Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Friday, 29 February 2008
Fetish as a transcendence of subject
and object of desire.
(See entry for 1 March.)
There's been much blogosphere discussion of a variety of issues lately (especially this from Mike Daisey, with its resultant controversy), and if I've stayed out of it, it's because I have little to add; greater minds than my own, with more experience of the tensions and anxieties involved, are on these contemporary problems, and more power to them. (I also don't really understand the question involved, that theatre is supposed to serve or fail that bizarre idea of "America" in some way, whatever "America" is, not to mention China, or Australia, or Mozambique, and whether theatre is failing them, too; it scrapes against the intimation that art, by its nature, doesn't possess explicit cultural utility, but touches the individual instead; the idea itself smacks of that curious contemporary Western pragmatism that castrates theatre's possibilities; but I've been obtuse before and will be again.)
I do feel that what's on the stages of these theatres that we're talking about is at least as important as how those plays get there, and really that's all I've been trying to write about. We'd all like to see "more theatre" around America, I'm sure, but there's a McDonald's in every small American town and billions of their hamburgers are sold every year; I don't think you can say that America's physical health has been well-served as a result. That theatre can be once again an intersection of philosophy and poetry, the unique nature of theatre and drama a means of intense entry to that bodied experience of philosophy and poetry, not unlike the status of the ancient theatre, is really all the idea I've been toying with; that bodied nexus is still, often enough, missing in the theatre. There are a few theatre practitioners out there, I know, who believe as I do that compromise in the pursuit of exploring that intersection is fatal, that the stakes are too high to worry about anything but the construction of that philosophical vision and the exploration of the means to join both body and mind in the recognition of its darkest moments. (Of course, this has political and cultural implications as well.) Which means, really, that so long as we've got playwrights and critics making these facile distinctions between feeling and intellect, subjectivity and objectivity, body and word, the work remains urgent.
One of these days I'll get out some more; spring springs for all of us, me included. So apologies for the light posting lately. But here, as every Friday, is a highly selective, prejudiced look at the theatrical week ahead, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 1 March: At the center of the Neue Galerie's Gustav Klimt show is their recent acquisition Adele Bloch-Bauer I, one of Klimt's masterpieces: the ability of the fetish as exemplar of desire to transcend the subject/object dichotomy inherent in desire (note those eyes within the golden textile of the subject's skirt), was perhaps never more explicit than in this portrait. The show itself is a major U.S. retrospective of the artist, featuring eight additional paintings, 120 drawings (many tenderly explicit) and a replica of the receiving parlor of Klimt's second studio. You can also see a full-sized photographic replica of Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, the extraordinary original of which I recently saw for myself at Vienna's Secession building. The exhibition runs through 30 June at 1048 Fifth Avenue at 86th Street.
Sunday, 2 March: Hello Failure, a new play by Kristen Kosmas that previewed at the last Prelude festival, gets a full production which begins tonight at PS122 at 6.30pm (note the early curtain time). It is, according to the Web page, "a sprawling associative neo-realistic comedy of beauty involving seven submariners' wives, one counterfeit civil war ghost, one lusty renegade hairdresser and a poignant potted plant all making it through the day ... barely." Ken Rus Schmoll, late of Amazons and their Men, directs a cast that includes the playwright herself, Aimee Phelan-Deconinck and Maria Striar; through 22 March. PS122 is at 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street; more information and tickets here.
Monday, 3 March: Just arrived on my desk is Lovefuries, a new collection of plays by David Ian Rabey, a Welsh playwright/director and the artistic director of the Lurking Truth theatre company. These most recent plays (two solos -- one for a woman, another for a man -- and a two-hander) explore transgressive desires in the midst of loss and the urge to a self-realization denied by social conventions; The Contracting Sea is a response to Synge's Riders to the Sea that attempts to reify the elemental power of feminine desire to transcend mourning. Rabey is also one of the leading exponents of the work of Howard Barker, though his own work is quite different and just as powerful; I hope to write about it more soon. The book is available for pre-order now from Amazon.
Wednesday, 5 March: The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is offering "Sonic Meditations," a program of solo pieces for percussion performed by David Schotzko, tonight at The Tank, 279 Church Street between Franklin and White at 7.00pm. Schotzko will perform five pieces, including Alvin Lucier's "Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra for Solo Amplified Triangle" and Iannis Xenakis' "Psappha for Solo Percussion." Tonight's program is the first in a new series, ICETank, which will feature members of ICE in intimate and unusual programs on the first Wednesday of every month.
Thursday, 6 March: Up at the Segal Center, members of the Target Margin Theater company will discuss their recent two-year series "On the Greeks." The company's artistic director David Herskovits and others will also preview their upcoming production of Aristophanes' Frogs. (As you might imagine, this two-hear project has particular interest for me.) The program is free and begins at 6.30pm at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue; more information here.
Friday, 7 March: Performances begin this week for Ken Urban's The Happy Sad and Tommy Smith's The Break-up, both written for the Flea Theater's Bats company; there's a preview tonight at 9.00pm. For this commission, Ken's written his first musical, a comic one-acter about New Yorkers who "make unfortunate choices about love and sex"; Smith's play is about a man who falls in love with his drug dealer, "with disastrous results," the press release says. Both plays are directed by Sherri Kronfeld in the Flea's small downstairs space at 41 White Street, between Broadway and Church; the show officially opens on 22 March and runs through 7 April. Tickets at OvationTix, and to learn more about the show, drop by the Flea's Web site.
Posted at 9.15 am in /Openings
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