Solo Performance as Vision Quest: One-Person Shows as Spiritual Journey

BY NICOLE LAU

The solo performer stands alone on stage—no ensemble to hide behind, no scene partners to share the burden, no one to catch them if they fall. This is not just theatrical choice; it's spiritual ordeal. The one-person show is a vision quest, a shamanic journey into the wilderness of the self, a pilgrimage through personal mythology that transforms both performer and witness. Like the seeker who goes alone into the desert or forest to confront their demons and discover their truth, the solo performer enters the empty stage to excavate their story, embody their shadows, and return with medicine for the community. This is confession as performance art, autobiography as ritual, the self as both subject and object of transformation.

The Vision Quest: Solitary Ordeal as Initiation

Before examining solo performance, we must understand the vision quest—the cross-cultural practice of solitary spiritual ordeal:

Native American vision quest: The seeker goes alone into wilderness, fasting and praying, seeking vision and guidance from the spirit world

Desert fathers and mothers: Christian hermits withdrawing to Egyptian desert for solitary contemplation and spiritual combat

Buddhist retreat: Monks entering solitary meditation for extended periods, confronting mind's demons

Walkabout: Aboriginal Australian rite of passage, young people journeying alone through wilderness

Dark night of the soul: Mystics' solitary passage through spiritual crisis and emptiness

The vision quest's elements:

• Solitude: No one to rely on, no one to perform for, alone with self and spirit
• Ordeal: Physical and psychological challenge that breaks down ordinary consciousness
• Confrontation: Meeting what you've avoided—fears, shadows, truths
• Vision: Receiving insight, guidance, or transformation through the ordeal
• Return: Bringing the vision back to community, sharing the medicine

The solo performance follows this exact structure. The stage is the wilderness. The performance is the ordeal. The audience is the community awaiting the vision.

The Empty Stage as Sacred Wilderness

When the solo performer enters the empty stage, they enter liminal space—neither fully ordinary reality nor fully other, a between-zone where transformation becomes possible.

The empty stage is:

The desert: Barren, unforgiving, offering no comfort or distraction

The forest: Dark, mysterious, full of unknown dangers and hidden wisdom

The mountain: Elevated, isolated, closer to the divine

The void: Emptiness from which all form emerges

The mirror: Reflecting back only what the performer brings

This emptiness is essential. In ensemble work, you can hide in the group, deflect attention, share responsibility. Solo, there's nowhere to hide. Every moment of emptiness, every silence, every failure is visible, undeniable, yours alone.

This is the wilderness's teaching: you are alone, you are exposed, you must face what you've brought with you.

Autobiography as Mythology

Most solo performances are autobiographical—the performer telling their own story. But the best solo work transforms personal history into universal mythology.

The process:

Personal story: "This happened to me"

Archetypal pattern: "This is a pattern that happens to humans"

Mythic resonance: "This is the eternal story being told again"

Universal truth: "This reveals something about existence itself"

Examples:

Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia: Personal experience of being in a movie becomes meditation on American imperialism, complicity, and the search for meaning

Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror: Interviews about Crown Heights riots become exploration of identity, race, and truth's multiplicity

Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk with Me: Sleep disorder becomes metaphor for avoiding life's challenges and the necessity of waking up

The solo performer is not just sharing their story—they're discovering the myth they've been living, the archetype they embody, the universal pattern their particular life reveals.

This is Joseph Campbell's hero's journey applied to autobiography: the ordinary person (you) receives a call (your story demands to be told), faces trials (the ordeal of performance), gains insight (understanding your life's meaning), and returns with the elixir (the gift of your story to the community).

Multiple Characters: Embodying the Psyche

Solo performers often play multiple characters—parents, lovers, enemies, strangers. But psychologically, these characters are all aspects of the performer's psyche made external and visible.

When the solo performer becomes their mother, they're not just imitating—they're:

• Embodying the internalized mother, the mother-imago that lives in their psyche
• Giving voice to the mother-aspect of themselves
• Exploring the mother-child dynamic from both positions
• Integrating the mother's perspective into their own understanding

This is:

• Gestalt therapy: The empty chair technique, dialoguing with different parts of self
• Internal Family Systems: Recognizing and relating to the multiple selves within
• Jungian active imagination: Giving voice to complexes and archetypes
• Psychodrama: Enacting internal conflicts externally

The solo performer's stage becomes a theater of the psyche, where all the internal voices get bodies, where the invisible cast of characters that populate our inner world become visible.

This is shadow work—the performer must embody not just the characters they love but the ones they hate, not just the voices they agree with but the ones they resist. To play your abuser, your critic, your enemy is to integrate those energies rather than simply reject them.

The Performer as Shaman: Journey and Return

The solo performer's journey mirrors the shamanic journey:

Preparation: Rehearsal as spiritual practice, preparing body and psyche for the ordeal

Separation: Leaving ordinary reality (backstage) to enter sacred space (stage)

Descent: Going into the underworld of memory, trauma, shadow

Encounter: Meeting the spirits (characters, memories, truths) that inhabit that realm

Retrieval: Bringing back the medicine (insight, healing, story)

Return: Coming back to ordinary reality transformed

Integration: Sharing the medicine with the community (the audience)

The solo performer is psychopomp—guide of souls—leading the audience through territories of human experience they might not enter alone. The performer goes first, into the darkness, and returns to say: "I went there. I survived. Here's what I found."

Confession and Catharsis: The Healing Power of Witness

Many solo performances are confessional—revealing secrets, shames, traumas that have been hidden. This is not exhibitionism; it's ritual healing.

The confession requires:

Vulnerability: Exposing what you've protected, revealing what you've hidden

Courage: Speaking what you've been afraid to speak

Witness: The audience holding space for the revelation

Acceptance: The audience's continued presence despite the revelation

Integration: The performer integrating what they've revealed through the act of revealing it

This is:

• Catholic confession: Speaking sins to receive absolution
• 12-step sharing: Telling your story to the group for healing
• Therapeutic disclosure: Speaking trauma to process and integrate it
• Truth and reconciliation: Public testimony as path to healing

The audience becomes witness in the sacred sense—not just watching but holding, not just observing but participating in the healing. Their presence, their attention, their acceptance creates the container that makes the confession transformative rather than merely exposing.

The performer discovers: I can speak this truth and not die. I can be seen in my shame and still be loved. I can reveal my wound and it becomes my medicine.

The Audience as Community: Collective Healing

Solo performance creates unique intimacy between performer and audience. The performer speaks directly to us, looks at us, includes us. We're not distant observers—we're companions on the journey.

The audience's role:

Witness: Holding space for the performer's revelation

Mirror: Reflecting back recognition, acceptance, understanding

Community: The tribe gathered to receive the vision quester's return

Co-healer: The performer's healing is incomplete without the audience's reception

The exchange:

The performer gives: vulnerability, truth, story, medicine

The audience gives: attention, acceptance, recognition, witness

Both are transformed: the performer through being seen, the audience through seeing

This is why solo performance often feels more intimate than ensemble work—it's one person's soul speaking directly to our souls, no mediation, no distance, no protection.

The Marathon Solo: Endurance as Spiritual Practice

Some solo performers create marathon works—performances lasting many hours or even days:

Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia: Three hours of monologue

Taylor Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music: 24 hours performed over multiple days

Mike Daisey's All the Faces of the Moon: Six hours of storytelling

The marathon solo is:

Endurance ordeal: Physical and mental challenge that induces altered states

Trance induction: Extended duration shifts consciousness for performer and audience

Ritual time: Stepping outside ordinary time into sacred, mythic time

Communal ceremony: Audience and performer undergoing transformation together

This is:

• Vision quest fasting: Endurance creating conditions for vision
• Meditation retreat: Extended practice inducing breakthrough
• Pilgrimage: The journey itself as transformative ordeal
• Initiation rite: Proving readiness through sustained challenge

The marathon solo proves that performance can be genuine spiritual practice, not just representation of it.

The Rehearsal Process: Preparation as Spiritual Discipline

Creating a solo show requires months or years of rehearsal—alone, in a room, working and reworking the material. This solitary practice is spiritual discipline:

Daily practice: Showing up consistently, like meditation or prayer

Self-confrontation: Facing your material, your limitations, your resistance

Refinement: Cutting what doesn't serve, keeping what's essential

Embodiment: Making the story live in your body, not just your mind

Surrender: Letting the work shape you as much as you shape it

The solo performer becomes intimate with their material in a way ensemble performers don't—you live with this story, alone, for months. It becomes part of you. You become part of it.

This is:

• The monk's cell—solitary practice over years
• The artist's studio—alone with the work
• The writer's desk—daily confrontation with the blank page
• The mystic's cave—sustained solitary seeking

Practical Applications: Solo Performance Wisdom for Self-Discovery

Non-performers can engage solo performance principles:

Tell your story: Write or speak your autobiography, discovering the myth you're living.

Embody multiple selves: Give voice to different aspects of your psyche—the critic, the child, the wise elder.

Practice confession: Reveal what you've hidden to trusted witnesses—healing through being seen.

Undertake solo ordeals: Create challenges that require you to face yourself alone—retreats, fasts, pilgrimages.

Find your witnesses: Cultivate community that can hold space for your truth.

Transform personal to universal: Discover the archetypal patterns in your particular story.

Return with medicine: Share what you've learned through your ordeal with your community.

The Eternal Solo Journey

We are all solo performers in the theater of our lives. We each stand alone on the stage of our existence, telling our story to whoever will listen, hoping to be seen, hoping to be understood, hoping our particular truth reveals something universal.

The solo performer's courage is the courage we all need: to stand alone, to speak our truth, to reveal our wounds, to share our medicine, to trust that our story matters, that our vision has value, that our journey—however particular, however strange—contains wisdom for the tribe.

The stage is empty. The spotlight waits. The audience gathers. And the solo performer steps forward, alone, to begin the journey.

You are alone. You are seen. Your story is medicine. Tell it.