D.B.D. - the Mind/Body Spa: An Interview with Rachel Rosenthal

Our interview with Rachel Rosenthal about her life-changing weekend workshop, D.B.D (Doing by Doing), opens the door on art as a vehicle of personal transformation. Rachel Rosenthal's performances deal with the universe on a grand scale, projected from the microcosm of the human ego. Her workshop techniques were derived from Instant Theater, an influential underground theater she established during the '50s, in which she developed a method for teaching whole groups of people to improvise magic on stage. She brings to The D.B.D. Experience years of research and meditation, facts and feelings about science, art, psychology, holistic health, body work and personal power. In this 1988 excerpted interview she talks about the workshop's chemistry and why art is so central to its transformational quality. —Eds.

Linda Frye Burnham: What's the most important activity for you now?

Rachel Rosenthal: Trying to keep the faith. See, I kind of see my life and my work as being a continuum, I try not to separate things. Everything I do is really a quest, like I talk about in the workshops. I feel that I have to find my own relationship to the universe. I have to find the best way I can serve. Mainly I have to fight despair—in other people and in myself. I find sometimes that's very hard. I can't even see the light. So I try to approach from a different angle, the way I do in my performance. I pursue something for a while and then I get to a point where I reach either a cul de sac or a depression, so I try something else. So right now I've started to paint. I find when I'm very, very depressed, when my mind just won't stop going—I'm continually bombarded by things that just destroy me, mostly about politics, animals, the planet—I find now that painting is very helpful. The hours go by and I am very involved in a physical and sensual activity, which I haven't done for a long time. I realized that I was starved for the sensuality of making objects, no matter what happens to them.

LFB: You talk about depression and despair because of world problems?

RR: I know that it comes from spiritual emptiness. The spirituality of the universe is a real thing, but the problem is to remain connected with it. It's a cord that's severed by the way we live, the assault on our emotions and our intellect. The problem is that we are real orphans. There's a nourishment of the soul that is sadly lacking; we are all starved and we're over-eating and we're undernourished.

LFB: Because the input we get is all material?

RR: Of course. And our starvation is dangerous because that's where the spiritual adventurers come in, the cults and the Moral Majority, that's the breach for them. These people are not into spirituality, they are into control. The real problem is to be reconnected as a thinking, intelligent individual, and what I'm trying to do is take it in a roundabout way that isn't direct revelation or direct faith, but, let's say, scientific understanding. If you really read what is going on in the new sciences, you've got to come to the conclusion that there is a sea of spirit in which everything is bathed, because that's the reality. Reality is no longer material but spiritual. I feel I get my faith from this.

LFB: Is art for you a renewal of that connection with that spiritual pool?

RR: Yes. I really believe that. That's why I hate to see art used as an outlet for your own personal cruelties and your own worldly gains. I do have a really sacred sense of art. Art is the only place that's sacred. It always was, that's where it came from originally. Art today is not to promote the sacred conception of the universe; it's to promote the commercial and materialistic concept of the universe. It's also lost its moorings. It's also an orphan. It's been cut off.

LFB: Because we don't know what it's for any more?

RR: We don't know what anything is for any more. There is no certainty anywhere. Alan Watts said that the real reality is total insecurity, where nothing is what we want it to be and everything is continually changing. The only way you can live in such a world is if you don't build something solid on it. There is only an illusion of solidity. So long as we try to live with these totally illusionistic concepts, we are going to continue perpetrating the kind of world that we are in now, which is a world that is hurtling toward big, big punishment. We are being punished, in a sense, for believing these untruths. We have to wake up to what the real truth is and start rebuilding the world on a spiritual base, a true spiritual base, which doesn't mean a religious base in the sense of organized religion.

They are always telling us of the illusion of solidity, this is this and not that, this is separate from this. And in reality everything is not only connected, but really flowing into one another. We have probably evolved from a time when we were able to take in reality in the real way, something closer to unconsciousness as animals just emerging from the animal kingdom. We were probably very connected to all of nature and we could really sense that continuum. But today it's 2 plus 2 is 4 and that's it. We create language and then the functions of the brain and the physiology of the brain sort of interlock. The more language creates these separate concepts, the more the synapses of the brain become also very separate and divisive, and so, anatomically, we are built in such a way that we sort of physiologically have to live in a state of illusion, which the Indians call maya. We are stuck in that state, but some people who either intuitively or through their reading know that there is something else, that there is another reality behind all this illusion, they make efforts through meditation and other things to go back.

That's what art does. Art is about that. When you make a work of art, that's what you are really dealing with—what I call the continuum, which is really the abstract underpinnings, not the actual content or image, but it's everything else that goes into it. In other words, the way you use the space, the relationships between the forms, the equilibriums, the volumes, the rhythms, the oppositions, the interweaves. Some people try to reach this understanding through art and others use other means. My hope is that enough people will do this kind of effort before the end of the century, before it's too late.

LFB: This sounds very much like your teaching in D.B.D. Is that one of your goals, to bring about that kind of spiritual transformation in your workshop participants?

RR: With the workshop, I don't know if the artmaking is snuck in in all this strong spiritual transformation or if it's the other way around. It depends on how you are geared. Some people will see the workshop as a big artmaking ball and they will get the other stuff quite subliminally. Or the other way around; the people who are more geared that way will really sense the transformational quality and, in addition, they will be doing some nice improv and having a little fun.

LFB: What would you say if somebody said, "Oh, D.B.D. is nothing but another California touchy-feely workshop?" What makes it unique?

RR: The artmaking. It's different from psychodrama in that we don't use language and we are not trying to play out psychological problems. The work is much more spiritual and abstract and artlike, often on a mythical level.

LFB: Do you see a healing quality in the workshop?

RR: The healing quality comes from a larger context, not so much from the individual psychological knots that have to be untied. That you can do yourself. It's not even assuming that anybody is sick or has problems or blockages. It's assuming that, as human beings in this society, this day and age, everybody is in the same boat; we all have this unassuaged hunger and thirst, we all have these locks, we all have these knots inside of us.

Sometimes the connection that you see on stage is so...unpsychological! It's like two bodies beginning to move together magically as if they've learned a choreography that they've rehearsed a hundred times, yet it's totally spontaneous. They're doing it for the first time, but they are beginning to vibrate together. When those things happen you can't describe them in words. You can't say, well, there was a scene in which this guy goes to the grocery store and the store owner is angry with him—it's nothing to do with that. It has to do with colors and shapes, movement, putting on a costume. Somehow you've got four people in a piece and they don't watch each other get dressed, yet they come out and they're all wearing white and black, those marvelous synchronous moments that are sacred moments that create the artwork collectively.

You know, it's like a primal feeling, where I imagine in the days of primal culture people would get that connection without words. They would all come together and make art together; create those moments which are sacred moments and are absolutely filled with the creating juices, where you can really feel the power of creation, not only the individual but the whole schmear, the whole number. Those are the things that happen in the workshop. It's like a weekend of collectively trying to go beyond, to resolve things with a good massage, to soften all these hard strings that we have inside us and to make us vulnerable.

LFB: After five years, can you state the central idea of D.B.D., what makes it work?

RR: It's about erasing the borders, the demarcations between life and art. I do believe that whatever it is that you are will be transmitted into the art in one way or another. What is more the acme of behavior than art? You give form to something that didn't exist before. You are really fashioning your soul, an extension of your spirit. If you start tampering with that form, which is the materialization of your spirit, you can really reach to the most deep level of where your creativity lies, the whole source of your being. That's what it's about.

Now when I say that, people really get scared. They're thinking, oh boy, here comes this woman and she's going to tickle the core of my being! This is terrible! What if she tickles it in the wrong way? To that I can only say that we are always good and bad, we are always yin and yang, we are always black and white, a mess of opposites. I bring to the workshop my very best qualities and only my best qualities. For a weekend, two days and a half, I am a saint. My aim for that one weekend is to really take the spirit of the people who are there and give a bath to that spirit. I call D.B.D. now the mind-body spa. You go there and you clean out your body and your spirit, your imagination and your artmaking, it's all taking this terrific bath and it's coming out clean. Then you go out and you get soiled again, but you have had the experience of this real purity, the creative drive that brings the best out of you, not only as an individual, but as an individual who is part of a group, in society. So for that weekend, I am really there only and purely to be at the service of these individual spirits and I do what must be done. After the weekend I go home and I am still old Rachel, with all her weaknesses and stupidities and pettinesses, like everybody else. But for that weekend, I am a saint, or whatever you want to call it.

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Spring 1984.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002