Background
Welcome to this inaugural event to mark and celebrate the appointment of Nicolás Núñez as Visiting Research Fellow in Drama. I am delighted that Nicolás is able to
with us for these few days; as many of you know, today and tomorrow Nicolás is running a psycho-physical training workshop in Milton – literally ‘running’ – as some of us know to our cost!
The title of Visiting Research Fellow is given to mark a special relationship between the University and a scholar or practitioner of significant standing within their field.
Tonight I’m going to talk a little bit about Nicolás in both those regards - as scholar and practitioner. Nicolás Núñez is a leading practitioner with 35 years experience in fields that are today growing in importance – new books and journals signal the increasing attention being given to performance training, psychophysical practice, performance and spirituality, and performance and consciousness - areas of enquiry in which
Nicolás has long been expert.
The significance of Nicolás’s work has been well recognized by leaders in the field for many years. Grotowski acknowledged:
I have the assurance of Nicolas Nunez’s special capacities in Theatre and in the Rite Research field. In speaking of those practitioners who continue out of the Grotowski legacy, Richard
Schechner lists the work of Nicolás Núñez and his long-term collaborator, Helena Guardia, alongside Odin Teatret, Theatre of the Eighth Day, New World Performance Laboratory, and Gardzienice. Very good company. In personal correspondence with me last week, Professor Schechner wrote: Nicolás Núñez and Helena Guardia are stalwart performance pioneers bringing together the very new and the very old. Their work in the Grotowski tradition is fused with their enduring research and artistic work.
This work has taken them deep into Nahuatl theatre and ritual, dance and music. Nicolás's book, Anthropocosmic Theatre is a fine example of his deep thought. Both Nicolás and Helena continue their decades-long active researches which take the form of intense workshops, theatrical productions, and writing.
And Nicolás also has the validating support of those safeguarding the traditions – of Nahuatl culture, and the other cultures into which Nicolás has been initiated and from whence he draws a deep and pan-cultural practical knowledge. Octavio Paz said of
the work: The efforts of Nicolás Núñez and his theatre group have a special interest which I would dare to call essential: ediscovering the inspiration and the logic of ancient rituals.
Theatre is literature and spectacle, play and catharsis, but it is also an initiation ceremony. Núñez and his colleagues have striven to re-introduce the sacred dimension in to theatre.
And Antonio Velasco Pina, an important writer and commentator on Mexican culture has written: ...this type of theatre consists basically of a process of research, an attempt to open up powerful trends which, coming from the distant past, can become the renewing strength which begins in our era a real theatrical
renaissance.
For his dynamic ‘Citlalmina’ which is created from a Mexican Conchero dance and a Tibetan monastic dance, Nicolás received the blessings and permissions of both the Conchero authorities and his Holiness the Dalai Lama who recognised the dynamic
as a ‘tool for mental training’. On the side of science, this very same dynamic has been validated by the NASA Biosphere II project.
Accounts of Nicolás’s practice have been published in TDR and in Performance Research, and his first book, Anthropocosmic Theatre has sold more than 10,000 copies in the original Spanish alone. In his second book, Teatro de Alto Riesgo, Fernando de Ita noted that Nicolas was “the only Mexican director to have a
theoretical text published in English”. And this week, I heard from Prof. Phillip Zarrilli that he will be including Nicolas’s work in a book chapter he is currently writing on performance and consciousness. Significant evidence of the seriousness with which
his work is regarded. The University of Huddersfield has long benefited from access to Nicolás’s practice. From as early as 1996, he began to visit, bringing workshops such as: ‘Theatre as a Personal Rite,’ ‘Theatre & Transformation,’ and ‘Efficient Acting = Control of the Mind’. In 1999, we brought the production, ‘Cura des Espantos’ to the woodlands at Storthes Hall, then a campus of the University.
In 2000, I co-ordinated the participation of a group of British practitioners (including some in this room tonight) in a special workshop culminating in The Flight of Quetzalcoatl at the pyramid site, Teotihuacan, outside Mexico City. In 2006, I joined the Taller for part of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in
Northern Spain, and a year later assisted with some of the later rehearsals for the ensuing production, Caceria des Estrellas.
Last year, I assisted Nicolás as he made presentations about the work of the Taller at New York University, at the invitation of Professor Schechner; and as part of the programme of events marking the Year of Grotowski I was also able to represent
him at the British Grotowski Project conference in Kent, where, as in New York, the conveners recognised Nicolás as an important part of the Grotowski diaspora. My paper there was entitled ‘From Poland to Huddersfield, via Mexico’. Thanks to Nicolás’s work here, the University of Huddersfield is noted as a place in which the lineage of Grotowski has continued to live and breathe.
Naturally, Nicolás is not able to visit us as often as I would like, but when he is not here, we continue to practise two of his dynamics, Citlalmina and Olmeca. That work is kept alive by the stalwart efforts of two of my PhD students, Karoliina Sandstrom
and Eilon Morris.
Today:
Why now? Why today? Never mind the burgeoning interest in the field which I mentioned earlier - why is it important to support Nicolás’s work and to put him in touch with new generations of students? In all generations there are those in what Nicolas would call a state of emergency or urgency, those who seek a state of being or perception or consciousness which is other than the daily and the mundane.
Those who intuit that their art comes from a deep source, the path to which they must be shown. Perhaps the deep self is like a deer in the forest, and if we would see her, we must learn how to make the approach. Mainly, we have forgotten how to approach. We have even forgotten that there is a deer. We have even forgotten that there is a forest.
And Nicolás’s work is also for those who feel the disconnect, an inner exile from being; who desire wholeness and depth. Contemporary education, even in the Arts, has become increasingly technological, mechanistic, materialistic, rational. We must teach only what we can assess, we must assess only what we can measure. Meanwhile, the immeasurables of art – and of life - elude us.
Opening his book on the importance of Contemplative Practices in Education, Arthur Zajonc (Amherst Professor of Physics) quotes Henry David Thoreau, We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake... The millions are awake enough for physical labour; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or
a divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? Nicolás’s psycho-physical training represents an invitation to a holistic awakening; the body is deconditioned, energies stirred and grown, full awareness and deep concentration developed. Learning to drop the filters and veils of our conceptual
chatter, we have a chance to experience the dilated consciousness of what Thomas Merton called ‘the Silent Self’. Zajonc tells us that to reawaken ourselves as Thoreau
exhorts us to do, we need to give birth to the silent self in the midst of our conventional life of duty and desire. Nicolás is willing to push people, even (as some in this room know) to push us from
a height into deep water in order to give the kind of shock to the system that we need to awaken us – to really awaken us.
Franc Chamberlain, who has written about his encounters with Nicolás in the book, Sacred Theatre, says: Occasionally we meet people whose work is able to shift our perceptions, not only of theatre but of ourselves and the world we live in, Nicolás Núñez, is one such person. His work channels a compassionate intensity both in workshop and performance situations and we need to be ready to put aside our neuroses to make the journey -- the work is not for the faint-hearted. Nicolás - gently, mischievously, with an exquisite sense of serious play - creates the friction which allows us to ‘cook’ ourselves. ‘We are playing a game’, he often tells
us, ‘but it could be true!’ Nicolás is a master of Stanislavski’s ‘as if’ restored to all its profundity (the profundity known by children, practised by Tricksters). As Francisco Lerdo de Tejada has described it, Nicolás’s work consists of 'an atmosphere of camaraderie, simplicity, generosity and humbleness, whose aim is
the expansion of our being'. The dynamics have a unique flavour, characteristic of both Nicolás’s apprenticeship with Grotowski and the deep engagement with his own Mexican culture that Grotowski inspired him towards. Nicolás has talked about the work being a meditation-in-movement for the nervous animal which is the actor, who needs to move and awaken the body, make strong connections between the visualising mind and the realizing body, between the emotional interior and the expressive exterior,
between the deep - the Silent - self and the social self.
I am very pleased that as Visiting Research Fellow in Drama, Nicolás Núñez can bring to staff, postgraduates and undergraduates, the tools and experiences with which to look deeply, to experience beyond the conditioned self, to make an inner inquiry that balances and supports outer inquiry, that has the potential to provide the education that we perhaps need most of all - how to awaken in a world that wants to
send us to sleep?
For for details regarding the THEATRE AS A PERSONAL RITE WORKSHOP, JULY 2016:
http://espaciokuu.weebly.com/apan-july-2016.html