Behind the curtain backdrops on stage you usually have a door opening to a hallway with dressing rooms. In other situations you will find a staircase leading to some ramshackle storage space with a sofa inside and a small makeshift dining table. Backstage is the place behind the scenes where you wait for your show to begin and it's the spot where you end up after it ends.
I'm convinced there is a backstage to our lives as well. It appears in many different forms. There are those moments when you catch yourself lost in thoughts. When you're looking up at the night sky. When you're waiting for the bus. When you're on the toilet. There is no performance there. No audience. Perhaps you experience stress or anticipation, but that's because you have things on your mind or you're caught up in emotions. Maybe it's something you ate.
Backstage is a space in time where we can learn to become aware of ourselves, our bodies, feelings and thought processes during a moment of stillness.
When a show is playing, you'd be surprised how little happens behind it all. The backrooms are deserted. The artists and audience members are engaged in the performance. At the end of the show, we need that spot backstage to retreat to and release the tensions we may have endured in the process of performing.
Artists each have their own way of preparing for a show and of coping with its aftereffects backstage. You'll come across types who are lying there to rest and those who are playing around with their pet animal. Others are doing warm-up exercises and are practicing their parts for one final time. And then there are those who fill up on mind-bending stimuli in order to perform their piece or come down from it.
Frontstage behavior
In the past, researchers have already made significant steps in describing backstage human behavior in the day-to-day context. The Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman is well-known for his book 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' (1956) where he explains the distinction people make between frontstage and backstage behavior. According to Goffman, we offer our most positive self-concepts in the frontstage where we try to leave a desired impression for other people to perceive. Backstage we give ourselves permission to cast off any societal roles during times of privacy.
Browsing YouTube, I stumbled upon a testimony by Dr. Josh Packard of Springtide Research Institute in Minnesota. His video is aptly titled 'Front Stage, Back Stage'. He tells us he's gotten up early to talk about how he has been experiencing the current pandemic. Packard and his organization share lots of info for young people to deal with the effects of social isolation.
Packard mentions that there has been a big uptake in loneliness among 13-to-25-year-olds. One in three young Americans feel completely alone much of the time. This alarming evolution had already begun way before Corona. Packard is confident that statistics will remain high after the virus has been dealt with. Springtide has recently published its report 'Belonging: Reconnecting America's Loneliest Generation', which you can read about here.
Packard argues the frontstage and backstage we knew from before COVID-19 are completely gone: "There are norms that we establish that give us a sense of certainty - both cognitively and socially - about what our day is going to look like, what our actions are going to look like. That has been totally lost. (...) When we are all working from home, living with each other and being socially distanced - but many of us in homes with other people - the frontstage and backstage just goes completely away."
Social norms are clearly properties of the frontstage area. That's where roles and identities come into play. I would argue however that the real work in front of us needs to occur backstage. And that backstage area could be hidden behind another door altogether.
Asking questions
What if backstage is not simply the domain of personal privacy and self-talk, but a hidden field from which we can observe those same notions? What if we choose to tackle the challenges of our current crisis not just through forms of social analysis or psychoanalysis, but by
- adopting a cosmic perspective?
- experience with psychedelic states?
- re-establishing balance to the natural world?
- correcting harmful eating habits that affect our brains?
All of the above are territories that the general public rarely gets to see, similar to the backstage environments at shows. I personally believe it's time we bring such regions to light simply to raise consciousness. We can start from the comfort of our own homes as we learn to ask the most basic of questions.
If we are to craft new routines for our daily lives - and those of young people - can we allow human beings to take a rest backstage? Chances are this will engender in them a sense of belonging.
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