her students to include both psychotherapeutic counseling and contemplative practice alongside their improvisational training. In contrast to other healing practices, Motion Theatre provides the opportunity to tell stories aloud in a highly physical way in a context where they are witnessed. The elements of movement, narrative, and community work in a synergistic way so that the benefit is greater than the sum of its parts. Wise points out that often the stories we are most reluctant to speak out loud are the very stories, which, once articulated, provide us with the deepest relief because they are no longer held secret. “The experiences that we hold the most shame about,” she says, “are the very stories that, when expressed, create a quality of transparency in our being that makes us loveable. We hide because we are afraid that if revealed we would be detested. But, in fact, it is in the revealing that we become attractive because finally we have dropped our mask.” As a long-time Buddhist practitioner and dharma teacher, Wise integrates contemplative practice into her teaching of improvisation and fosters an environment where students can reach deep into themselves. “Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that true love emerges only when there is true understanding,” Wise explains. “The only way we truly reach understanding is by looking deeply into ourselves and others.” Inherent in her unique style of performance art is the capacity to love self, and others, and this might be Wise’s most profound teaching. A new series of Nina Wise’s Motion Theatre classes will begin in January at San Francisco’s Shotwell Studios, Berkeley’s Studio Rasa, and in Sebastopol.
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