Kintsugi is the Japanese art of restoring broken objects with gold dust. By highlighting its scars and making the fragility of the material and its history evident, the artist makes the object resurface with a beauty that is even more valued than originality. "Only dew is the world, dew and yet" ...haiku by Kobayashi Issa, Japanese poet (1763-1827) A moving poem, written by Issa at the death of his only remaining young son, in the final verse the poet emphasizes that despite the pain he has been worth it. "World of dew" is an expression that alludes to this transitory life.
The false myth of the Gulf of Alaska ran online, where two seas, the North Pacific and the Bering Sea, collided head-on without mixing. This halocline -natural barrier- occurs by two bodies of water of colossal proportions fighting against each other. The unusual phenomenon is caused by eddies - whirlpools - hundreds of kilometers in diameter that often carry huge amounts of sediment that color and cloud the water. This dynamic of fluids dragged by the two seas due to temperature or salinity draws that impressive strip, appreciated as two different liquids, whose waters will homogenize and mix naturally over time. Life and our brain are those two seas, whose waters sometimes carry cloudy sediments, causing a barrier between them. There are also people who due to their genetics, the place where she was born, the things she lived and the treatment they had with her, have a neuronal broth with too heavy sediments that do not allow her to mix with society.
The Autobiographical Theater takes that soup and turns it into fiction. If we take Heuristics -find and invent- the art of designing better futures, with the human ability of creativity -in this case artistic- to seek solution strategies that allow solving problems, conflicts or disadvantageous situations. We add Ethnography -cultural anthropology- of the identity and lifestyles of peoples, based on observing and recording cultural practices and social behaviors. We integrate the autonomic consciousness -ability to anticipate and prepare for future contingencies-. And we add our personal ingredients, autobiographical memory -our personal history- composed of episodic memory -our personal events- semantic memory -the details and narrative of the events- and procedural memory -knowing how to do things-. with a pinch of; Oxytocin -trust and love- Dopamine - pleasure and empathy- Serotonin - well-being, happiness and self-esteem- endorphins -reduce pain and increase pleasure-. And we add a touch of social cognition - understanding social relationships - we will have the ideal soup of the autobiographical theater. The personal and community, the private and the intimate, the individual and the collective go hand in hand. Ethics, relationships, abuses, conflicts, hope, solidarity, everything goes hand in hand in autobiographical stories. Traces of the past are resignified on stage. We have added two essential ingredients to our scenic soup for our collective, Autopathographic Theater - it relates the development of one's life from the point of view of the illnesses suffered - and Autoethnographic Theater - living with the disease of others - since the cast is made up of users, and the staff who work for them.
In the audience attending the Autobiographical Theater, in addition to all that neural soup, embodied cognition is added, which is the relationship between cognition and the body relating to the environment where it is immersed. The theater not only affects us by what we see but also by what happens around us, if someone in the audience cries or laughs, we replicate the emotion through the mirror neurons. When we see an artistic spectacle in a group, we interconnect as a tribe, shared intentionality is activated -ability to cooperate with strangers- cultural intelligence -unite our minds to perform tasks and think about what to do- the "ToM" theory of mind -understand and reason on the beliefs of others to plan a common goal.
Art is perception and action, imbued in a socio-cultural context, involving emotion and cognition, leading to sensorimotor involvement. In short, a person perceives and acts at the same time when enjoying a fictional story. When we are faced with artistic production, our brain translates what it feels, gives shape and meaning to the information that comes to us -understands to assimilate-, and starts first from an emotion. The more the immersion, the deeper it will be located in our brain. That is why theater is the empathy we need to achieve changes in social neuroplasticity. Autobiographical performance is located at the intersection between aesthetic, embodied and intersubjective processes. In a network of relationships -co-authorship, co-creation, social cohesion, intracommunity- between performer and spectators. Therefore, by attending an autobiographical representation as a public you become at the same time a witness, by knowing the facts that are narrated. This particularity activates the processes of understanding and the mechanisms of connection between the performing experience of the performer and the experience of the viewer with possibilities of new meanings for both. Our bio, our identity, experiences, knowledge about the world, learned skills and our ability to imagine the future are mixed in the neural broth of subjectivity to undertake the day-to-day. Memory, imagination and fantasy are exchanged roles, sentences are removed, texts are invented, some parts are overreacted, others take away truth and value. And all this happens while we spend the day doing our things. Only some people also add their personal touch to the broth that enhances its flavor: learned helplessness, seasoned vices, harmful life habits, condensed traumas, unfortunate decisions, loneliness, marginalization, stigma, vulnerability, exclusion ... All that and more, they travel at the orbital speed of the electron in the memory atom by the correlates of consciousness and perception. Current flows between neurons and brain regions that build a personality that reacts with disparate emotions and behaviors to the issues of reality. And it is that our brain cosmology is a cluster of story particles - we are made of them - with their own gravitational mass that attract us, without being able to avoid reliving them in our psyche. We can see that particular and collective imaginary in any event, in daily chores, in that diversity of human tessellation, in that historical memory, in anthropogenic climate change, in those mistakes made anew by the person, the community and the states.
It appears reflected in geopolitics, industry, education and in the social. We live in a quantum entanglement between autonoethic consciousness, autobiographical memory, and society, where the power to create images and self-images made us human. Abstraction is the virtue of consciousness that gives volume to the mental frieze. The metaphor as an opportunity for resilience. Art has travelled with us since archaic cave times, there is no culture or religion without images, and an image is art. And the theater makes it three-dimensional, something that can be modeled - apprehending life.
The first was to use magical symbolism was because he needed representation to understand or face reality.
The autobiographical theatre starts from that premise, as a palimpsest writes again on top of the traces of the past, without erasing them. Metaphorize the memory that hurts to distance suffering and achieve inner calm. Take the past events in the reinterpretation of them in the present to project ourselves into the future. Fictional scenarios where to spread the quantum soup of memory.
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