if we are to demolish the pretensions to art in a piece, what from theatre would be retained in a theatre minus art? Would it be like a formal occasion where there is the sense of exaggeration, in the ostentation of a social ritual? Perhaps Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics could play a part in this, the artist hosting a dinner party rather than producing a privileged cultural artifact. This would say something both about Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and about theatre: a transversal relation would be established – how strong would this connection appear to be? Is relational aesthetics a theatricalisation of contemporary art practices and a practical non-art? or even an appropriation of what is in theatre its excess for the sake of renovating artistic practices?

Why should I give the opinions of a few disgruntled punters who seem to want reviewers to shit on everyone’s play the time of day?

Conducting detailed scans of the brain of a patient undergoing a near-death experience, scientists could find no evidence of any conscious activity. Indeed, there was found to be no room in the brain for consciousness when it is in the process of shutting down all its functions. However, on the patient recovering consciousness, something had been going on; the patient’s visions were consistent with some kind of mental activity not accounted for in the science.

This leads to the speculation that consciousness is mediated through the brain not located in the brain but all around. Rather than being centred in the brain, the brain is merely a filter.

Under certain conditions conscious experience that is normally filtered out might enter the brain, explaining the woman who suffered a severe brain trauma and on recovery found she suddenly had an expert grasp on quantum physics. She is still alive and currently at the forefront of her field in France. Then there are cases of people recovering from neurological insults to the brain or neuropathologies who find that they have mysteriously acquired languages of which they had no prior knowledge – the man who came back from such an event and found he could speak and understand Cantonese.

Consciousness is not produced by the brain but is already there for the brain to find. This is not a new idea but goes back to William James and Henri Bergson who were thinking along similar lines at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences, Penny Sartori

Minus theatre nonetheless researches theatre. It makes a point of differentiating theatre from itself in terms that it is not performance, not narration, storytelling, not colonial, parochial, and not a mode of art, as theatricality or exaggeration, but art itself.

Is it more a matter of the linkages between senses and how they can be blocked? Or broken?

Spritz reader … what this thing does is accelerate reading by flash-carding words at a ridiculous rate so the eye registers an image, an ideogram! and doesn’t scan. All it does is focus and … read. Word by word. At a ridiculous rate. I said that. A novel in 40 minutes. There’s something about the tactile and the eye. How does the eye feel about this? Haptic sense repressed.

“I don’t know who he is; just a guy who comes and watches us, our lives. He’s not very pleased with us.”

Obscure hierarchies

Is it more a matter of the linkages between the senses and how they can be blocked? or broken?

It’s clear there were other things with a strong hold on his attention.

You’re still very young. Do you ever feel angry?

The truth is beautiful.

Someone declared the pier unsafe.

It was all so wrong, she said.

Masters of Persia – a heavy metal band that uses the ancient language Persia and sometimes mixes it up and plays ancient Persian instrument in a heavy metal style – of course these guys (the lead singer is a girl, she reminds me of E.) live in exile, outside of Iran. And they’re both angry and religious, religiously angry – they practice Zoroastrianism. I haven’t found a clip.

A giant man is nodding off to sleep in the bus shelter.

He lurches forward and catching himself he pulls himself back up, waves, like a weed rooted in the ocean bed, pulling him back and forth… In the wash of sleep.