Epidaurus and Me

Many millennia ago, the roles of priest, healer and entertainer were all held within the same person. So the evidence of surviving architectures suggests. The shaman, telling stories that emerged from the common and shared experience of dreaming, helped their community understand their place in the world.

They talked, round the fire on dark nights, of traveling to other realms, meeting other creatures, being transformed. They brought back wisdom from these ‘other worlds’. They created a cosmic architecture of worlds above and worlds below. Their stories helped bind communities - units of survival that, ultimately, made humans the dominant lifeforms we now are. The original storytellers created the cosmos.

I wrote about this in a essay published by Aeon last year: https://aeon.co/essays/acting-is-an-ancient-tool-of-connection-we-can-all-play-with

Something I did not have time to discuss in that essay was the Greek ampi-theatre at Epidaurus. You’ll have seen pictures of it - a huge outdoor theatre space with amazing acoustics. I’ve visited, and it’s every bit as impressive as I imagined it would be.

Epidaurus was not an entertainment venue though. It was a healing centre. It represents the moment in Western history when the shaman’s role began to fracture into that of ‘priest’, ‘doctor’, and ‘performer’.

Someone who sought healing would visit Epidaurus. They would sleep in a special room in the hope that the Gods would visit and reveal what cure they needed. Their dreams would be interpreted by ‘priests’.

They would undergo treatments - diet, exercise, potions, physical therapies, mineral springs - administered by ‘healers/doctors’.

They would attend performances to purge emotion, to provoke the catharsis of laughter, or to align them rhythmically with the universe through dance and music - performances created by professional performers.

At Epidaurus, around 2,600 years ago, we see the ancient figure of the shaman splitting into three. It’s part of the long, and continuing, human journey into specialisation.

There’s nothing wrong with this. As our knowledge deepens, we want people who are specialists.

However, as we specialise we also limit. We can focus so much on the details of our ‘area of expertise’ that we forget how one thing is linked to another, how every specialisation is only a fragment of essential humanity. Our full humanity comes from the connection between things - the high ritual of religion and the belly-laugh of a bawdy comedy, the healing of a drug and the mental relaxation of encountering (or making) art. Long conversation and quiet contemplation.

I call my work ‘The Art of Calm’ and speak about how the effect a painting has on people is as important as the content of the painting itself. When someone asks me what a painting means, I gently refuse to answer. It’s not very important what a painting means to me. What matters is what it means to the person looking at it. Their experience is their experience. My role is to draw on places of calm and insight while working, in the hope or provoking similar experiences in a viewer.

I don’t think of my work, in any sense, as ‘conceptual’. It’s experiential. It links back to the decades I spent in theatre - ultimately a performance is not an idea, it’s a lived and shared experience. There may be ideas in there, and certainly I use ideas while making a performance. But the proof of the proverbial pudding is in the eating. A performance works when someone experiences something while they watch.

I apply the same criteria now: does someone experience some kind of calm, insight or joy while they stand in front of a painting?

For me, over-reliance on ‘conceptual’ approaches to art-making is a form of emotional cowardice - the artist telling people what they should think rather than trusting them to enter into uncategorisable experience.

It’s useful to me, as I make work, to remember that once, a few thousand years back (and still today in other cultures than the one I grew up in), the role of art was to heal, to build community, and to entertain.

I’m not making huge claims for my art. I’m making huge claims for art.

Art making and art-encountering is fundamental to our humanity - it heals us, connects us and entertains us.

It’s not my job as an artist to try to do these things. I make art and trust that Art will do what Art can do.

We are priests. We are healers. We are artists, We are shaman. We are human.