F2F

Over at Que 23, Lucas discusses, in "Fractured Realities," the trend in life and art toward a fractured and dissociated self. He concludes:

Technologies like email, blogging and so forth carry with them a high risk. They risk separating the physical self from the intellectual and emotional self. As we begin to see trends in this direction in our art we must further look for ways out. How might it be possible to reconnect these fractured realities. What
might we rebuild out of these fragments of the world? What would the mash-up between an ideology of hate and an ontology of acceptance look like? We stand poised to transform the void from a pit of death to profound revelation. Are we
brave enough to bind these shards of the reality together and let the healing begin?

To me, this is where theatre steps in. While I could be accused of being a one-note guy (to a man with a hammer the whole world looks like a nail), to my mind the liveness of theatre can fight the fracturing by bringing bodies and minds together into a room at a specific time and, through that confluence, forges a community. Isn't it the dissolution of community, the sense of being here now and being here now with specific people that form your world, the first step toward community? And couldn't the sense of community be expanded outward to include larger and larger parts of the world?