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, 29 May 2008
Chris Shinn on Bill Henson, Agency, Sexuality and Power
NOTE: I should point out here that my posting of Chris's
comments below shouldn't be taken to indicate my agreement or disagreement
with any of his opinions (as if this matter is reducible to
black-and-white considerations of right and wrong). In particular, I would
suggest that Chris's idea that "society must keep in place a taboo against
incest and adult-
This morning playwright Christopher Shinn posted some thoughts in the comments section to my original post on Bill Henson. In the interests of maintaining a broader, open discussion on these issues – which will, I'm sure, arise again – I reprint them below, with his kind permission:
"It's actually very dangerous to decide whether these photographs are acceptable or not by interviewing the subjects of the photographs, for any number of reasons. Anna Freud showed us that people who are abused often exhibit 'identification with the aggressor' as a defense against trauma. So a former subject claiming the photographs did no harm should not be used to exonerate the photographer, as this may be an ego defense against indescribable and even unrepresentable pain.
"Conversely, a subject claiming that photographs did harm them should not be used to determine whether or not the photographer did something immoral or illegal. There are any number of reasons that a person who has suffered trauma elsewhere might displace the blame for this trauma onto a less fraught person than a primary object (like a parent). Scapegoating is all too common, as I think George's comments imply – child sexual abuse did not begin with photography and will not end with the prosecution and persecution of Bill Henson.
"I think this issue forces us to think abstractly and philosophically as well as scientifically (keeping in mind that science is ideological as well) about incredibly 'subtle' and 'complex' issues (as Coetzee calls them in one of the links above).
"I am deeply moved by JFK's testimony [in the comments section of this post] because of the larger and deeper issues of
agency, autonomy, power, and submission in human life that it makes me
think about. Because I agree with Freud that infantile and childhood
sexuality are universal and foundational, and that therefore society must
keep in place a taboo against incest and adult-
Posted at 12.49 pm in /Politics
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Thursday, 29 May 2008
Those who may have missed the recent Met production of Tristan und Isolde will have the opportunity to see it on television tonight, when it runs as part of PBS's Great Performances series on WNET Channel 13 at 8.00pm. Deborah Voigt and Robert Dean Smith take the title roles under the baton of James Levine in a production by Dieter Dorn. I wrote about this production earlier this year here.
Posted at 9.53 am in /Music
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Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Coverage on the Henson controversy from the New York Times, the BBC and the Guardian (UK).
Posted at 2.26 pm in /Politics
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Wednesday, 28 May 2008
This online exhibition from the Staats- und
Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky is a fascinating
illustrated version of the daily journal that Samuel Beckett kept during
his first visit to the German city from October through December 1936. The
day-
The exhibition also features fine photographs from the period, as well as a virtual "Kunsthalle" featuring art that Beckett saw during his visit. Admission is delightfully free; the Web site, once again, is here.
Posted at 1.27 pm in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 27 May 2008
While the Henson controversy is not explicitly a US concern, those following the story will be interested to read the open letter of support from members of the Creative Australia 2020 Summit. Its signatories include actress Cate Blanchett, musician Daryl Buckley, composer Liza Lim and many other bright lights of the Australian creative community. The Sydney Morning Herald has a story about this today, as well as a few interviews with subjects who have posed for Henson in the past.
Implicitly it's very much a US concern. See Jonathan Jones' Guardian blog post on the censorship of a photograph by American photographer Nan Goldin, as well as this Providence Journal story about photographer Sally Mann and a play based on her work and the censorship issues that continue to revolve around its exhibition. Distance and geography matter less these days, though; in this Internetted age, the local is global.
Posted at 10.09 am in /Politics
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Friday, 23 May 2008
"Revolting," says Australian PM
Kevin Rudd:
A photograph by Bill Henson
Australian photographer Bill Henson is currently facing charges of creating and displaying child pornography (more specifically, "publishing an indecent article") relating to an exhibition of his work in Sydney. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has described Henson's images as "revolting," and Australian police have announced their intention of prosecuting the artist.
The 13-year-old subjects of Henson's photographs do not appear to be enrapt in states of sexual excitement or posed in positions that explicitly depict intercourse (though they may not be particularly chaste either); instead, it's the very display of these fragile bodies, uniquely young and therefore innocently vulnerable (though "innocence" itself is a condition that Henson may be exploring), that offends. That adolescent sexuality is all-pervasive in this commercial culture as a means to sell products -- whether they're promoted through commercials during Gossip Girl or offered as iPod downloads after a performance by one of any number of scantily-clad adolescent pop-stars -- is apparently not at issue. Henson's photographs, instead, bring this vulnerability to light, as images and vulnerability that sell nothing. Responding to concerns that his work might provoke disturbing feelings (feelings that can't be catharted through the purchase of a product, anyway), Henson says, "You can't control the way in which individuals respond to the work," adding that his intention is to explore notions of intimacy: "Something which is absolutely inviolate and unknowable." Far from violating his subjects, Henson seeks to express their ambiguous inviolability, without attempting moral judgment or conclusion -- which is not the same thing as violation in the least.
What Rudd and the show's opponents hope is to further marginalize these bodies and images -- to push them further into the dark corners of society, where, in the shadows, they ironically would be even more vulnerable to corruption, violence and harm than in the light that Henson seeks to bring to them. The sickness of the puritan mind is that, through the relentless justification of moral condemnation, it itself imagines these bodies as objects of violence and exploitation, and therefore guarantees the continued curse of the taboo upon expressions and sexualities both mature and otherwise. The puritans themselves imagine the violation and the violence, rendering the bodies objects of shameful desire and disgust (for what can "revolting" mean, other than "disgusting"?). It should be the duty of every artist to condemn these actions by the Australian government, for there are Rudds and puritans everywhere, in every country. As Solzhenitsyn and Kafka have memorably demonstrated, it is one of the conditions of the 20th century that the greatest fear should be that of the knock of the police at the door (whether it's your apartment or the gallery or the theatre in which you show your work), and the disappearance of the individual, at the business end of a policeman's gun, in the night.
Alison Croggon and Chris Boyd have more on the story; Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery has also released a statement. Grossly and crudely censored and mutilated samples of the work in question are here. And so much for the political capital that the Labor Party's Rudd government tried to pile up with the Australia 2020 summit, at least in some quarters; it'll be interesting to see where the dividing line falls on this one.
Posted at 2.54 pm in /Politics
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Tuesday, 20 May 2008
If there is anything that my attendance at the Obies last
night taught
me, it is that there is plenty of theatre (and plenty of reviewers and
critics) to go around. Congratulations to those of my acquaintances and
friends who won awards and grants last night; Peter Ksander, the Two-
Headed Calf troupe and Heidi Schreck all are eminently deserving. I hope
this recognition spurs them on to greater heights.
In the meantime, the evening (along with Alison's post of Sunday) also spurs me to a greater consideration of my own work, which must come first. I wrote in January 2007 of my ambivalence to reviewing as well as writing this blog, and I still feel this ambivalence keenly. So perhaps there will be some slight, near-unnoticeable shift at Superfluities Redux -- more intently concentrated on the aesthetic of my own vision for theatre than a consideration of the aesthetic of others'. They have their own critics and writers, after all; my voice, at least in that arena, will scarcely be missed.
To you, the reader, there will probably be little difference; to me, the writer, there will be a slightly more focused perspective. So fewer reviews (if any), and rather fewer "Night Planners" published each Friday; postings here, too, will be less frequent. I'll continue writing for the Guardian on items of general interest. It will be nice, however, to have an inbox less cluttered with press releases and invitations; evenings for me are now better spent writing my own work than reviewing that of others. I've got three plays in mind right now, another that I hope to produce soon, and they need to have priority. But as I say, there's no lack of information available about New York shows, and no lack of reviews.
A conspiratorial theatre is best pursued in the shadows, on the
margins, and not in the light of day. I'll continue to look forward to
hearing from my co-
Posted at 9.01 am in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Originally posted 20 May 2007.
Though he has watched a decent age pass by,
A man will sometimes still desire the world.
I swear I see no wisdom in that man.
The endless hours pile up a drift of pain
More unrelieved each day; and as for pleasure,
When he is sunken in excessive age,
You will not see his pleasure anywhere.
The last attendant is the same for all,
Old men and young alike, as in its season
Man's heritage of underworld appears:
There being then no epithalamion,
No music and no dance. Death is the finish.Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
And then to go back quickly whence we came. ...
The tragedian's urge is to the pointless description of the light that the chorus of Oedipus at Colonus mentions, its expression through himself. The anatomization of that light is what the artist senselessly is compelled to express (the soul's work), in Beckett's formulation of the artist's activity ("The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express"): as Pozzo insists, "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." It is ironic that the Art of Theatre, then, is pursued in small dark rooms: not a Brechtian showing of the apparatus, but a demonstration of the difficulty of seeing clearly. In pursuit of that clarity the stage is ruthlessly stripped to its own devices: no commingling with television or film allowable. Given the difficulty of the artist's work, it's only fair not to burden him with media not his own.
Tragedy never loses sight of the dark: it is presupposed, the ugliness of existence upon which a human-made beauty is imposed. This is a difficult, sensuous beauty: it is not mere cosmetic prettiness (this is for melodrama). This imposition requires a rejection of Schopenhauer's Quietism: it is a call for action, not resignation. A transgression against the condition of man's illness, a finding of strength after the experience of profound, bitter recognition. And a movement, that expression, towards the awakening of possibilities within a world which would thrust and confine all experience into collective culture's own crude mold -- a mold first created to deny the catastrophic realization experienced at Colonus, and to validate its own illusory status as the only truth.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 8.43 am in /Organum
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Friday, 16 May 2008
"Of the giving of many prizes there
is no end ..."
(Apologies to the author of Ecclesiastes 12:12)
(See entry for 19 May)
A highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest:
Sunday, 18 May: The MCC Playlab Series continues tonight with a staged reading of Sangeet by Ranbir Sidhu. Sidhu's play, "a comedy without manners," is a poetic exploration of multiculturalism in Margaret Thatcher's London, focusing on an ex-strongman from India, a male nurse who leans toward euthanasia for some of his more borderline patients, and their children. Sidhu's plays (I've read this one and True East) are physically and linguistically explosive meditations on race, sex, shame and guilt, uneasy and complex approaches to uneasy and complex questions – a staged reading may not pass along the physical dynamics, but certainly will demonstrate the linguistic. It's free and open to the public; a wine and cheese reception will follow. At Baruch College's Engelman Recital Hall, 25th Street between Lexington and Third. The reading begins at 5.00pm.
Monday, 19 May: Wherefore theatre criticism in New York? John Heilpern of the New York Observer, Jonathan Kalb of HotReview.org and Alexis Soloski of the Village Voice each respond to the question during the panel discussion "New York Theatre Criticism" at the Segal Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, tonight at 6.30pm. It's free and open to the public; more information at the Segal Center Web page here.
And it's unlikely to run very long; Soloski, at least, will be heading downtown later tonight – as one of the judges of this year's Obie Awards, which will be handed out this evening at Webster Hall, she won't want to miss the ceremony to be hosted by Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp. You can watch the ceremony yourself during the first live Webcast of the event; more information at the Obies Web page. And keep an eye out for me; I'll be there too. Though I must promise to keep shtum on the evening itself; what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, as the commercial says.
Tuesday, 20 May: Also this week from the MCC Theater is the world premiere of a new play from the controversial (and my erstwhile correspondent) Neil LaBute, Reasons to be Pretty. LaBute's new play is the third in a trilogy (the first two parts were The Shape of Things and Fat Pig) about America's obsession with physical beauty and the warping effects this obsession has upon American men and women alike. Reasons to be Pretty runs through 5 July; more information here.
Wednesday, 21 May: Something about the Greeks has gotten into
the water (or, more likely, the wine) over at PS122. Following La Femme est Morte, the Shalimar's current
production about Phaedra, Oedipus is in their sights now. The Pan Pan Theatre
of Dublin is offering up Oedipus Loves You, beginning tonight at
8.00pm and running through 1 June. "Pan Pan's punk rock sensibility
strikes a fierce chord in this savvy update of Sophocles' classic drama of
the ultimate dysfunctional family. ... Oedipus is still counselled by the
wise Tiresias, but the sightless sage is now a Freudian analyst and
ex-
Posted at 8.08 am in /Openings
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
But not for long, if the grosses and the response of the vox populi critics are any indication:
Caryl Churchill's 1982 Top Girls had its Broadway premiere last week, and New York Times critic Ben Brantley gave the play a thumbs up. But apparently the "pre-opening buzz ... was mixed." ... The Times sent some poor staffer with a tape recorder to the Biltmore Theatre to get on-the-spot reactions from audience members who left after – and during – the performance. The recordings were duly posted to the Times' web site; the six responses were decidedly mixed. A few loved the play, a few hated it, and a few were puzzled. So it goes.
What this might or might not mean for the future of
non-
UPDATE: On a somewhat related note, Terry Teachout of
the Wall Street Journal considered this year's somewhat uninspiring
Tony contenders a few days ago, and noted the narrow
Broadway-
Would that the Tony Awards would tear down the wall that separates Broadway from Off Broadway! Alas, that will never happen, because the awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing in collaboration with the Broadway League, a trade association whose members are in the business of persuading the public that Broadway is the be-
all and end- all of American theater. The truth, of course, is that the real artistic action is to be found Off Broadway and in America's regional theaters. One of the finest of the latter, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is receiving this year's Regional Theatre Tony Award, the sole occasion on which the Tony nominators deign to acknowledge what everybody who cares about theater already knows, which is that Broadway today is less a center of serious artistic endeavor than a theme park for well- heeled tourists.
Read Terry's full post here.
Posted at 10.40 am in /Guardian
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
"Art is the lie that tells the truth." Much as many would like to place emphasis on the last word of that statement, the simple, unadorned, unqualified direct object of the sentence is "lie" – that is, artifice, as in "art." Whatever truth value may inhere in the experience of theatre, it inheres ex post facto and not within the experience itself. Similarly, there is no "magic" in theatre; if we are to insist on precision, we must insist on art's status as illusionism, as something of this world and not beyond it. In citing the experience of art as supernatural, we deny responsibility for it, and our reaction to it. Theatre is discipline, nothing is accomplished there through the mere wave of a wand. We react through our bodies, in which our souls inhere.
The idea that art is magic or truth is more destructive in the realm of
explicitly political theatre, for explicitly political theatre, more than
any other, insists on its own validity, its own truth-
The art of theatre is a cold hard thing at its heart. It is a
knife-
Yesterday at the theatreVOICE blog, Daily Telegraph theatre critic and University of Strathclyde professor Mark Brown considered the performances of the Free Theatre of Belarus, which was awarded a special Europe Theatre Prize for "stand[ing] up bravely against the repression of one of the ugliest regimes in Europe." Admirable, of course, and the award had the support of Vaclav Havel, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Michael Billington, among others. Witnessing the productions of the FTB, Brown reports, "There was widespread suspicion that the award was a purely political gesture." Brown concludes (and the conclusion is worth quoting at length):
[Howard] Barker, detested though he is by a shamefully large number of people in English theatre, is entirely right when he asserts that a play has no "use." A play is not a spanner, not a blunt instrument, but (it should hardly have to be said) a work of imagination. [Which is not "magical" either in its most profound sense. – GH]
There is nothing revolutionary in the self-
satisfied posturing of the David Edgars and David Hares of this world. The courageous work of the Free Theatre of Belarus irritates, sometimes possibly threatens, their regime, but it offers little to the wider world of theatre. The truly revolutionary implications of theatre emerge in work which, without sentiment and moralism, brings us face-
to- face with the realities of human existence, raising us above the infantilising mediocrity of our day-to-day culture. We find that in the Greek tragedians, of course, and in Shakespeare, at his best. We find it too, if only more English directors and critics could bring themselves to admit it, in Barker.
Brown's entire post, titled "A Play Is Not a Spanner," is here.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 10.11 am in /Organum
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
Gallery: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
Originally posted 10 January 2006.
Manet's large 1863 canvas was first exhibited in the Salon des Refusés (along with James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl and work by Monet and Cézanne), where it was summarily snubbed by Napoleon III as well as by thousands of other attendees of the Salon next door; Le Déjeuner also is often considered the first work that can be truly called "modern art," having obsessed Picasso when he first saw it in 1900. It is one of the very first pieces of "art about art," it is said, defining an avant-garde, and also a demonstration of the ways in which theater is about 100 years behind the other arts. Most theater, anyway.
Manet worked from a classical source of inspiration, specifically the
grouping of three characters at the right-
It's very hard to say, too, how these two distracted gentlemen can be unaware of the very bright and prominent nude sitting next to them (though if they're academics, this is explained quite well), introducing eroticism: more, it's an eroticism that implicates us. Quite unprovocatively, the woman is the only person in the painting who seems to be looking at anyone in particular, and that person she's looking at is us, the perceiver. By being nude, perhaps voluntarily so (she seems unconcerned and not frightened, her clothes, a hat and a dress, in a small pile next to her), she is the unadorned human subject at the center of the painting. She is very brightly lit, the brightest subject in the painting, and the way that perspective works here she is the clearest. Her face, too, is the most detailed, the most clearly depicted of the people in the painting: she has individual identity, unlike the men. The perspective itself is one of the first intimations of Impressionism; as you look into the distance of the painting you see that the background fades, becomes two dimensional, even; smudges and blocks of color.
Given the rather goofy disinterest of the two men and the fetching but somewhat more distant (and for my money similarly erotic) woman in the background, the subject of the painting is no longer the story it tells or the characters it depicts, for these are ultimately unsolvable mysteries, but the relationship between the viewer and the painting itself. The nude invites the viewer into the world of the painting, first by inviting questions as to the situation the painting seems to depict, but finally by drawing all of our attention to her. In that imaginative world we ourselves participate in the mystery of the event of the picnic, her own mystery. Because she is neither nymph nor goddess, though, she is approachable as well. She welcomes us.
Well, she does, so long as we don't turn away from her, as Napoleon III and so many of the attendees of the Salon did nearly 150 years ago. The Manet painting has survived the years as calendar art as well as a controversial album cover which reproduced Manet's masterpiece and ran into considerable legal trouble itself (the female nude, singer Annabella Lwin, was 14 years old at the time the picture was taken). But, despite its status as a classic of 19th-century painting now, it's important to remember the outcry, the accusations of obscurity and social insult that were hurled at the painting when it was unveiled at the Salon des Refusés, the same insults that are hurled at so much avant-garde art today. Said a critic at the time of the Manet painting:
A commonplace woman of demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth. These latter look like schoolboys on a holiday, perpetuating an outrage to play the man. ... This is a young man's practical joke – a shameful, open sore.
The only thing this critic seems to have left out was how ... well, boring it is, which would be the ultimate insult today.
Although the Salon itself was filled with depictions of nudes, it was Manet's that rankled – unidentifiable (though clearly of contemporary origin), unashamed, inviting. And ultimately without the certainty of narrative or historical identity.
What does all this have to do with theater and drama? Well, one of the things it points out it is how far our drama is behind the other arts, about 150 years behind painting in this case. Most of our drama is still playing with Victorian narrative form; as much as there are jokes around the edges of it, "playing with form," that form is not abandoned nearly as much as Manet abandoned conventions of narrative and allegory in 19th-century French painting. But there's more, too: there's the emphasis on light and shadow, rather than shape and detail; and, of course, the implication of the viewer. Manet's nude challenges us to enter the painting, accepting the impossibility of interpreting it, of assuming that if we do so it will grant us meaning. It doesn't. Foreman, too, places people on the stage, staring out at us, inviting us into that world, and we too can reject that meaninglessness, if we wish to do so. But the sensual pleasures it offers in our entering the world of the painting, without preconceived notions, can be revolutionary in changing our way of seeing, as Manet changed the art of painting.
POETRY: A poem by Natalie Scott, "Victorine or Naked Woman in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe," was published in the October 2004 issue of the British poetry magazine South.
Posted at 8.47 am in /Organum/Gallery
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Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Quotes: Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin
A perennial suffering has just as much right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream. For this reason it may have been wrong to write that after Auschwitz poetry could no longer be written. ...
The concept of a resurrection of culture after Auschwitz is illusory and senseless, and for that reason every work of art that does come into being is forced to play a bitter price. But because the world has outlived its own demise it needs art as its unconscious chronicle.
Theodor Adorno
Only for the sake of those without hope, has hope been given to us.
Walter Benjamin
Posted at 8.27 am in /Quotes
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Monday, 12 May 2008
While I busied myself with a new play or two this weekend (even as I sought an actress and/or director for this little piece of work, but as Neil Young memorably said, "Rust never sleeps"), artsjournal.com reposted my comments on creativity and consultants for the Guardian at their NPAC blog. Additional notes from Jason Grote and Scott Walters are appended to the original Guardian post. From Denver to New York to London and back again. I get jet lag just thinking about it.
And, making up for lost time, artsjournal.com recently introduced a third blog about theatre to add to the other two they already host. Philadelphia Inquirer critic Wendy Rosenfield is writing Drama Queen, which "covers theater, dramatic, political or otherwise."
Posted at 8.39 am in /Miscellaneous
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Friday, 09 May 2008
Shalimar Wishes You
a Happy
Mother's Day
(See entry for 14 May)
A highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest:
Saturday, 10 May: The unofficial 2007-2008 Edward Albee theatre season in New York concludes this week with the opening of Occupant, Albee's recent play about sculptor Louise Nevelson. The Signature Theatre Company production stars Mercedes Ruehl and Larry Bryggman under the direction of Pam MacKinnon; Occupant runs through 6 July. More information at the Signature Theatre Company's Web page for the show.
Monday, 12 May: Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna of Poland's TR
Warszawa theatre company will talk to Susan Feldman, artistic director
of St. Ann's Playhouse, about his upcoming Brooklyn production of
Macbeth tonight at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth
Avenue. TR Warszawa is one of Poland's leading contemporary theatre
companies, revisioning theatrical traditions for the contemporary stage;
Jarzyna's production of Medea at Vienna's Burgtheater won the 2007
Nestroy-Preis. The evening is co-presented by the Polish Cultural
Institute, which is almost single-
Wednesday, 14 May: Performance group The Shalimar returns their show, the
whimsically-
Thursday, 15 May: The Ontological-
Posted at 8.44 am in /Openings
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Thursday, 08 May 2008
Normally I don't participate in these blog memes that go around, but
when new-
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
This morning the book nearest to me is Anne Carson's meditation on poetry and eroticism, Eros the Bittersweet, and page 123 opens her discussion of Plato's Phaedrus, which I read myself a few years ago. The corresponding excerpt:
Desire stirs Phaedrus when he gazes at the words of this text (epethumei, 228b) and visible joy animates him as he reads it aloud to Sokrates (234d). Phaedrus treats the text as if it were his paidika or beloved boy, Sokrates observes (236b) and uses it as a tool of seduction, to draw Sokrates beyond the city limits for an orgy of reading in the open countryside (230d-e; cf. 234d). The reading elicits from Sokrates an admission that he himself is a "lover of logos" (andri philologo, 236e; cf. ton logon erastou, 228c). Eros and logos are fitted together in the Phaedrus as closely as two halves of a knucklebone.
That's four sentences, but there are no blog police I know of to come knocking at my door. In any case, I offer the challenge to any five visiting bloggers who care to take a crack at it.
Meanwhile, at better bookstores and magazine stands everywhere, you can
find the May 2008 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, in which
appears my brief review of Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre. In a week or so you
should also be able to find the May 2008 Theater
journal from the Yale School of Drama/
This meme's for you, bloggers. Have at it.
Posted at 8.25 am in /Miscellaneous
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Wednesday, 07 May 2008
Wrestling School Summer Session
Much as I don't regret giving graduate school a miss, here's a semester I wouldn't much mind attending. Howard Barker's Wrestling School will be conducting a Wrestling with Barker Residential School on 3-6 September 2008 on the campus of Exeter University in England. Details from the Wrestling School itself:
A four day residential Summer School led by Wrestling School practitioners exploring the practice of preparing and presenting Howard Barker texts in performance.
Howard Barker and The Wrestling School now produce perhaps some of the most controversial theatre in the UK. These exhilarating but challenging works inspire hatred in some but passionate devotion in countless others.
Why?
What are the characteristics of this work?
What are its guiding principles and governing aesthetics?
Why does it inspire so much pleasure and devotion among performers?
How is this work made to resonate so powerfully in performance?
Is the creative process transformed by the writer as director?The School will be of interest to both the practioner (actor/
director) who wants to gain a greater insight into approaches to presenting Howard Barker's texts on stage and those who wish to take a more academic/ analytical approach to the texts and gain greater understanding of Barker's underlying theories of theatre and the highly individual and groundbreaking aesthetic he has developed over the past 10 years. Outline Content
- Masterclass. Howard Barker directing Wrestling School actors in scene work from more recent works.
- Individual and small group work directed by Wrestling School actors using a representative selection of texts from the last 25 years.
- Poetic text and the actor. Examination of the technical demands and rewards of working with Barker texts. To include preparatory voice work.
- Reading the text. A performer's approach to the text on the page.
- Sounding the text. Practical work in sensing that Barker's texts are the gestural in sound; the excitation of the text into the palate and the mind is a somatic experience, which when fully articulated, renders a Barker text clear, exhilarating and real.
- Talk by a writer/researcher on approaches to analysing Howard Barker’s texts and his theories of the Theatre of Catastrophe.
- Theatre of Catastrophe. Barker talks about some of the underlying theories in his approach to his writing.
- The development of an aesthetic philosophy. Howard Barker reflects on the development of the company's style.
- Howard Barker in a Q&A session with leading Wrestling School practitioners.
It will include an opportunity to observe Howard Barker directing company members in the initial exploration of an as yet unpublished and unperformed new text.
Leaders. The Summer School will be led by experienced Wrestling School practitioners, including Melanie Jessop and Gerrard McArthur, with Howard Barker. Leading writers on Barker will also contribute.
More information on attending the residential school, as well as an application, is available at the Wrestling School's Web site.
Posted at 8.47 am in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 06 May 2008
"[Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett] had met in Berlin in 1976. Feldman wanted to do something with Beckett for the Rome Opera. Beckett indicated that he didn’t like opera – and Feldman agreed. Out of this understanding grew the collaboration on Neither (1977), and Beckett's pleasure with that work accounts for the fact that he recommended Feldman for the music of Words and Music ten years later. ...
"[Feldman said:] 'I never liked anyone else's approach to Beckett. I felt it was a little too easy; they were treating him as if he were an existentialist hero, rather than a tragic hero. And he's a word man, a fantastic word man. And I always felt that I was a note man. I think that's what brought me to him. A kind of shared longing: this saturated, unending longing that he has, and that I have.'"
Samuel Beckett and Music
Edited by Mary Bryden
Posted at 4.14 pm in /Quotes
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Tuesday, 06 May 2008
Originally posted 13 December 2006.
Christian Schad, Zwei Mädchen (1928)
Oil on canvas, 109.5 x 80 cm.
Galerie Brockstedt, Hamburg
She does not need us for her pleasure; she needs us if she is to be
seen. Does she stay with us? Our decision, ultimately. Five years before
Germany drifts into its twelve year sleep, her face expresses a lovely,
guiltless audacity. We are rendered spectators. We can be shaken, drawn
in, if we allow it. Perhaps she will be censored, rendered invisible,
unlike the Laocoön, which the church prefers. In so
far as this is a
painting, it is a sensual Laocoön, a Laocoön of
the promise of ecstasy.
This flesh of her thigh as much non-
Perhaps Sophocles could have written a play for her as well, just as tragic. A spectator can welcome her experience as the spectator might welcome that of Oedipus.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 9.32 am in /Organum/Gallery
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Monday, 05 May 2008
According to Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett's 1963, 15-
Play, as its title indicates, is ironically self-
I disagree with Cohn, though, when she asserts, "For all the brilliance
of performers who have to subdue their theatricality, only readers can
appreciate Beckett's dramatic skill in Play. ... Play is not
only to be looked at and listened to, but it is also to be read." Of
course this play, as well as Not I, makes extreme demands upon both
performer and audience when it comes to the communicability of the text,
but this demand is a necessary and sufficient part of the theatrical
experience here, however helpful a familiarity with the text might be. The
demand is a component of the work's urgency. Gone are the pratfalls,
falling trousers and banana peels of Beckett's middle career plays and
novels. We're left now with the use of a can opener (and not the electric or rotary-
More on Samuel Beckett here.
Posted at 9.01 am in /Videos
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Friday, 02 May 2008
Spring has sprung. With it, the traditional theatre season is coming to an end (though festival season is just around the corner). Instead my mailbox is filling up with notes about upcoming fundraisers. This week, two shockingly affordable events will support the efforts of some fine theatre folk indeed.
And they'll be fun. Tomorrow, Saturday 3 May, the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's Incubator series is hosting a benefit party for its summer artists -- a rejection letter party, no less. Attendees who bring along a rejection letter from anyone (a producer, a grant organization, or even a parent) for posting to a "rejection wall" will get $5 off the $15 admission. The organizers also promise a DJ and a barbeque. Says producer Shannon Sindelar:
The strategy behind the party is to create a situation where everyone in the arts community who wants to attend can afford it ... and join in making light of the fact that space in all capacities is tight. The party is thrown in response to the specific community the Ontological Incubator serves: burgeoning young artists who frequently struggle with rejection, due in part to limited space in New York. This is a chance for the community to come together and share in the universal experience of rejection, and in doing so, remove some of the power individual rejections hold.
So that's to you, Bush and Royal Court Theatres. The party starts at 9.00pm at the Ontological at St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street at 2nd Avenue.
And next Saturday, 10 May, from 7.00pm to midnight, Kori Schneider and Andy Horwitz's IRT Theatre will be celebrating its brand new space with a benefit at 154 Christopher Street, #3B. Kori and Andy are restructuring and rebuilding their black box theatre in the West Village, updating their lighting and sound systems and commissioning new work for a full season scheduled to open in September 2009. They have to pay for all that somehow. Although admission is free (with an open vodka bar from 7.00 to 9.00), donations will be gleefully accepted (and they're tax-deductible).
I highly recommend contributing to both the Ontological and the IRT Theatre; these programs are where you'll see the next generation of performers at PS122 and the Under the Radar festival (as well as the next crop of American theatre artists to work at the more exploratory theatres in Europe). Catch them now and you'll have something to tell the grandchildren.
If it's a new play you're looking for this week, though, try Stretch (a fantasia), a new work about Richard Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods by New Georges artistic director Susan Bernfield. Stretch features a musical score "for violin, trumpet, bass and IBM Selectric typewriter" by Rachel Peters and is directed by Emma Griffin; performances begin tonight at The Living Theatre, 21 Clinton Street, and run through 26 May. More information at the New Georges Web site here.
Posted at 8.41 am in /Openings
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Thursday, 01 May 2008
At the Guardian (UK) today, I write about a recent study of arts presenters' impacts on the audiences they serve. I conclude:
Neither a work of art nor a marketing study exists in a vacuum, of course. While the authors believe that the study's impact scores "should not be used as a means of evaluating or comparing artists or the worthiness of their performances," Wolf and Novak hope that the information "might be used by presenters in understanding the consequences of their programming choices and reaching higher levels of effectiveness in their work." It's naive, though, to think that ultimately programmers and curators, in a time of shrinking support for the arts, may not accept and reject work for their seasons based upon the narrow "impact constructs" that WolfBrown defines.
Well, that's one of my conclusions, anyway. Read the whole thing here.
Posted at 11.36 am in /Guardian
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