Taking Clive Seriously for a Moment…

Abstract

Dick McCaw was a friend and colleague of Clive Barker's for many years, notably during Clive's chairmanship of the International Workshop Festival, which McCaw created and directed to answer the continuing training and development needs of professionals working in the performing arts. In this article, he assesses the roots from which Barker's Theatre Games derives its continuing influence, and offers a critique of its vulnerabilities, interwoven with personal reflections on his association with its author. He discusses our greater understanding of the workings of the brain since the advent of fMRI imaging, and how this affects Clive's metaphor of the roles of the ‘back’ and ‘front’ brain in controlling and integrating the actor's motivation and movement, relating this to other ways in which Clive's proudly autodidactic methods often reached towards the right solutions through unscientific methodology. He looks also at Clive's use of the teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais, and of his intuitive and successful use of Feldenkrais techniques in regaining momentum following his first stroke. Dick McCaw, whose DVD celebrating Clive's theatre games workshops and their background, Theatre Jazz, was issued by Arts Archives, Exeter, in 2005, is currently teaching at Royal Holloway, University of London.