#8 Relate Theater to LIFE!

Theater, as all other art forms, defines a part of what it means to be human. Although I may not understand the lives of other animals, I still tend to assume that the difference between living as a human and living as an animal is rather large. Even though both do basic things for survival while striving to raise the next generation, where some animals may even perform better than humans, what makes humanity unique is some ritual that is performed by none but humans—art, which is the real representation of a large sum of the human wisdom.

Once having carefully mused over this matter, one may find that much more dynamicity and complexity are added to life as a result of the existence of art. Art has existed since the day the humans had the urge to improve their lives and have “lifestyles” because “style” is essentially an artistic concept that demands aesthetic judgments and creativity. People live in houses of different styles but not uniform caves; people wear different styles of clothing, eat different styles of food, have different styles of recreational activity…etc. Human nature has an artistic tone as well—people have different styles of personality and prefer different styles of behavior. The drive of humans to want to be unique and different entails style, which in turn entails art.

Therefore, the previous establishment makes it clear that art is really a part of the fundamental building blocks of human nature, deeply embedded in how things operate within our society—people simply have been too accustomed to this and take art for granted. They do not notice art until it is put into more explicit and sensible forms—such as visual art renderings, sculptures, music and of course, theater performances. However, what happens next is rather ironic—people acknowledge theater as art, and embrace the artistic experience when (and perhaps only when) they attend a theatrical event, and they forget that theater really originated from their lives to begin with! Most people view life as rather spontaneous and theater as entirely fabricated and contrived.

However, I must be careful to avoid overgeneralizations, and perhaps people do acknowledge the cousin relationship between theater and life. This may appear in sayings such as, “today was a dramatic day” or “she is overacting a bit.” This kind of acknowledgement makes appearance in language habits, but perhaps people do not quite stop to think about the relevance of theater to life (until they take this class, presumably). Therefore, at this point, I would like to reflect upon the dramatic structure and how people operate themselves in daily lives.

People, like the protagonists in a play, should be goal driven at all time. This goal can be a super-objective for any given periods of time—by the minute, hour, day, week, month, year, lifetime, many lifetimes…etc. For example, today I am driven by the lifetime goal of staying alive for as long as possible and as healthy as possible; therefore, I decide to go out for a jog in the morning (we do not really care at this point about the logical entailment of jogging to health). So now I am driven by another objective—go out and run. In order to do this, I must have the proper running clothes on, which means that now changing my clothes is a more immediate objective, which, in order to achieve, I must first get my butt off of this chair…

This is basically a dramatic structure. In a really well written play, the achieving of seemingly simple objectives are often challenged and inhibited by the actions of an antagonist, or plain bad luck from nature. The protagonist, the hero, then must overcome the obstacles, which only seemingly get worse and elevate tension. Eventually all may be solved and returned to a natural state, or it may not. Likewise, in life, we are the heroes. My objective of going for a jog may run smoothly, which is in turn deemed “not dramatic,” but worse yet is if I did not have an objective at all and remain in my chair for the running time of the show (my lifetime!? Scary thoughts!)

In a play, if the characters have no objective, the audience will fall asleep—they want what the hero/heroin wants. Contrarily, if my jogging plan was delayed by an unexpected phone call, which I hurriedly answered and put off, then I felt too hungry, so I want to grab food but is met with the dilemma of running unhealthily after eating, so I go out without eating but is then met with natural disaster—a tornado blows me away… many hours later, I return home with all the exercise that I ever wanted, and exclaim, “what a dramatic day!”

…So it turns out that drama is more so part of our lives than we realize, and it does not even have to relate to whether what we do is exciting—anything can be dramatic! It is only imperative that we stare at the world, at the people going about their daily choirs, at ourselves, and at the motivations of all the behaviors with a dramatic eye-glass, and it is precisely our ability to do so that sets us apart from any other species on this planet.