Welcome to the Blackbox
What can theater teach us about presence?
“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
Peter Brook wrote that in The Empty Space in 1968, and it remains one of the best known attempts to define theater. I first read it when I decided I wanted to study theater, after my undergraduate degree. It was one of those key texts that I knew I couldn’t get away without reading. It stuck with me, as it has with many theater students over the decades: the simplicity and directness of its description of that relationship. A minimum of two bodies in a space. One doing something as simple as “walking,” the other “watching.” That’s it. That’s a start. Something is already happening.
