Life's Nourishment: Milk by Dylan Van Den Berg

Dylan Van Den Berg, Katie Beckett and Roxanne McDonald in Milk

Milk by Dylan Van Den Berg

Directed by Ginny Savage
The Street Theatre
3 -12 June, 2021

The theatre is a forum for sharing stories; exploring the past; questioning the present; and preparing for the future. ‘Milk’ does all of the above with superb staging and atmospheric sound and lighting featuring pivotal moments in liminal spaces, directed with depth and nuance by Ginny Savage.

We are taken to a metaphysical Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania, which is created instantly through imagery and sound (Peter Bailey) – the wind is a constant presence. The design of the rock-strewn stage (Imogen Keen) is evocative and versatile; piles of stones can be interpreted as cairns and path-markers, burial sites and weapons. Ranging in size they indicate the passage of time through erosion, and they can be put in a pocket and transplanted to another time and place.

Spanning two centuries the play tracks the conversation between three Aboriginal ancestors coming together on the verge of life-changing moments. The characters are nameless – known only as Character A, B, and C – which suggests a blending of personalities and continuation of stories. Playwright and Character C, Dylan Van Den Berg has just become a father, which has made him introspective. He wants to know where he came from and what he might be passing on to a future generation.

Character A (Roxanne McDonald) and Character C (Dylan Van Den Berg) 

He and the other characters, A (Roxanne McDonald) and B (Katie Beckett), attempt to reconcile what came before invasion and colonisation of Tasmania with what is yet to come. Roxanne McDonald (portraying an old woman from the 1840s) tells her story with honesty and heartbreaking integrity. While the horror and violence of the past is not dwelt upon, there are certainly uncomfortable scenes and a few tears were shed in the audience. A note in the programme reminds us that “a group of Palawa people, mostly women, were removed from their country and taken to the Bass Strait Islands in the early-to-mid 1800s. They were sold, bartered, and gifted as ‘wives’ to the white sealers who lived there.”

Katie Beckett plays Character C’s grandmother, although the actors are similar in age, which leads to an intimacy and shared understanding of identity. The difference is that “You’re lucky with that milky skin. You get no trouble. You get to carry it all on the inside – all the knowledge. Some of us gotta carry it on the outside for everyone to see.” Character B is a middle-aged woman from the 1960s who is attempting to find fun and explore the world through various encounters and relationships, while refusing to be confined by convention. 

Katie Beckett as Character B

Through outstanding physicality, the actors all embody greatly varying experiences and shifts of mood that are entirely convincing and utterly compelling. The costumes, also by Imogen Keen, are designed to accentuate the details of their circumstances, from the rough-looking, sturdy coverings, fashioned like a blanket, of Character A, to the impractical and uncomfortable shiny fabric worn by Character B as she prepares to go on a date and sell herself as something she is not – “I’m a natural blonde, baby… this is just a dye-job.”

They progress and move past grief, shame and self-loathing by literally picking themselves up and carrying on. Lighting by Gerry Corcoran illuminates, defines and conceals spaces in intriguing ways that create conversation. We all have blind spots in our family history, but learning about the past can inform our present and teach us to be more compassionate towards the people around us.

It is apt that Milk opened in a world premiere during Reconciliation Week. It may be a personal story about loss and survival, but it asks us all to question our heritage and to consider our relationship to the land we live on. Again, the programme notes that, “For many years it was said that the Palawa people were ‘extinct’. White history has swallowed our stories. This is just one of many.” A lot of stories and knowledge have been lost through lack of sharing, but in the words of character C, “It’s all out there. Even the stuff we think is gone. We just – have to listen. We just – have to dance.”

This play is stunning and heartfelt. It is personal and it is broader than one man’s story. It affects all of us, as it should. See it; feel it; share it. That is all.

Neuroscience Meets Mindfulness: Hardwiring Happiness

Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson

Rider

Pp. 223

Being good to yourself has benefits for everyone, and for the entire planet. That’s quite a grand claim, but Rick Hanson, “a father, husband, psychologist, meditation teacher and business consultant” makes a concerted effort to help everyone do just that. He sets out to show us how to retrain the brain to focus on positivity rather than negativity, which is actually not our brain’s natural and default setting. The balance between science and practicality is fair, and Hanson correctly states, “You won’t need a background in neuroscience or psychology to understand these ideas.”

He has handily distilled his practice down to four simple steps “with the acronym HEAL: Have a positive experience. Enrich it. Absorb it. Link positive and negative material so that positive soothes and even replaces negative. (The fourth step is optional.)” Every new technique seemingly has to have an acronym, and this is a good one. He introduces concepts with analogies and anecdotes, including side tables to condense the information, and a section at the end of each chapter called ‘Taking It In’ that summarises the key points. He includes a table that the reader can print and then fill in with their own experiences that they want to affirm, and there are reference notes and a bibliography later in the book for further study. He even includes a section explaining how to use these steps with children, “while naturally adapting them to the child’s age and situation.”

The basic premise is simple: the brain has a built-in negativity bias to pay more attention to the bad than the good. This is a survival technique because the bad can kill you; the formation of implicit memory is negatively biased, to make us avoid harmful things or, as Hanson puts it, “Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”

With advice that borrows a lot from Buddhist teachings, Hanson recommends that we focus on the positive and open our mind and body to happiness and good feelings. He describes how to sit and be with positivity, cultivate inner strengths, and absorb good feelings so that they can be recalled in other situations and used to calm and focus. He is keen to encourage feeling good in the moment and taking in the good through simple experiences like looking out of the window or eating an orange. It may all sound a bit Little Book of Calm, but if increased positivity is good for you, why not give it a try?

He focuses on ‘feeling all right, right now’, which he considers to be one of the greatest strengths, and supports experiencing something as it is rather than grasping after it or wanting more – “let sensations come to you rather than reaching for them”. An experience is made more powerful by being particular to a person and linked to their good memories. Hanson encourages holding onto this pleasant feeling to be able to more easily recall it later, through multimodality; sensing good experiences throughout the whole body and being aware of as many aspects of it as possible.

Although much of this sounds rather pleasant, we still have the capability to resist it, so Hanson isolates these negative blockers to our potential happiness. Some may argue that employing this positivity method is simply denial, but Hanson counters, “You’re not looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses, but rather correcting your brain’s tendency to look at it through smog-tinted ones.” Another specific blocker is the belief that there’s no point in feeling good since some things are still bad. Even a little bit of good will increase happiness: you can take a slice of the pie without waiting or wanting to have the whole thing. It is up to us to learn to enjoy experience, and Hanson is aware that this may be difficult, so he brings it home by appealing to our morals and contemporary ethics. “The fearful, greedy and self-centred reactive setting of the brain promotes a kind of gorging of the earth’s limited resources that is causing deforestation, mass extinctions, and global warming.”

He has crafted such a framework that it is morally questionable not to look after ourselves by accepting more happiness into our life and brain. He has supplied a very straightforward and practical manual outlining how to achieve this goal in which neuroscience meets mindfulness. And if he has made some money along the way, well good for him; I have no feelings of envy or resentment. See, it’s working already.