Acting Out The Wound

Dr. Lou Montgomery

      Truthful acting out oftentimes demands concrete embodiment of that which we find most abject, embarrassing, or terrifying. It can consist of a direct confrontation with shadow sides of ourselves we would rather forget-- like dirty underwear buried at the back of the closet. Engaging the wound—both private and cultural-- requires courage, humility, ruthless honesty, and humor. And oftentimes the entry point is through the body itself—its pains, secrets, and humiliations.  But like the mythic treasure that lies in the depths of the dragon’s lair, pure gold emerges from digging in the dirt. It has been my experience that after taking on the most taboo subjects and embodying the most repulsive characters, I have felt as liberated as a convict let out of a dungeon squinting into the light of day. The heart is filled with possibility. I travel easier with a lighter step. And from my work with hundreds of students I can testify that this liberation is as available to the practitioner of  imaginative enactment as to the professional actor.

      I am remembering, for instance, a group enactment of a woman’s dream in which she was in a bath tub with huge turds floating past. The woman wanted to dismiss the imagery as insignificant,  but because it was such a rich metaphor for our collective shadow,  we as a group were drawn into the action of the dream. In rapid  role reversals with the two “turds”, first her own and then her son’s, in which the dreamer posited questions in one role and answered them in the other, she successively accused herself, defended herself, confessed, “ate shit”, came clean, broke down, and ultimately and cathartically  broke through into numinous insight about her guilt ridden role as mother to her son and betraying friend to herself.  By eating and digesting her “shit” she became the pharmakos healer, articulating the numinous trapped with the fecal shadow matter. The important point here is that she did not turn her shit into something else or flush it away, which were of course her first impulses. Rather, by engaging the wound on its own terms, she discovered WITHIN  its very matter and essence profound illumination.  The turds of her life were exalted, given their crowning dignity, Like the lotus whose roots are buried in fecundity, she not longer needed to minimize or reject her smelly rich troubles. I could give countless examples from other group dream enactments wherein rejected horrifying characters such as biting spiders or Hells Angel bar room bouncers, which represented physical injuries or shameful memories, transformed into fierce protective allies through simply allowing them voice and expression.  In all my group work, I am keen to follow the scent of the rejected and disowned. So often, the more repulsive the presenting image the more potential for alchemical transformation.

       Taking the perspective again that freedom and healing require attentiveness and respect for ALL parts of ourselves we can inquire: What do our wounds ask of us? The wounds of body and soul often ask to be witnessed, tended, and artistically rendered. The creative call sometimes literally invades the body. Wounds call out to us, wanting to be heard and remembered. Our maladies and malaise have speech. They ask us to go back to our origins, sometimes to sink into our depths. All of my performance work orbits around  particular  personal and cultural wounds that the various pieces serve as mouthpiece for.

     For instance, when I was writing and performing Kali’s Follies  I was attentive to the idea that the body of earth and the body of woman have been similarly exploited, colonized, devalued, marginalized and wounded. My body’s history was somehow synchronous with all women’s history and Gaia’s history fully remembered. For as bodies we have been similarly marked, coded, and made text. This text asks to be interpreted, read aloud, projected out from the body.  It is precisely the wound, however, that can serve as opening, psychopomp. pharmakos, and creative daemon.  The body’s marks, scars, holes, pains, traumas, and memories carry our narratives, myths, longing, gestures in the world, and potent images. Through language body and narrative become a seamless whole gesture and thus derives its fictive power.  Cultural sickness can be displayed through the metaphor of the body. And since mass culture tends to often hold onto and define itself by the wound, for instance the way much of the U.S. has viewed itself as “victim of terror”  post 9-11, letting the wound speak defuses its unconscious grip on the psyche.  ( Imagine, for instance, where we would be now in the “War on Terror,” if we as a nation could have allowed the voice of the disenfranchised and subjugated Other, whether it sounded from our own Native American reservations, the victims of U.S. funded Central American death squads, or thousands of landless farmers throughout the Third World who have fallen through the cracks of our free trade agreements, to penetrate our sanctimonious, entitled, and nationalistically toughened psyches.  Instead, by refusing to look or listen to the Other, flagrant hubris and the lack of compassion and humility has racked up torture scandals, Minutemen vigilantes patrolling our borders, enormous loss of privacy, and a further concretization of our role as the global bully on the block. The more we refuse the wound a voice, the more explosive its volcanic outcry as our vulnerability only increases.)

      In my experience of acting out, metaphors that arise as primal bodily wounds are intentionally probed, palpated, and opened. They find a voice and tell their story. As the producer of metaphor and body image, the body gives itself back to itself as it gives itself to the other. The inner and outer worlds are connected. The body takes wild experiences, explosive emotions, and traumatic memories and tames and shapes them into images that can be perceived, apprehended, and received by the others as audience.

      During the writing of Kali’s Follies , when I was in the depths of my subterranean descent into the wound of cultural and personally introjected misogyny, a particularly terrifying hell realm indeed, I allowed my pathology to speak.  Being painfully aware of the often bitter contempt felt for the feminine nature of this body—its curves, fullness, swellings, wetness, and softness, especially under the scrutinizing but seemingly relentless male gaze. I wrote the following:

     This body perceives itself as the reflected image of the desires of others, as an entity to be controlled, made smaller, and disciplined, as the object of self-imposed will power. It is a body that has not been inhabited  but one that feels alien and monstrous.  These abject feelings have become exaggerated as the body ages. It is coming apart, deteriorating. It is in flight, rebellious. It has taken leave of its senses. This is body silenced, mute, and turned in on itself.

    Often this woman’s body feels entrapped, decorated, fragmented, existing for the pleasure of man and not its own. It is dislocated, seemingly deformed, at the very least, an unwieldy nuisance. Often this body is ashamed and self-concealing. This body has been self-loathing and terrified of its insatiable appetites. It seems weighted down, ready to erupt, excessive, messy. It is hungry, ravenous even, but its cravings are seen as dirty and defiled. It is vulnerable to attack. This body has tried to kill off its desires and hungers. It is disowned. It is orphaned. It inner dictator is male. The public space this body is allowed to take up has been whittled down and circumscribed.This body is screaming in protest, but often feels gagged and chained. It is a site of struggle, a war, a stalemate. It is Other. It has been labeled vampire, castrator, killer, devourer, witch. hag, biting, tearing, swallowing, and murderous. Any beauty this body feels is not intrinsic, but a normalizing discipline. It has been ruled from the outside. It is surrounded by images it can never measure up to. It is lacking, missing something. It is detached, disconnected. There has been no one home inside its house. It is numb and frozen. It is a prison. It is holding itself hostage. It is in the direct grip of culture. This body must take to the stag, fill up space, voice its protest, admit its folly, and depose the petty tyrants. It must write and act its way out of the wound. It must die in order to live.

      Six years  have passed since I wrote the above passage. Looking back, I can see that the permission I gave myself in expressing the depth and extent of the wound, is what gave rise to the humorous metaphors and characters that allowed my strident message to be not only palatable but entertaining. Now, having fully dramatized the misogynistic wound, I feel  not only younger but infinitely more whole and joyous.  There are traces of these sentiments but they are not taking up residence as somatic expression.  How would it be different, I ask myself, if I had not allowed myself to express and thus exorcise such abjectness? Would I  be harboring more bitterness within a wizened and brittle psyche?  For indeed our untended unvoiced wounds tend to have a desiccating effect.

      Acting out this theatrical journey through historic, psychological, and biological time and space served as a reclamation project of colonized psyche, a retrieval of soul.  By embodying and not just speaking text, in public space/time travel on stage, I moved in, back and down through layers of psyche. Crevasses were traversed, frozen zones of flesh and emotion were thawed and melted, occupied body territories held hostage by imprisoning cultural introjects were liberated, uncharted regions were explored, some for the first time, sensuality was ignited, and ancient mysteries of blood and animal instinctual passion were unearthed and recovered.  The body of self and audience witnessed the body’s circuitous labyrinth journey winding its way back to psyche’s center, turning on its axis, and threading its way out again. 

     Through enactment of the wound, the body becomes a palpable and tangible alchemical vessel as it is presented on stage. The archetypal operations of psyche are visible in their constellations.  Complexes are intentionally activated, even exaggerated, so that they might clearly dramatize the tensions and oppositions inherent at the core. The body as alchemical retort is stretched and transparent . The audience can see through the keyhole of psyche and hear its confession. Narrative, emotion, and sense images are publicly cooked, moistened, separated, washed clean. The wound as site of pollution and mortificatio is purified and purged.  In my performance of Escaping the Matrix , after comic scenes in which  onion like, layers of confusion and egoic mis –identification are peeled away, I literally enact physical dissolution into transparency as the audience and I  become “Nobody or No Body.”

      Our wounds serve as gateways and openings to the numinous.  As actor/pharmakos I offer myself, my sensitivities and my ability to suffer pain as a sacrifice. I carry and metabolize the pathology of others. I make a conscious journey to the site of the wound, since its location and metabolizing is also its healing; and in so doing, the unexpected leaps forth. Two examples of unexpected characters and scenes springing forth full blown  whilst  engaging a wound come to mind. Firstly, while creating Family Baggage and exploring the depths and symptomatic ramifications of my own codependency, I finally unearthed the extent of my addiction to control one day while riding in a ski lift. What spontaneously and immediately emerged was a very funny scene called “The Thrill of Control ” in which a hyper-crazed control-driven female executive’s day is treated like an Olympic sporting event replete with sportscaster commentary, crowd reaction, instant replay and scoring.  The manic CEO gets points for flossing at stop lights, exercising while dictating to her child in daycare, and juggling multiple power lunch affairs while calorie counting. Her increasingly Chaplinesque inauthentic  manipulations and compulsive maneuvers  score her a perfect 10! 

     By way of a second example, last year during an emotional release workshop, a very surprising  comic scene literally jumped onto the page after visiting the site of a tormenting wound.  In this case, the wound consisted of an abject numbing emptiness as I confronted the extent to which  I had over the years vacated my body and had been totally “checked out.”  The degree to which “ the lights had been on with nobody home” was so absurdly painful that it demanded comic relief.  The scene, one of the most popular in my latest play Escaping the Matrix , is a word play farce somewhat akin to the old BBC comedy series Faulty Towers or the well known “Who’s on First?” parody. As a dinghy aristocratic lady spars with a hotel desk clerk who is trying to “check her in”, in a dizzying feat of ridiculous circular logic, she remains stubbornly “checked out.”  Indeed, as she defiantly scolds the clerk: “This could be a case of mistaken identity. You could be mistaking me for someone who checked out already, or is beside myself, or risen above myself, or is shadowing behind myself, or got split off and sidetracked, or is running along beside myself. There are infinite possibilities…I have yet to arrive at myself and don’t intend to start now!!” The scene strikes a particular cord and triggers such a degree of laughter, I think, because it lampoons all the ways we use distraction and business to medicate our existential aloneness.  In both examples, to publicly  display such an unconscious cartoon like obsession with control or self evacuation is for the audience both a mirrored revelation and hefty relief. “ Whew!” I imagine them thinking, “ Thank goodness it’s her up there making an ass of herself and not me! “  It is without a doubt  artistically satisfying to comically nail  embarrassing behavior and hold up a potent mirror. And yet, in the admission and willingness to embody such a degree of unconsciousness,  there is also the lingering sense of having made a public sacrifice and of having carried something huge, even if its hugely absurd, in terms of the collective psyche. 

       To illustrate how enactment of the wound can be transformative in an experiential group setting, I am reminded of a sociodrama I once participated in that illustrates the multi-faceted contexts our bodies carry. The thematic idea for the group improvisation was that of a woman “bird” imprisoned in a “gilded cage.”  The gilded cage represented any and every way a woman might find herself imprisoned or colonized by cultural expectations, family of origin messages, misogynist internalized beliefs, social and political oppression, emotional shackles, etc. Each actor/player spoke from and embodied all the roles; the voice of the confining cage, the confined one, the “free” one outside the cage, as well as the voice of various oppressors. The improvisation was a fantastic concretization of a woman’s, or for that matter anyone who has experienced being marginalized.  It was the world in miniature; it’s oppressive and liberating forces were all activated in action.

     The sociodrama took a quantum leap, however, when players began to spontaneously embody the voices of the ancestors—the mothers and grandmothers back through the centuries and millennia. Then again, spontaneously, the unborn children yet to come found their way onto the stage and into the drama. What was created, concretized, shared experientially and internalized was the theme en situ within a vast continuous time-line linking the bodies of the ancestors, the women today, and the sons and daughters yet to come. That wonderfully moving experience inspired much of the writing of Kali’s Follies as an expression of body narrative stretched across time and linked to the bodies of all women.   Embodiment means we are part of a larger community and share our incarnation. We are bodies moving in the body of earth that moves amongst larger heavenly bodies.

      The body is not only located in both physical and imaginal space but as performer or player generates an intersubjective field of experience. Wounds generate images that have “immediate powers of their own” to quote Gaston Bachelard. As we submerge ourselves in the poetics of wounds, we traverse interior landscapes as well as open up to the world at large, experiencing “leaky margins.”  The wounds of our bodies and souls invoke and invite the whole universe; they serve as a hallway for myriad invisible presences. 

     As I wander inside the wilds of my own bodily imaginations and travel out to the edges of psyche, many personae, places, and daemons present themselves. Thus, the many characters and dramatic spatial metaphors enacted in Kali’s Follies ( for instance, I  embody such spaces as cave, ocean, battle-field, tower, car body, coffin, werewolf body, hanging body) have all basically emerged from out of my wound as flow, as blood, Indeed, the lysis of the performance is the moment when I enact my blood being turned to gold—a visionary state I unexpectedly experienced in my body. The deep wound, the woman wound, is transformed and inscribed into the larger story of our culture’s time, This initiation, now publically shared, is inaugurated through the wound that has had to open in a new way into a fresh transcendent place. My identity is not complete until I have told my story, spoken right out of the wound, and thus become fully and authentically embodied. By moving onto the cultural stage, it takes the form of communion amongst ensouled bodies.