(UN)DOUBLE
 

DIRECTOR NOTE Myth-building, to become the “great main character,” shameful, destructive – and familiar: Dostoevsky’s The Double, diagnosing the mythical image of self. Toxic, driven by an ideal of self rather than true self-worth. Failed doubles, going on rampages because society didn’t see them for who they should be. Forced into, in their view, involuntary failure, haunted by their doubles: unachieved success and status they blame on the rise of some external injustice. Egregious and violent, the double pathology Dostoevsky first described in 1846—continuing to rise, hateful and radicalized. What pathology drives someone to create a double? And what happens along that path? Once created, I argue, the double is impossible to achieve—because a complete self can have no double. Only those who don’t crave a double find the fulfillment that others lose themselves trying to attain. I took these questions to a master ACTOR, practitioner and philosopher in the creation of selves, but grounded in the physical. His approach felt like an antidote to being driven by the double. What is the crucial difference? The body—action. Presence through task. Our performance is a meditation in body as a challenge against narrative. Through action with another’s body, self blends into the other. We feel responsible and connected to the greater whole of existence. The presence of being together, responsible, alive, becomes more grounding than the pursuit of any individual narrative. Perhaps we need a disclaimer: we don’t support the views of those radicalized towards their doubles. We see their existence as the result of a pathology, much too increasingly present. This pathology – an image of self-unmet by reality – leads to rejection, frustration, and violence. A pressure on greatness that will never be met. No one should ever be so violent. But unless we wish the impossible - that such violence will never exist again - we must learn about them, identify them, and surround them with listening, and dare I say, connection, before they violently strive for a double forced upon us. DIRECTOR’S NOTE (106) Theater Is Body Nome Cognome (107)