ABSTRACT
Human life spans a relatively short and unpredictable arc of time, and the nagging question of how to handle the day-to-day encounters and trials can be challenging. In order for the theatre to set up the circumstances for an audience to experience vertical time, theatre-makers themselves must consistently undergo training in embodied time. Art creates the experience of vertical time for the perceiver by plunging a stake or dropping an anchor into the endless flow of time, thereby creating a sense of eternity in the human body. The theatre too has the capacity to generate moments of eternity by creating the conditions for an audience’s experience of vertical time. The theatre shares with music the languages of time via tempo, duration or rhythm but also traffics in the semantics of space, encompassing architecture, shape or spatial relationship. Sensitivity to time increases when anxiety decreases.
