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| This was during my last rehearsal in November 2011 (Gustavo Thomas. 2011) |
Blogs, I know, no longer are, in the hyper fast and ephemeral world of internet, the only way of personal contact between the author and his readers, but in my case they may be the only way to stay a little longer in the reader's memory (digital memory) than is achieved with an update on my professional facebook page or the seconds following the publication of 140 words in my twitter. My theatre blog here on Blogger remains a recurring place for those who want information about me, my work and my dreams themselves as creator and as a person. In that sense I now use it after so long an absence.
For several months I've been away from my professional life as a theater watcher and narrator, as a writer and practitioner on the scene, and that's been due to the "overwhelming" need to stay almost motionless and due to being engulfed an altered state of my mind with powerful pain medication that would not let my head function normally and coherently.
In early January 2012, after two months of clinical tests and an annoying illness, I had to undergo neck surgery to get rid of two huge blood clots that had become completely infected all around. The cause? A Butoh exercise performed with extreme depth and concentration (in excess), coupled with a lack of medical care; the specialist's confusion led him to delay longer than he should have in trying to discover the cause (and possible consequences) of the lumps in my neck, without realizing the dangerous infection that developed unhindered by medication for almost a full month. The surgery, an emergency one, fast and simple, was quite successful, but recovery has been long and painful. The healing of the wound, which in English is called "packing", consists of keeping the wound open until it heals "itself" helped only by daily changes of dressings that fill the gaps to try to maintain the skin moistured and prevent the closing of the wound too soon leaving gaps that may cause other abscesses in the future.
Two months have passed so far and I can barely see the beginning of the end of the healing process; although it hasn't closed completely, the wound is already healed by some 90% and I hope that in about two weeks it will have healed fully.
This unfortunate event interrupted a very interesting part of my creative life because I was immersing myself in the creation of my first professional Butoh performance; after nearly two years of study and practice I was at the right time to start. Also, the very long process of publishing the book of the Acting Method by Gonzalez Caballero had to come to a stop (I'm at the end of 25 years of work with this book), as well as my current analyses on my theatre and acting techniques blog that follow from the work of the four authors proponents of this method of acting: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Pirandello. That which I was able to continue was my practice of painting and drawing in digital format, and thanks to the altered states of my mind caused by medicine and pain, the writing of poetry.
I restart my professional work slowly and with new energy, without fear of cliché, I promote in me the idea of a renaissance: and I am clearly walking in the other "half of the road of life", outside of that dark and ominous forest in which I fell for many moments of uncertainty and pain.
Thanks for following and staying close.
Gustavo Thomas
Toronto, Canada
March, 2012.
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