Superfluities Redux by George Hunka Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City: Vienna's Burgtheater

Tuesday, 07 July 2009

Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Tomorrow I travel to Wales to deliver a paper and otherwise meet new friends, find new aesthetic encouragement and generally recharge the batteries. Among the demands of a day job and a new daughter, I'll confess that it has been difficult to keep the fires stoked, especially in imagining a theatre that, because of its demands, demands more from me. In New York there is little return on investment, perhaps in Europe more. I will not be blogging from the conference (as they say about Las Vegas, what happens in Aberystwyth stays in Aberystwyth), so here there will be a hiatus, with no promises of a specific return date.

Posted at 9.02 am in /Miscellaneous

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Thursday, 02 July 2009

Upcoming

The Heiner Müller/Robert Wilson Quartett, coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall (Photo: Pascal Victor)

Beginning at Performance Space 122 this weekend, younger experimental artists take both stages through 26 July in the undergroundzero festival. The festival, curated by Paul Bargetto and produced by East River Commedia in association with Collective:Unconscious, offers fifteen full productions and five staged readings, including new work from Blessed Unrest (an adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov) and Thinking Person's Theater (She of the Voice, adapted by Eliza Bent from a short story by Hari Kunzru, directed by José Zayas). Tickets for each production are $15, little more than the price of a movie. Full information on the festival and ticketing information is here; come out and support the next generation of theatre's innovators.

Casting an eye over contemporary New York theatre, a look back at the last generation of theatre's innovators would also be a good idea. Tracing Grotowski's Path: Year of Grotowski in New York, the year-long celebration of the Polish director's career, concludes in July with On Grotowski and His Legacy, a three-day event at the 2009 Lincoln Center Festival that includes a panel discussion with Grotowski's artistic heir Thomas Richards and NYU's Richard Schechner as well as two films at the Walter Reade Theater. Tracing Grotowski's Path is co-sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute and NYU's Performance Studies Department. Information on 13 July's panel discussion (which is free) here, more on the 11-12 July film program here.

Finally, a save-the-date for Robert Wilson's production of Heiner Müller's Quartett, starring Isabelle Huppert, which comes from France's Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe to BAM's Next Wave Festival this November. This will be a rare opportunity to see an example of this work (one of Müller's most remarkable plays, based on Les Liaisons dangereuses) from two notorious theatre artists; individual tickets go on sale on 8 September. More information here, and below is a sample of the production from its French premiere:

Posted at 8.32 am in /Upcoming

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Wednesday, 01 July 2009

Organum

Being modern. However postmodernism may be defined, it is clearly considered by its theorists to be subsequent to the Modernist period at least in time. But more than that, it is a reaction (a progressive reaction, according to its enthusiasts) against the tenets of the Modernist movement, tenets that arose from the need for a radical individualism, mythic, tragic and urban, recognized from within the conditions existing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Sociologist Georg Simmel noted, "The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life." It also self-consciously married form to content, and, through this metaphor, individual body to spirit, as inseparable. While Modernism suffered its greatest challenges through the two world wars of the early twentieth century, these wars also lent validity to Modernism's central assumptions: that the comprehensive worldview offered by the Enlightenment could not forestall catastrophe, a conclusion that the Modernists had suspected for years. In response the postmodern mind turned from this conclusion and posited the body (shorn of spirit, which was either non-existent or as irrelevant as a personal god) as merely another image in a world of mass-produced images: postmodernism as a cowardly escape, howevermuch fun it might be. Here the individual was a mere construct of social forces and the images that surrounded him, lacking autonomy and discouraging imagination. The self and the art product was a culturally-produced palimpsest, nothing more nor less. In this sense postmodernism exhibited an even more dulling pessimism than it charged Modernism with: the "nothing to be done" that kept Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot, for if the individual was a mere construct, why not surrender to the Culture Industry and the institutions comprising it? (Beckett himself did "do something," writing plays, prose and poetry that examined and critiqued this condition.)

Though Modernism as a literary movement may be considered anachronistic, it is not for that reason invalid, and it may continue to give courage. In the theatre, some are seizing the Modernist perspective again in response to the postmodern mashup, the latter relevant to culture perhaps but irrelevant to the autonomous self, a warm and comforting blanket in which to wrap fear and trembling. At next week's Howard Barker conference in Wales, Elisabeth Angel-Perez's keynote speech is titled "Reinventing Grand Narratives: Barker's Challenge to Postmodernism," intimating that the broad historical and philosophical canvases of the Modernist project continue to be an antagonistic response to postmodernism. This is not to suggest that Barker considers himself a Modernist; this I don't know; but his favorite philosopher, Theodor Adorno, has the reputation of defending Modernism against the encroachment of the postmodernist Culture Industry. A Modernist theatre may partake of the formal explosions of musical modernists Schoenberg and Webern early in the twentieth century. In 1938, Adorno wrote, "The terror which Schoenberg and Webern spread, today as in the past, comes not from their incomprehensibility but from the fact that they are all too correctly understood. Their music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing. They are called individualists, and yet their work is nothing but a single dialogue with the powers which destroy individuality – powers whose 'formless shadows' fall gigantically on their music. In music, too, [and just as much in contemporary theatre – GH] collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity." This was prior to Hiroshima and Auschwitz, which still loomed as formless shadows over Asia, Europe and the modern world. The world remains just as modern.

Posted at 8.56 am in /Organum

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