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, 25 February 2008
There are few theatre designers on the Internet with blogs of their own, but now there's one more. Video designer Tal Yarden, responsible for the fine video work in Ivo van Hove's The Misanthrope at the New York Theatre Workshop earlier this season, is working with van Hove on a new Amsterdam production of Angels in America (his design can also be seen in Liberty City at NYTW, which opens shortly). Yarden concentrates very much on the nuts and bolts of video production in the theatre, but the nuts and bolts perhaps count more than anything else. An education, with illustrations; his blog is here.
From the Netherlands to the antipodes: Alison interviews German playwright Marius von Mayenburg today at Theatre Notes (and at the Guardian) on the eve of the Adelaide premiere of his play Moving Target. Von Mayenburg is unknown here in the U.S., even as his plays appear regularly at the Royal Court in London; in his native Germany he is a man of the theatre in the old sense:
If you were looking for a model of a writer in the theatre, you could do worse than point to Marius von Mayenburg: playwright, translator and, for the past eight years, full-time dramaturge at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, one of Berlin's major theatres. As he says, for a playwright he has the ideal job: it may at times be stressful, it may deprive him of sleep or even sometimes interfere with his own writing: but on the other hand, he is right where the action is.
"All my work is somehow related to dramaturgy," says Mayenburg. "I react to the traditions we are working with in the theatre, I react to the actors. And in my work, I am reading all the time. I'm always looking for what's 'missing,' for what isn't being addressed in the plays around me, and then I try to write those plays myself."
Better that than writing the plays that are already there, over and over again; good to have his own theatre for it, too. More here.
Posted at 11.55 am in /Miscellaneous
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Monday, 25 February 2008
"The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long, in a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing. And it is then a little breath of fulfilment revives the dead longings and a murmur is born in the silent world, reproaching you affectionately with having despaired too late. The last word in the way of viaticum." The condition of theatre minima is to present with the discipline of the aphorism and the anecdote (for time is short) a contemplation of the symbol-making human body in abjection: through contemplation, compassion. Prior to contemplation is experience, however, the investigation of the abject qualities of the solitary self, the probing of the wound, filled with infection. Because this horrifies (even beyond the viaticum of that contemplation), the dramatist is alone in his probing -- perhaps he seeks out the theatre, ultimately, both to gather company (I fear this is a hopeless and lonely task) and to share in communion of contemplation (which a media-saturated world doesn't desire). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are neither new nor old in demonstrating the means by which one human being can render another abject; the guilt of birth that leads to violence against another, instead of a recognition of the abject within the self. The twentieth-century gives us more effective tools for this, the technic as advanced as technology can be, but flesh reconceived as filth in the camp or beneath the sun of a nuclear explosion is a question of the cleverness of the contemporary human mind, not a novelty itself. (At least in Europe or Asia; in my experience there is precisely no room for this yet in the ideology that now drives the American theatre in nearly all its varieties; the historical imagination that permits us to see the past in the ground we walk upon and in ourselves as the children of the past does one thing: it prepares us.) Sophocles and Shakespeare knew this, this rendering of the human subject as object for refusal, as filth (Philoctetes, Oedipus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida) in the eyes of others.
In a creative community the abject can only be brushed upon, for abjection is solely recognized through the sensual experience felt only by that primary object, the individual human body: language the scalpel and probe of the self, alone. Contemplation is a different matter: it is the individual creation of a written play for the stage that permits collective contemplation, that provides those tools for the creative performative body; the dramatist begins to describe a circle which can only be completed by a performer, but this doesn't work the other way around. So the sentence quoted above, from Malone Dies, needs the light of day (as well as the novel from the conclusion of which it is drawn), needs to be prior to theatre: it is only after it is written that the dramatist can begin to write, a few months later, the first lines of the first draft of Waiting for Godot. Compassion must arise through personal, physical recognition if it is not to be an abstract thing, a mere self-serving slogan. Recognition is only possible through sight and sound and touch, all the bodied physical senses, never through mere thought, a puling pity and progressive politics. Theatre trains light, white and laser-like, on the abject, so that the individual audience member can more clearly recognize it as self and other -- as the intersection of subject and object, both and neither -- and have compassion for it.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 9.04 am in /Organum
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