Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
David Mamet today in the Village Voice explains why he is "no longer a 'brain-dead liberal'" (not that he ever was a liberal in the first place, brain-dead or otherwise, whether he considered himself one or not; he's always seemed to me a testosterone-fuelled laissez-faire type; the admiration and affection he displayed for the characters he created in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross always outweighed any putative critical stance towards those characters or the ideologies that drove them). No surprise there. And Sarah Ruhl this week in the New Yorker gets the full-on attention of John Lahr, speaking of admiration and affection; knowing the demographics and editorial slant of The New Yorker, no surprise there either.
Posted at 2.47 pm in /Drama
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Wednesday, 12 March 2008
Hans Holbein:
The Body of Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521)
(See entry for Julia Kristeva's Black Sun below)
I'm on my way out of town for the next week or so. While I'm gone, you're encouraged to see Kristen Kosmas' fine Hello Failure at PS122 and The Break-Up/The Happy Sad at the Flea; also at PS122 is Kevin Augustine's Bride, which begins performances this Sunday, 16 March.
I've received an email or two recently about some of the more theoretical writings on Superfluities Redux, especially the "95 Sentences" and the Organum. Most of the comments have regarded the difficulty and density of some of these texts, for which I offer no excuse; the struggle I have with these ideas is a part of my writing about them. But I thought, as background, I might offer a short list of books on my bedside table, which inform my own writing. It might (or might not) be useful to someone else; I regard them all as having unique implications for drama, tragedy and theatre:
Julia Kristeva's Black Sun. A frequent criticism thrown at contemporary tragedians is that they are pessimistic or dour; Kristeva's study of depression and melancholia nonetheless argues that there is a unique, necessary beauty in the confrontation of loss and catastrophe. Read alongside her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, which implies an extension of the work of Georges Bataille into the contemporary psychoanalysis (and subsequent philosophy) of Lacan, it is hard not to be led directly to the theatre practice of Howard Barker and Sarah Kane -- often painted as pessimists or miserabilists themselves. But they are not. Kristeva demonstrates why.
Howard Barker's Arguments for a Theatre seems to have a permanent place on that bedside table, as indispensible inspiration. Today this attracts me, from the essay "Honouring the Audience": "A new theatre will be over-ambitious. It will not settle for anything less than a full company of actors. The stage should swarm with life. No new writer should be taught economy, no matter what the economy demands. The new writer should be shown that the stage is a relentless space and never a room. If the new writer is taught economy the theatre will itself shrink to the size of an attic. It is probably time to shut the studio theatres in the interests of the theatre." But, at the same time, the tension between this idea and the work of Harold Pinter, which is all about a few people in small rooms and which I'm also re-reading, is fascinating rather than contradictory to me.
The poems of Baudelaire are the starting-point of modernism, but hardly its end-point. In fact, Kristeva's work also extends Baudelaire's project into the novels of Céline, Burroughs and beyond -- from modernism into what is often labelled post-modernism. Apart from demonstrating the uselessness of these distinctions, Baudelaire remains an urban contemporary.
And, along with Barker's essays, on that table semi-permanently there are these and these, not to mention this. And, although it's been missing from this blog for a while, this is ever in easy reach.
Posting will resume on Saturday, 22 March.
Posted at 9.46 am in /Miscellaneous
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