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, 21 April 2008

The play as erotic aphorism. There is an intense need in the decision to work aphoristically: that there is so much to say, so little time to say it in, with too few resources. The most economically and environmentally sound of method, aphorism squeezes each last theatrical, aural and literary drop from each and every movement, sound and word. (So it is the most lyrical, too, of forms.) The fragility of time is such that with each second we can slip from it; millions in the past century have learned that time can be torn asunder with a knock at the door or a flash in the sky (millions more in the last, most technological, democratic, humanistic and enlightened century than in any century before, a fact which interests no-one, certainly not in the theatre). Those who create dramatic aphorisms tie crisp, brisk Gordian knots of theatre. The well-turned, tight bodied word explores a possibility of unexpected ecstasy in the surprise of its making, in the connection of flesh and sound. Destroy this with analysis or with meaning-making, and you can't put it back together again.

As with Webern and Celan, each sound, each word expands in all dimensions of space and time simultaneously. Even the interstitial silences and stillnesses bear weight. Calling attention to themselves (not out of the self-love of the Broadway musical and the downtown epic alike, but rather because there is nothing else to hear or see), they demand tender attention and compassion for the painful rips they inflict upon the darkness.

Environmentally, too: ambitious design sprawls like a soft, manicured and unnecessary suburb around a hard city of experience. And ambitious longer forms rob the audience of time better spent with their lives than with our art. That we take their money in the name of entertainment is indicative of our absorption in the culture industry. "Of course, it's very funny, too": these words the self-serving rationale of a dead spirit, for we drown in comedy from every screen and page. There is no shortage of it. If we demand it even from our most sublime ambitions – ambitions beyond the lachrymose or the insipid – we reveal that we have been absorbed into that industry to the point of disappearance. We are no longer here, but within the hysterical screen.

In building a theatre that is necessary (necessary because like all necessary things it is imaginable and does not yet exist), I don't need a space of more than 50 seats, nor more than a few performers, nor the run of more than a half-dozen performances, nor more than an hour of an individual's time; a call even for this is self-aggrandising. But one must offer something hard, and tight, and uncompromising, word, performance, self and body inextricably bound, like the most effective aphorisms, in the exchange.

Other material:

Organum II (in progress)

Organum I

"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)

Posted at 3.27 pm in /Organum

Permanent link to this story

join the theatre minima mailing list