Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2008 - 9

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we were there first by Beeb Salzer
Sometimes a book is eye opening. The best books are. They
are the books we tell our wives about as we read so that they
have no need to read the book themselves. Lately I have inflicted my wife with many ideas I found in Jonah Lehrer's
Proust Was a Neuroscientist.
Lehrer's thesis is that some famous artists intuitively understood things about our minds and bodies before scientists
did. His list includes Walt Whitman's prescience about the
brain and the whole body, George Eliot about the changing
brain, Marcel Proust's memory, Paul Cezanne and light, Igor
Stravinsky, sound, Gertrude Stein, understanding language,
and Virginia Woolf about self awareness. I have left off this list
the tasty chapter about Auguste Escoffier who was an artist of
the haut cuisine that still influences what we like to eat. (Before his time, high class and royal food was to look beautiful
and was sculpted with cold fatty goo. UGH.)
Descartes theorized that there was a duality, the body
and mind were separate. Spinoza believed that there was no
separation but Descartes' ideas were widely accepted. So
when Walt Whitman wrote about how our bodies and minds
are one system, his work was controversial. And it didn't help
that his images were sometimes sexual .
The chapter on Whitman shows that in his thinking and
thus in his poetry, he describes how every part of the body is
part of our rational and emotional being. Imagine in 1871 the
poet writing in Leaves of Grass, "I SING the Body electric."
And in the same volume:
Of Physiology from top to toe I sing;
Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for
the muse-I say the Form complete is worthier far;
Whitman knew a back and forth loop exists between
the body and the brain: a fast heartbeat and fear, a gut reaction to a person or situation, a pain that causes depression.
Moreover, emotion and rationality are related so that a person with brain damage and no emotions is also incapable
of making good rational decisions. In theatre, where we
depend on metaphors, the best metaphors involve physical images, a flame, a monster, barbed wire, or silk, all of
which may prompt a bodily reaction. And as actors know
that assuming the posture of a character helps to drive
their interpretation, so too do costume designers know that
sometimes taking the pose of a character helps to understand the person and inform the sketch and costume they
are working on.
Ben Brantley, the New York Times' principal critic
writes about a play he has just seen in London:

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Some plays you feel in your muscles. Though there's
plenty of artfully awkward talk in Harper Regan,
Simon Stephen's arresting new drama at the National
Theatre here, it wasn't the words being spoken that
made me conscious of the tension in my body.
Instead it was the character's angular, embattled
postures, every one of which spoke of discomfort,
frustration, guarded hope, and defensiveness, as
these people tried (and usually failed) to talk to one
another in any meaningful way.
In another review, this time of Fela!, playing in New York,
Brantley says, "...this is music that gets into your bloodstream
setting off vibrations you'll live with for days."
Another of Lehrer's chapters describes how in the middle
of the seventeenth century, scientists led people to think that
everything is measurable and thus the mysteries of human behavior could be understood. This positivism led to the belief
that human brains were formed and then unchanged. No matter then that human freedom was problematic.
Born in 1819, Mary Ann Evans, later Marian Evans, then
Marian Evan Lewes or Mary Ann Cross, and finally taking the
nom de plume, George Eliot, accepted the positivist view but
later came to believe that the brain was flexible. As is often the
case with any of us, an unrequited love made her re-examine
her life. She rejected religion and positivism. She also concluded that if she could change, the brain was not an unchangeable
organ. Her idea accounted, as she saw it, for personal freedom.
Her concept of changeability led her to see that Darwin was
right and that chance in nature played a large part in how living
things evolve as well as how circumstances can alter the brain.
In 1989, a researcher at Rockefeller University, Elizabeth
Gould, while working with rats, discovered that despite all the
past concepts, the injured brains of her rats were healing themselves. Another researcher at Rockefeller, Fernando Nottebohm,
studied bird brains and found that birds in a stimulating environment needed to form new brain cells, creating one percent of new
cells in their brains' song center each day in order to create complicated songs. So now it's understood that neurogenesis, creating new brain cells, was not only possible but was at work, even
in old people who were thought to lose cells rather than create
new ones. I think our best designers exhibit the ability to change,
find new images, and make new neural connections. Certainly, we
attempt to cause the same responses in audiences, to make them
think, reconsider, and make new neuronal connections.
No theatre artist in the book? Not to worry. Harold Bloom,
the famous critic and professor, claims that "Shakespeare invented Freudian Psychology." v

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2008