Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Monday, 05 November 2007
In re Andrew Field's comments on form and content in political theatre at his first Guardian blog post and various comments at Ms. Croggon's blog.
Part I of the Organum was recently reposted here.
The object who knows. The performer is privileged object on the stage: she is the Object Who Knows, the displayed perspective of tragedy. She is the figure in the physical landscape who sees it from inside, something quite beyond the poet, and in that sense lives within his construct. But because she lives within it, she is, unlike him, surrounded by it, must make her way. The performer who is brave, tenacious, is willingly absorbed by her surroundings, but in that absorption her power is her own consciousness. So she has power over performance, she shapes the air as much as the other objects and performers on the stage. The poet gives her words with which to valorise her consciousness of her condition.
The profoundly political stance of this condition, indeed the politically revolutionary status of erotic tragedy, inheres in the willing valorisation of this consciousness. Performance is an ecstatic falling, all senses open and willing to experience what terrors and joys lie in wait for the tragic consciousness. As privileged Object Who Knows, she demonstrates, to the audience, her courage, her intent to transform the performance space into an arena of sensuous awareness. As the audience may transform their world outside the theatre, armed with her example.
It is amoral work. The seeming frenetic nihilism however is captured and contained within the discipline of training, of the knowledge of how to see, to move, to appear. The performer's body is a landscape within a landscape, explored for her from within, the audience tracing the inner journey through her flesh. She possesses the power of her body to explore conventional morality, to explore transgression, as an individual agent. The meaning is the exploration; in exploration itself is political meaning, experiential possibility, the truly radical political stance. In that sense, the following is far more radically political than too much American theatre that posits itself as such.
From a February 2007 gallery post:
Paul Cava, Listrum Vulgare. Used by permission of the artist.
De causis plantarum. Pressed between the pages of a yellowed book, its thick red leather cover oxidising with age, or a palimpsest under glass: our vision overlaid upon a translucent writing, etched upon flesh, flesh upon flesh between wooden bedposts (antiqued, whether present or past), and all laid atop the seeds contained in berries hanging from the pulsing vine. An openness, her body a blossom, rooted upon his. A finger reached to touch, to disturb, and the page crumbles: sere and flaked, ink, flesh and leaf easy fuel for a wooden match. The intent of the disturbance to participate, but the couple is beyond us, too fragile for our participation. Their pleasure operates from within the veined green, behind the unreadable text, the foolscap of their history and inscription of their coupling. Legs intertwined to weave and thread through the crumbling textures of history, drawing them all to their root, his deep penetration into her, both arched in criminal desire. (See her limbs, fetished in a caressing silk.) She settles on him, full body surrendered, his body a bed for her that surrounds, into which she sinks, as the layers settle upon a tender page, inside a tender book. Under a glass that protects them, from us.
This could remain in light, as torn as a Schwitters collage, but Schwitters you could drive a truck into, you could laugh at the tickets and the numbers, the only travel here is towards the center, the self, not detritus of railroads, instead things themselves. These handwritten words, besides, not torn but fading: ink disappearing in light; dancing letters and figures in retreat from present torture.
In anger and envy the spectator, businessman, politician, puritan and moralist, shatters the glass that protects them, holds them safe in the confines of the curling leaf, the arms that embrace her. If you were to set a match to the sere linen page, this architecture of the dry surface, it would burn quickly, explode, set them free, in eternal memory of each other.
Posted at 8.30 am in /Organum
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