Free Thought Series: Culture

       Theatre stumbled into my life out of pure happen stance. I was a junior in high school, short an elective and the only options I had available to me was either Intro to Theatre or Pottery 101. My only reference to pottery at the time was the classic scene with Patrick Swayze in the movie Ghost, so (a young naive me) made a hard pass on pottery and decided on Intro to Theatre. I was at first overwhelmed with the idea of being someone else. Taking a character in a play and using dialogue to create goals, obstacles, mannerisms, temperaments, desires, etc. for a person was difficult, but equally fun and rewarding. I've always said, learning how to be an actor simply made me a better human being. If theatre has taught me anything it's human beings love to watch conflict. We love to be taken for an emotional ride. Reading plays from the past can give us insight on popular conflicts of the time. Many conflicts still hold true today which is why so many plays from the past continue to be done. This connection crosses over to other forms of story telling wither it be music, film, or literature. I discovered through my theatrical education the art of story telling is a documentation of culture. Every story ever told once striped down to its barest themes follow similar tropes. Love against hate or good against evil to name a couple and in every age through out history story tellers fill in the gaps of what was viewed as good or evil or whom we should love or hate. We as humans will gravitate towards a story where the conflict resonates with our own behavioral norms, so the more universal popularity of the story, the stronger behavioral correlation of the culture behind the story. One of my favorite well known plays Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams provides an ample amount of clues to what was socially acceptable in the late 1940's (when it was written). This all fits into the school of thought of culture simply being a collective understanding of proper and improper behavior. Collective behavior shifts in large groups are described as sub-cultures. Hippies being a famous sub-culture having a different set of behaviors compared to the goth sub-culture as an example. Having the privilege of living on the west coast and the east coast I've seen a divide in behaviors of those sub-cultures as well. One example that comes to mind is confrontation. East coasters have no problem with confrontation, categorizing confrontation as a non condemned behavior. While west coasters tend to avoid confrontation and view others as assholes for being confrontational, categorizing confrontation as a condemned behavior. I will state in any culture there will be outliers, but have enough outliers it morphs into a sub-culture, and to grow beyond sub-culture is to change a behavioral perception of culture itself. Many polarizing issues today seem to revolve around behavior of one group being deemed unacceptable by our current culture and we see the battle to shift perceptions of behavior from improper to proper. Why I started this blog in the first place was because I became increasing aware of how toxic the methods of trying to shift perceptions of certain behaviors has become and how this toxicity is having a negative effect on our culture as a whole. We need to get out of the hate, anger and attack methods and switch to one of self education, reasoning and understanding. Hate, anger and attack will only lessen productivity while creating a further divide. Understanding, reasoning and structured arguments will be the way to work towards making real and non damaging change.