THE PATH OF ASHES
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What the Dreiske ensemble is striving for is no less than a complete severence from all we have ever learned of the 17th-century play called King Lear, and a unilateral reconsideration of the universal themes contained therein, in order to render its material meaningful outside of its superficial cultural limitations. Since its inception in 1975, the Dreiske Performance Company has made its goal the creation of a hybrid theatrical form called by its artistic director, Nicole Dreiske (addressing the Colloquium of Theatre and Life Sciences at the University of Paris in 1984), “symphonic-kinetic theater,” whose object is “to challenge the predictable patterns of the dramatic form by using theme and image rather than narrative as the foundation of the drama,” and by making performance, rather than text, “the aggregation point of multidisciplinary cultural resources such as sociology, anthropology psychology, mythology . . . incorporating them into the actor’s material during play development.” Hence the journey into xenotropic isolation, pursuant to a redefinition of personal freedom, paralleling Lear’s search for spiritual freedom through divestment of power.
This is a pretty heavy theory to carry into an inferno of salt and sand (and the arduousness of the Dreiske Company’s ordeal cannot be emphasized enough–even in the American southwest, people have perished from exposure less than a mile from civilization). The distillation of this sojourn is recognizable as the Bard of Avon’s Lear only by its cast of two nomads, played by Nicholas Peneff and Dreiske herself, who resemble Lear and his Fool in bodily proportion to one another, but here represent a band of several travelers. They have survived a cataclysm that has shattered their tribal structure and now wander in the wilderness searching for a new leader. By the time they finally succeed in reestablishing a settlement, their cultural identity has become so altered by intermingling with that of others that when an elder recalls the old ways, they no longer understand his words. With the old man’s return to the regions outside the tribal settlement, the members must decide whether to remain or to go with him. What is a leader, the story asks, and what constitutes a leader whom we are willing to follow?
