Tangible Minds™

I decided to apply this technique to theatre. Over the previous three years I had acted in the local community theatre in Whitefish, Montana. Before that I had danced on stage in Philadelphia with two different groups. I enjoyed the challenge of creating a palpable experience for an audience through the vessel of my own body and mind, and saw this technique as a valuable tool by which to intentionally sculpt emotional landscapes upon a stage.

For this application to theatre, I was particularly interested in how these feeling states I was mapping were connected to what I called imagery fields. The images which NLP manipulates through submodalities can be seen to inhabit “fields” occupying apparent space around the body. Anyone can become aware of these fields by paying attention to a mental image, and shifting attention gradually to the space which contains it. These fields can be identified to have its own submodalities – size, shape, density, visual qualities, etc.

An imagery field constrains the type of imagery that can arise within it. For example, if I conjure a feeling of fear by remembering a threatening encounter with a thug, and then notice the space around the mental image of the thug, I can do an experiment. What happens if I place an image of a kitten in that space? It immediately grows large and menacing, and hisses at me. Strange! If I transform the feeling of fear into something calm and secure, and then put that same mental image of a kitten into the imagery field, it does what most kittens do: purrs and looks cute.

It was my experience on stage that deliberately constructing large, potent imagery fields in the space onstage drew an audience compellingly into the experience. One of my most satisfying moments on stage was in The Boys Next Door. I played a mentally ill man living in a halfway house, and in one scene I was in a catatonic state, brought on by a violent encounter with my abusive father. I was unable to move a muscle, yet I constructed a presence on stage that communicated pure, hopeless pain and despair. Several people afterwards told me they found that scene particularly disturbing. I created this by filling the space around me with images of horror.

How this works I cannot say. Some would argue that the imagery fields carry some non-physical kind of energy that all of us are able to perceive. Think of your first impression of some people, how you can immediately get a sense of open delight or creepy control, for example. Or think of the stage presence of true theatrical masters: how does a Zoe Caldwell fill the entire performance space with her presence? I might argue instead that a perfectly adequate explanation could be that we are finely attuned to subtle cues in body language. When I inwardly see a powerful image, off to my right, larger than life, it is likely that you will pick that up, and that without even knowing it you will read the fine cues of my posture, breathing, eye focus, and micro movements of my musculature.

Either way, this is what drew my attention in the first months after discovering this technique. I wanted to explore the possibilities in a place with access to lots of theatre, and so moved from Montana to Seattle, where there was a thriving fringe scene I hoped to become part of.

It took me several months to establish myself in Seattle, to find a suitable apartment and line up enough work to feed myself. (By this time in my life I had a considerable portfolio of work in copywriting and other marketing work, and found it easy to pick up several key clients soon after arriving.) All the while, I began taking classes and digging into the Seattle arts scene, soon finding myself drawn more to the alternative dance community than to theatre.

In early 1995 I began working with a recently retired professional dancer from New York City. She had hung up her slippers and moved back to Seattle with the intention of finding a husband and having a child before it was too late. Ann had danced for Merce Cunningham and other famous choreographers, and had enjoyed a vibrant career. And she was an incredibly sweet, genuine woman. Working with her was a privilege.

Ann’s intention was to keep her hand in dance, just a little, while holding down a 9-to-5 job and looking for Mr. Right. In working with me, she wanted to choreograph and perform a short piece of her own. I was to help her identify and craft an internal source for her dance, one that came more from her soul than her head.

We began by identifying a particular arc of feeling states. She wanted to express a feeling state of power and grace she called “stand-tall.” This was the state she typically brought to the stage in New York. In helping her transition from an external orientation to choreography as scripted movement, to an internal orientation to dance as authentic expression of inner states, I was fascinated to experience the difference between the two. In her normal state, her body control was beautiful but did not move me. Dancing from the inside out was another thing entirely, drawing me exquisitely inward to the space of her expressive body, my own muscles moving in micro harmony with hers as I watched.

In order to create a compelling story for the dance, we sought a counterpoint to the stand-tall state. She identified a feeling of fear which seemed to be its opposite. I believed our task was straightforward: to map both the fear and the stand-tall, create a continuous transition between one and the other, and for Ann to dance the authentic expression of the transformation from one to the other.

Ann experienced “stand tall” as a thin metal bar rotating like a propeller in her belly, as if casting a swath of fog into the back of the performance space behind the audience. Within the fog stood all the people who were important to Ann, and the bar was a motive force, connecting her to those people through her dance. She experienced the fear as a crusty shell around her body, containing and confining her, cracking in one or two places to allow her a glimpse at the world beyond. According to our theory, it should have been a simple matter to transform the crust into the bar and connect the two feeling states in one smooth transitional arc.

But something unexpected intervened in this spare plan. No matter how much she tried, Ann was unable to connect the two states. There was no shared middle ground. When we invited the fear to transform to its ideal state, it became an oceanic body of water filling her torso, an experience of “calm presence.” When the “stand tall” was manipulated to become something unpleasant, it became crumbling ground beneath her feet, a feeling she called “unstable.”

It was impossible to fuse the two. So to create the dance, we assumed we were working with two distinct “parts,” each with its own distressed state, each with its own ideal state. She worked from the beginning, holding both the crusty shell and the crumbling ground images as simultaneous feeling states, and slowly opened both feeling states into the ideal states of “stand tall” and “calm presence.” The result was powerful and compelling.