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I think a lot of my teaching and directing is absolutely about how to give actors a sense of their own agency within shows, even in shows where they’re told what to do, how do you make sure that that feels like something, that you can find your own sense of being, either freedom within the constraints.
Achim Nowak 00:23
Welcome to the MY FOURTH ACT PODCAST. I’m your host, Achim Nowak, and I have conversations with exceptional humans who have created bold and unexpected lives. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on any major podcast platform so you won’t miss a single one of my inspiring guests, and please consider posting an appreciative review. Let’s get started. I am absolutely delighted to welcome Phelim McDermott to the MY FOURTH ACT PODCAST, feeling is a celebrated actor and director from the UK. He was a co founder of the improbable theater in 1996 more recently, in 2023 he was awarded the Lawrence Olivier Award for Best Director for the play My Neighbor Totoro. Philim has staged operas in some of the great opera houses of the world, including numerous times at the Met. I associate philim intimately with the work of Philip Glass. He is also passionate about the work of Harrison Owen, the originator of the conversational framework called Open Space
Phelim McDermott 01:49
Technology. Hello, feeling Hi. It’s really lovely to be talking to you. Achim, so thank you very much for inviting me.
Achim Nowak 01:56
I’m glad we get to talk. There are so many doorways for our conversation. But when I speak with somebody who has your level of professional, international career as a director, I always wonder, when you were a young boy growing up, did you have that calling? When did that show up in your life? I
Phelim McDermott 02:19
don’t know if you know, I made a show with Philip Glass, pre pandemic about four years ago, and it was called the dow of glass. And in it was about my relationship to love of Philip’s music and its importance to me, but also it was kind of the origin story, kind of life myth of my own relationship to theater. I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t know that I was going to be involved in theater. It was a very early love of mine. From the moment that I was taken to the theater, my mom took me a lot to see Shakespeare when I was young, and I had a long relationship with a theater in Manchester called the Royal Exchange Theater, which is a beautiful theater in the round. I wanted to be an actor, and I wanted to be a great actor. I wanted to be an extraordinary actor who strutted the stage. And that dream is still there, but how it’s manifested is very like life. When it comes into manifest into being, the details of that are very different. So I’m not a great Shakespearean actor, but I am a performer, and I love still performing. But I also didn’t know at that early stage that I would end up as a director. So life and the forces surround us in life, in conversation with my desire to be an actor turned me also into a director. So
Achim Nowak 03:53
Well, I if I’m going to generalize now, I don’t want to test this hypothesis with you. In my experience, many actors who work, who are good actors at some point say, Well, I’m love acting, but I feel like I’m a piece of clay in somebody else’s vision, and I don’t fully get to own my voice and my vision and directing as a way to to paint on a larger canvas. Is that your experience as well.
Phelim McDermott 04:23
You know, there is an interesting journey to that, because my parents, especially my mum, were very supportive of me becoming an actor, because my mom loved the theater, and I at that early age, I want to go to drama school, and my mum and dad, it was very important to them that they’d been to university. My mum was working class woman who’d ended up going to university. And there was that classic line that’s a UK thing. I don’t know if it’s elsewhere, but you should have something to fall back on. They would say, actually, I went to a place called Middlesex Polytechnic, which became a university. And I did a performing arts degree, so I didn’t go to drama school. And at the time, that felt like maybe delaying something of going to drama school. But actually what happened was that in that process, I started making my own theater so I never really had a real moment where I was an actor who came out of that system of, you’re an actor, and then you wait by the phone. I’ve never waited by a phone. If there wasn’t a job, I always thought, well, I’ll make one. So I became an actor and a performer who made my own work and collaborated with people so in a way that have been in other people’s shows, but I haven’t really wrestled with that sense of being, you know, someone else’s play or puppet. I’ve always felt lucky that the journey of the shows that I’ve made, of the shows that I’ve been in, have been very much of my own making so but that also means that when I’ve met people who have had that experience, I understand how different and lucky I’ve been to have a different kind of journey, and I think a lot of my teaching and directing is absolutely about how to Give actors a sense of their own agency within shows, even in shows where they’re told what to do, how do you make sure that that feels like something, that you can find your own sense of being, either freedom within the constraints?
Achim Nowak 06:35
Yeah, because I am a former theater guy, again, what I’m hearing as you’re talking, because I was an actor for a while too. Then I was the people who always say, oh, that director, that’s an actor’s director. Me, that director will allow you to experiment and discover interesting and she or he wants your creativity. And then there are those directors who just want you to move to where they want you to stand. So the stage picture looks great, right? I’m being simplistic. And I
Phelim McDermott 07:10
know I think I have a My own sense of that is that I, you know, I love the theater, and I had many growing up, many moments where I would see shows. And you know Derek Jacobi playing Hamlet, and I would see these extraordinary performances. And then, of course, as one knows more about theater, there’s the possibility to get a little bit more jaded. And I would go and see shows, and I realized I could see the ghost. Often. I could see the ghost of a director on stage with the actors kind of moving them around at really, for me, it’s important that within those constraints of putting on a show, actors really feel like the work is theirs. And I think I’ve been on a journey through improvisation, but also different methods of working with text, of how to release that sense of, you know, in a way, it’s about opening space. Yeah, you know, we talked about Harrison Owen and open space technology. It’s how within a show, you make sure the show is the actors. But also, how does it you make sure it’s alive every single night, so it doesn’t become something that becomes ossified.
Achim Nowak 08:24
So how do you do that?
Phelim McDermott 08:26
There isn’t one particular way. I think the way is that you stay curious about that question. And of course, one has a over the years, you have a whole set of tools, which I you know, I could talk about some of those. But I think, for example, I have a curiosity about different theater teachers. So Michael Chekhov is a big inspiration of mine. But also, I’m fond of looking at strange seeking out strange books. I think there’s a term for it being a sort of Marvin for psychology books, personal growth books, acting books. And I found a book that I saw on a shelf. I thought no one in the UK would like this book. And it was called instant acting, and it was by a man called Jeremy Whelan. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Jeremy. I have not. He’s an extraordinary guy because he was a, you know, he was a Hollywood actor, but he created a methodology, which was how to create shows where you work with the text, but you make sure it stays alive. So it’s a recording technique. It’s also a way of getting rid of that other ghost that often one sees on stage, which is actors still holding their script. There’s an invisible script you can see in front of them like a little barrier. And what Jeremy’s process is that you look at a text, you record it very neutrally, and then you play it back, and the performers get up into the space straight away. Mm. And as they hear their lines being said, they can basically improvise and move in the space in an embodied way straight away. Then you go back and record again, and you play the next recording, and you say, now you’re not allowed to do anything you did the first time. So that great impulse you had that really thought, Oh, that was funny, or that was moving. You have to drop that and do something different. And you keep doing that process, you have different games each time you do it. And by the end of that process, say you’ve been working on a like, a three page scene, the actors have learned those lines with their bodies, yeah. And you then say, Now, play the scene. And they say, but I’ve not sat down and led my land. You say, trust yourself. And what happens is that you see the performers and that it’s like they are literally making up those lines, but it’s absolutely honoring the text. You never, ever change the text. So for me, it was like a beautiful marriage, because I love shows that are totally improvised, and we do that. But I found, through his method, a way to look at that constraint of going no, no, there is a text that you have to get right. So one thing I was playing with this, and I really enjoyed exploring it, and then I’m going to do this with Shakespeare. And many years ago, we did a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream with the English Shakespeare Company. And I was the early days of playing with it, so I had to persuade these actors. It was a great idea. But we got to this point where we okay do these scenes and do the Shakespeare and just fade all lines and get the text right. I remember watching these moments of actors performing with Shakespeare, and it was literally like they were channeling Shakespeare. It was very beautiful, because it really was like they were improvising, but it was Shakespeare was so exciting. So over the years, um, I’ve, I’ve used that as one way. I’ve played with that with with opera singers, which is also a kind of challenge as well. Where you go, we’re going to record this. And opera singers don’t like being recorded, hearing their voices back, but I’ve managed to do it, and it’s one of those ways where I have found the way to really bring text alive with body, so that the body is thinking, not just It doesn’t preclude the intellect, it includes the intellect, but it includes the minimal impulses and processes that are going on with in an actor’s intuition into the moment. So that’s that’s one example of one of the ways it played with
Achim Nowak 13:01
that I so appreciate you taking me into one aspect of the process. Yeah, it totally makes sense to me. So I
Phelim McDermott 13:09
want to, I can hear your excitement about you’d like to do it. I know you do.
Achim Nowak 13:14
I want to just test two other things with you. Yeah, um, back in the days, I remember I’m on a name drop for a moment, but it related to you. So Ingmar Bergman’s theater company, they had an art that they went they did theater in communities, and they were in Brooklyn going to some school. So what they hear were these Swedish actors working with students in Brooklyn. Was a beautiful thing to watch. But one side conversation I had at the time. They said, you know, Ingmar Bergman, when he directs theater, like, if he does had a gobbler or some big classic play, he will wait until he has the right actress to play the part, and he won’t do it until he has the right person. I know, an opera also there’s then said, Well, if we’re going to do this opera, she or he has to do the title role. Versus another Mindset is, well, a gazillion other people have played this part. Let me work with the talent. I have any thoughts around the right fit? Versus, is that a silly conversation, or does it matter? Or where are you with that as a director,
Phelim McDermott 14:23
you know my Well, we’ve joked in my own company, improbable about our casting process? Yeah. So I would say our casting process is to really talk about how we work, and to say that we improvise, and we will improvise, and we’ll keep improvising, and basically we will scare everyone away, then we’ll see who’s left and they’re the right people. Because when I’ve got in trouble, it’s because people haven’t really believed that we do what we say we do. Yeah, actors love performing, so they come to a. Auditions. And I love improvising, yes, yes, yes, no, no, but we will improvise. And when we get to the tech, we will still be making the show, and we will still be changing. And then once the show is in previews, we will still keep playing. And then when the show is opened, we will keep playing, and it will and you have to say that at least three times before it really lands as a reality, and I’ve got better and better at saying it so that it gets heard. And this slightly relates to open space technology and the principles that really resonated with me when I came across them. And there’s a principle that’s on the wall, which is, whoever comes the right people. And you know what’s great about that is it’s about invitation, which is it, me, an invitation means it’s okay to not come, okay to not turn up, but it’s also important that you know that you’ve decided, and you’ve made a choice to be there. So I’m excited by people choosing to be, you know, curious in a certain way, is why I’m still doing theater, why I’m not bored with it anymore. I think in terms of casting, of course, you’ve got, I want to work with that person. They’re wonderful, but I don’t really believe in the I can’t do it until the casting is right, yeah,
Achim Nowak 16:23
for our listeners who we’ve referenced, open space technology, yeah. And it’s, I always feel funny saying Open Space Technology, because it’s not technological platform, but it’s a, I would say, a framework for engaging with other humans and with ourselves, yeah, originated by a wonderful gentleman named Harrison Owen, who passed away last year. If you had to give a 32nd executive summary to somebody who doesn’t know open space, and you can be very biased based on what you like about it, but what would you want people to know about open space.
Phelim McDermott 17:01
As I said, I love searching in books for things, and I would have been given this book by a friend. It was called Open Space Technology, and it sat on my shelf. And literally, it was one of those things where the book dropped off the shelf, and I thought, I need to probably have a look at that. And I opened it, and the first thing that’s in the book is that Harrison talks about how it’s a thing that he thinks that everyone should do. He didn’t like copyright it, or, you know, there’s no program of training and blah, blah, blah. He said it belongs to the world because it existed before he came along. And when I read about it, what I saw was It was basically one way of looking at it. Is one wonderful, big improvisation game, and it’s a game which helps get out of the way lots of the structures that stop creativity collaboration happening, and we’re very good in the world at creating structures which look like we’re working well and we’re planning and so on. But for me, open space is a way of helping people again, trust their intuition, trust their impulses around how to work together, how to connect with each other. And when I read the book, I thought, I know this already. I have been trying to create this culture in my rehearsal rooms for years and years and years, I’ve also avoided certain things, like dealing with certain issues, because I did not know I’d avoided, for want of a better word, say, political, yeah, issues or difficult issues like conflict and so on, because I didn’t have a frame to look at it in a way that felt resonant to me. And suddenly I saw this thing that Harrison had held for many years. And when I know this already, and I was feeling, at the time, very frustrated with theater, because sometimes people would say the theater community. And I remember thinking, Where is this theater community? I didn’t recognize this place where it was. I didn’t feel that we were collaborating as well as we could together. I didn’t feel we were supporting each other. I didn’t I felt quite isolated, and I followed the instructions in the book. Word for it. I’d never been to an open space technology event. I’d never seen anyone else facilitate it, but I felt like I knew it already, and I wrote an invite, and the invite was called, devoted and disgruntled. What are we going to do about theater? Mm. Um, because I felt that I was still devoted to theater, but I was also very frustrated and disgruntled with lots of the ways that we made it, the ways that so, like I mentioned and I wrote this invitation, other members of my company were a little bit dubious about it. Said, I don’t think anyone will turn up. Over 200 people responded and turned up on the first day of this event. And it was electric, because each moment in the process is basically what you do is you get everyone in a circle, yeah, you say, what are we going to work on? And then people can put on pieces of paper what they’re going to work on. You stick it all on the wall, and you go to work, yeah, which is how I make a show. Now, you know, I’m going to make a show. You go, how are we going to do? And you write it all down, stick on what you’re going to do on the wall, and you go to work. But this the form helps hold the whole thing in a way that people do it for themselves, and your main job as a facilitator is to be totally present, but pretty much invisible, yeah, which was how I had seen myself as a director over the years you know me and my co Artistic Director Lee said Our main job as directors, as artistic directors, is to put ourselves out of a job and to make ourselves redundant. I recognize in all the things that Harrison talked about, absolute kindred spirit in what this but suddenly I had a way to work on these issues that I had been avoiding. Now, that event happened 20 years ago, and it’s now a big annual event that we do every year. We have lots of open space satellites when issues emerge about different issues that are present in the world at the moment, or things that and it’s like a way of addressing and collaborating and creating community, because vicariously, it does this thing where, on a deeper level, it connects People, and community happens in a way that I never experienced before, and also it holds space for all the different voices. Holds space for things I agree with. It holds things space for things I disagree with. But my job as that facilitator is to hold that space, and I always saw that as my job as a director is to hold space for people so that they connected to their own impulses. So it’s a kind of beautiful rhyme with what I was doing with improvisation and
Achim Nowak 22:52
theater. Oh, you connected some beautiful dots right here. Thank you again. For listeners who have never experienced open space, there are just very few guiding principles that allow people to gather and have conversation. For me, and I want to just run this by you, one of the most radical principles that sounds so obvious, called the law of two feet, meaning, if you’re in a conversation, and for whatever reason, you’re no longer interested in it, you’re allowed to walk away, yes, and I realized I was constantly staying in conversations I wasn’t interested in because I had been so trained to not walk away. Yes, absolutely, walking away and joining another conversation that might be more interesting. And if you relate this to the choices we make in life, how absolutely, if conversation is a metaphor in situations that we don’t leave,
Phelim McDermott 23:50
sorry to interrupt you there, but it’s also about choosing to stay. So it is about leaving, but it’s also like saying, don’t stay. If you are going to stay, really choose to be here and be present and commit, yeah, and to commit. Now this was one of the things that I saw, was an improvisation game. So another of my teachers is a man called Keith Johnston. Now I don’t know if you know about Keith Johnston. Keith Johnston is an extraordinary teacher who changed my life. He wrote a wonderful book called impro, and he is a you may call it improv, but in the UK, we call it impro impro impro because our great grandfather of improvisation is a guy called Keith Johnston. He wrote this wonderful book, which I read as a just after I left college, and it’s got all the impro games that he created at the Royal Court in the 50s, 60s. And he. Was an extraordinary teacher, and I went did a workshop with him, that was a 10 day workshop in Dorset, in the countryside. And suddenly my way of making theater was changed, because it became about the live moment, about improvisation. And Keith’s biggest teaching is that, what is improvisation? Well, mainly improvisation is a sensibility where you embrace the possibility of failure and smile about it. So Keith would say, you’re going to improvise, you will fail. So the main thing is, if you learn how to fail on stage and smile about it, don’t worry, the audience will think you’re superhuman. Will buy you drinks in the bar afterwards. Because, of course, the big challenge of improvisation is, I’ve got to be funny. I’ve got to be original. I’ve got to now. Keith’s work is amazing, and there is a wonderful game. And he was also a bill like Harrison, an incredible creative brain about how to engage with creativity. He created a game where he said it got really difficult as improvisers and fellow improvisers to be really clear, to give feedback to each other about whether scenes were good or not, and watching a scene, can you really say when you’re bored? And he tried lots of different ways of in workshops of people saying, I’m bored now. So he said, I tried saying, Well, hold your hands up and lower your hands when you’re bored, or raise your hands, and he actually found it impossible to get people to tell their fellow players friends when they were being boring or not interesting and when. And eventually, he said, It took him years, but he found a way to do it. You lined up the audience’s chairs with enough room to stand up and leave when you’re bored. Yeah. So terrifying. Getting power, actually power. It’s the most powerful teaching for a performer ever. So what you do is you get into the space and you start like improvising, and you have to keep the audience there. And what’s great in the audience is you learn in the audience of how to give feedback, but you also learn on stage how to keep an audience engaged. And of course, he said, what happens is people are funny and whatever, so on and so on. But actually what it teaches is that eventually the performer can entertain the audience by making them laugh or being doing lots of crazy stuff. But actually what you need to learn how to do is to tell stories. So in that process, narrative kind of births itself in the process. Now that is basically the law of two feet, yeah. So when I read in Harrison’s book this thing about how to, you know, that process teaches the room 250 people, all working together like a big beehive. It raises the collective intelligence of that group because they are giving each other feedback. And Harrison used to joke even the knowledge that that person who tends to speak and not listen to other people. Even the knowledge that people might leave puts a check on that ego in a certain way.
Achim Nowak 28:47
My brain is spinning in good ways as I’m listening to you and I so nudge you into what I think is a difficult conversation. I am German born. I live in the United States my whole adult life. I live in Portugal. Now I could describe one of the differences of how I experience life in my city in Portugal versus South Florida. And actually we’re recording I’m in South Florida this week, is that my experience with the Portuguese people is that they are less performative than Americans. With Americans, it’s easy to feel like they act happy for you. They act this for you. They perform for you. It’s part of the cultural conditioning. Again, I don’t want to label, but in Portugal, people don’t put on a show for you. I want to connect this to something you said earlier, which really intrigued me in the rehearsal process. When you say, I can, I can watch a show and I, I see the actor still holding the script. You know, if you were to give our listeners some guidance as somebody who helps elicit performances that are authentic and deep and varied from people. People in how you do that in life. So you can maybe dump some of your own scripts to go to the place that you take your performers to. What would you say to our listeners? You know,
Phelim McDermott 30:11
something that’s alive in me when you ask that is, I’ve been teaching improvisation for many, many, many years. Most of my teaching could be replaced with a here’s the date, a cassette player in the corner of the room that has a tape of my voice that says, slow down. The big thing about, and this is improvisation, but I think it again. It applies to text. It applies to everything. The big thing about, as you say, being performative is the the pressure to be original, the pressure to be interesting that just you is not enough. Yeah, so lots of the games and the teachings from Keith were about trying to trick that bit of your brain that thinks you have to work hard to be interesting. And actually what you want people is just to sort of turn up and be present. So one way is to slow yourself down, you know. And again, people think improvisation. That’s that thing where people jump up and they’re really creative and they’re wacky and funny, but actually, another of Keith’s teaching was about the pressure which is given to us by our schools, given to us by the idea of what creativity is, is that we have to come up with original and clever ideas. When people try and come up with original ideas, they end up saying exactly the same things again and again and again. If you can manage to not listen to that pressure to be original, you can slow down and in an improvised scene, for example, you do the obvious thing, do the next obvious thing, the next obvious thing. Actually, what’s counterintuitive about it is the audience think you’re amazing, because their brain is going and they’re thinking of and actually they’re very pleased. The hardest thing for an improviser to do on stage is to do the most obvious thing. They see a door in front of them, and they they will spend they don’t care what people say. Go out and test it for yourself. Don’t believe me, improvisers who are first learning how to will spend 15 minutes trying to get through that door. They will think of ways it’s locked. They will lose the key that it won’t. It will jam. They will things will go wrong because they will think to make it interesting, they have to create trouble. But actually the obvious thing is to take hold of the door handle, to open the door and go through it. Yeah. Now this is very interesting, because that obvious thing leads them to this on a deeper level, a scarier place when you’re on the outside of the door trying to get through and it i I’m having lots of trouble. It’s conflict. It’s actually there that performer is staying safe if they open the door and they look into the room, or whichever it is, they don’t know what’s in there, and they have to come up with another idea. And that’s why it’s scary, because they don’t know what happens next when they’re on the outside of the door, they know what’s happened. Happens Next. They’re stuck. It can’t get through, open the door, and the space opens up. And the possibilities of where the scene could go next are potentially infinite. So I would say I don’t know if I’ve answered your question. Slow down beautifully, yeah? Be obvious. And actually, that’s all you need to know, yeah, yeah, to take yourself into interesting places. And I know this is applies to people working with text and performers on stage. The performer is most interesting when they’re in a state of courageous vulnerability, they go, I’m going to the courage is to open the door. The vulnerability is to not know what happens next. And ideally you want that to be happening like a kind of whirring moment. To moment to moment to moment to moment to moment. Thing happening that brings the performer alive, and an audience can absolutely smell it. They can absolutely feel it when a performer is surprising themselves with how they’re saying that line for the first time, surprising themselves by really noticing that the performer in front of them has done something slightly different than they did the previous night. And I don’t know how to do that myself, so that’s why I’m still interested in theater. I’m still working on it. I’m still working
Achim Nowak 35:41
on it. Oh, but I appreciated this of the micro examination of those moments, which is what you just did for us. Last question, because I mentioned the introduction that you have directed a lot of Philip Glass. We’ve mentioned already. I have a fondness of Philip Glass. What is it with you and Philip Glass. Why are you a good fit for his operas? I think as we’re recording this, you’re in Barcelona staging a Philip Glass work. What should we know about Philip Glass’s music and opera and your connection to that
Phelim McDermott 36:13
work? It comes back to the kind of early life myth thing, and my show Doug of glass was about that question, in a way, it felt like theater chose me. I didn’t really have a choice, or if I ignored that invitation, I would have been unhappier. It felt like Philips music chose me, because when I first heard it, I really felt like I knew it already to come back to this thing about open space. It felt like Philips music was an invitation to me. It was an invitation to slow down, an invitation to look at the world. And many people who love Philip’s music know that it’s used in film a lot. So his famous film, koyanesi, that film is a beautiful marriage of visuals and and his music, but it the music itself holds you in a way that says, look at this pattern in nature. Look at this pattern in behavior in relation to this music. So I did not know this at the time, but it felt like it was speaking to me on a deeper level. And so I feel like I didn’t understand opera. I would go and see operas, and I thought, I don’t really understand it. And then I was asked whether I wanted to do a Philip Glass opera. I suddenly thought, Oh, I love Philip’s music. So my journey into working with opera and opera singers and opera performers and orchestra is through the lens of Philips music, and I feel like I was very lucky, because it was like a dream. Door opened for me into that landscape. So in order to make Phillips, I think that Philip kind of in those operas, Satyagraha, the first one that I did, Einstein, which I am going to be doing, Einstein on the Beach and Achim it. When you start working on them with performers, you realize that you have to find a vocabulary that makes it make authentic sense. So again, weirdly, we’ve ended up talking about slowing down. It’s really what I discovered was you had to create another kind of ritualistic performance language where time slowed down. And that’s what you have to do with the performance. You have to find a way that they connect to their internal, more somatic landscape of impulse, impulse, impulse. In order to make three and a quarter hours of music go like that, if you get it right, if you don’t manage to do that, three and a quarter hours can seem like six hours or whatever, but it was a very beautiful thing to be given this opportunity, because it then opened up more possibility of working in operas and working with singers and performers in a way that I had never experienced before. But Philips music, it has a way of, as I say, invitation to look at things. So if you put some Philip Glass music on and you you go and walk around your local place that you know well, it will invite you to see it differently. It will invite you to see patterns. Patterns in natural movement that you don’t necessarily always see, and it will invite you into seeing complexity and patterns of complexity in a way that’s more compassionate, rather than being overwhelmed by complexity, it will invite you to go. So Open Space Technology, if you see a footage of an open space event, speed it up. You know those stop frame things. You put some Philip Glass music going absolutely you see nature as it is, yes, yes. So there’s a kind of rhyme there for me with Phillips music and the open space and so on. And probably won’t be time to talk about this. I’m going to talk about one other teacher that I have, which is, sadly, another person who’s left us is a guy called Arnold Mindel. And Arnold Mindell created a concept called Deep democracy, and he has a frame for that, which is, it’s like a cone. And I talk about this in the day of glass show. It’s like a beautiful cone that has three levels of reality, and at the top is consensus reality, which is what we agree reality is, it’s the place of conflicts, and it’s the place of issues and troubles. Then lower down is Dreamland, and this is the place of archetypes, mythic stories, dream figures, our own dreams, our own accidents, you know, our own mistakes, our own failures, our own all these things, atmospheres in the background, to quote Michael checks work this Dreamland world, and then right down at the bottom of the cone, when it all comes into a sort of the bottom of the ice cream cone. You know, imagining is essence level where everything is connected, yeah, and I feel like Philips music is an invitation to you. To not ignore consensus reality, but to be reminded of these deeper levels of reality. And Arnie’s work is about, he has a aspect of it called World work, which is about working with conflict. And he says, any conflict, any world issue that you’re you’re working with, has to be talked about, communicated about, on all three of these levels, on consensus reality. So you have to talk about what the polarities and the real conflicts are are. You know, the fight over this thing. But you also have to know about the Dreamland histories and stories behind that conflict and the, what he calls the ghost roles. And the ghost roles are often the roles that aren’t present but talked about, and that could be anything, you know, we talked about thinking about what the ghost roles in our conversation these teachers, we talked about Lawrence Olivier, you know, he’s like a ghost role in our conversation. And then down at the bottom is this point where everyone is connected, and we lose our sense of ego, and we have these moments, these deeper levels can only be because they’re ineffable, can only be talked about through things like music and theater and stories, and they’re the things that take us to these deeper levels. So I thought I just wanted to be an actor, but actually those early dreams in my childhood were a calling to not forget these things, which often in my childhood, I would have moments where I was I thought, Oh, I am connected. What is looking at the stars? As a young child, we forget these things and their callings to reconnect to those aspects of ourselves that are deeper than that cone, but also aspects of the world.
Achim Nowak 44:12
Thank you for taking us to many juicy places in this conversation, I just want to recap. We spoke a lot about Harrison Owen and open space technology. So if you’re listening to this and want to learn more, you can find Harrison Owens work by Keith Johnston. We talked about Arnold Mendel. Did I get that right?
Phelim McDermott 44:34
Yeah, Arnie Mindel, N, I, N, D, E, L, L, and Arnie’s work is, is amazing. I Arnie is one of the best improvisers in the world, so he’s not with us anymore, but he’s still doing that. And
Achim Nowak 44:48
if anybody’s listening who has not heard a lot of Philip Glass, you, you spoke. So Philip Glass, really, because we used the metaphor of the door. You. This opens door after door, yeah, yeah, and it slows me down every time I listen to Philippi. So thank you so much. Phelim, this was a true gift, and I appreciate
Phelim McDermott 45:12
it. Really. Enjoyed talking to your achimist. I’m greedy for nourishing conversations. So thank you. It’s been really beautiful talking to you. Thank you.
Achim Nowak 45:23
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