Diane Cilento, Karnak & the Spirit of Performance

Abstract

Diane Cilento: Karnak and The Spirit of Performance, makes the bold assertion that Cilento, an Australian actor who came to prominence in London in the nineteen fifties and swinging sixties, occupies a position of major significance in a chain of esoteric thinking stretching from the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff (1866-1949), through his acolyte, the British academic and author John G. Bennett (1897-1974), who passed on the tradition to Cilento during her time at his International Academy for Continuous Education at the Sherborne school in the UK. This thesis tests that claim, tracing Cilento’s career and early life to identify the biographical and personal context which led Cilento to a series of key encounters and experiences throughout those decades, and her subsequent vocation and commitment to the tradition of Fourth Way teachings and Sufi traditions in the nineteen seventies, most remarkably in her establishing her own school ‘Karnak’ in 1979 and twelve years later building a four hundred seat amphitheatre playhouse Karnak, committed to those practices, in the Daintree rainforest of Far North Queensland.

Dimensions of Cilento’s relationship with the indigenous Kuku Yalanji people of Mossman Gorge are scrutinized in the latter part of the thesis through the production of her laser show at the Karnak Playhouse Creation. The dissertation examines Cilento’s centrality not only within the dissemination of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way pedagogy but earlier in the formative stages of the major cultural and social movements which took place globally in the post war decades and why she viewed herself as Australia’s ‘Last Pioneer Woman’.