Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Thursday, 17 April 2008
Howard Barker on actors:
"[Actors] responded to his text because they needed to speak, and to speak to the speech's limits. Because of this profound need in the soul of the actor, Barker loved them, but those he loved best never permitted this pure instinct to become contaminated either by vanity or the corrosive effects of the cult of entertainment. He had a vision of acting as a form of religious practice, which in its most spiritual manifestation became an ecstasy, an ecstasy in which the actor would not know himself. In this condition of ecstasy the audience would be delivered from the requirement to criticise, it would in effect be seduced into a condition of receptivity which abolished values, politics, morality from the stage and enabled it to enter the realm of authentic tragedy. Speech would not be rendered in the terms of conventional realism. Its metaphorical and rhythmic character effectively eliminated any of the associative qualities so esteemed in naturalistic theatre. Barker did not want his audience to identify with the stage character, he required them to be overtaken by surprise and to admit surprise. His world was not the world as the realists struggled to understand it. Yet by its profound and desperate searching it surpassed the realists by its realism ... not all actors possessed the capacity or the will for this practice, for its disciplines were severe and the public rewards – given the status of Barker's theatre – limited ..."
Howard Barker/Eduardo Houth
A Style and Its Origins (2007)
(ellipses in original)
I would only urge that one consider adding the word
"dramatists" to the word "actors" in the above excerpt. While expression
with the pen and
expression with the speaking and moving body call upon different
disciplines and trainings, there is a sense in which the dramatist is the
ur-
The dramatist must too know acute ecstasy and suffering before he can translate it to the words that he passes along to the performer. The sympathetic marriage of dramatic and performative impulse, the marriage of performer, dramatist and word, is clear and necessary. The director paints and designs in the staging of these impulses. But he cannot know, in his external role, the terror that gives rise to the ecstatic wonder of the dramatist and performer in the paroxysms of creation. It passes through him, but he keeps none of it. The written and spoken text of the body takes center stage again.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 2.05 pm in /Organum
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