A critical part of our art-based inquiry must be the physical enactment of the stories before an audience, performatively and emotively transmitting the truth of the images so that they enter bodies as well as minds. The image and its information are vetted through not only mind but also through the heart and the gut.
Its truth can be determined by whether it makes all the cells of the body -mind sing in resonance and vibrate with complexity, raising the communal vibration to a higher level. This theatre of the soul will be a collaborative and communal endeavour where those viewing add new dimensions and multiply the truth.
Our times call not for simplification but a complication of narratives to accommodate our enlarged capacity for understanding the world and each other that comes from genuine engagement with the souls of our images.
It is after all, meaning that research seeks.
- Pat Allen, Art as Inquiry