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, 13 June 2008
Cross-posted to the theatre minima journal
On reading David Ian Rabey: "On Being a Shakespearean Dramatist", "Liberations from the Literal"
If a pianist reads Proust, will her performance become invested with a Proustian element? One must ask her, but it seems safe to say that this investment, conscious or unconscious, should not be unexpected, any more than the originals of the composer Vinteuil and the painter Elstir (and if composers and painters, why not performers?) invested Proust's literary work itself with influential threads, suggesting the mutability of time, place and imagination. The division of aesthetic modes into written literature, music, plastic art, dance, drama and all else may have its Aristotelian elements, separating genus into all its species. But the separation depends upon difference rather than similarity and is useful only for the purposes of categorisation, the arena of the pedant and the academic. Such categorisation is exclusionary by its nature, when exclusion should be recognised for the stifling limitations that it imposes on the artist. It does not explain the role of Vinteuil's original in Proust's creative imagination; Synge and Caspar David Friedrich in Beckett's; Holinshed, Ovid and Plutarch in Shakespeare's. Division in imagination leads to the alien, the alone, the solitary. It keeps one from the community of imagination across history and within the individual artist. That this influence is not identifiable by the artist, cannot be pinned by him or her like a butterfly to a wax tablet, does not mean that, under the skin, the affinity and affordance is not shared.
Without a theatre a dramatist builds instead a library of affordances and influences on his shelves and within his own imagination. In his mind and spirit their ideas and words are bodied and live; mingling and coupling they produce new plays, the products of a seeded imagination, the impregnation of a talent. This is not to deny the primary place of experience, without which no conceptual or abstract thought is possible; conceptualisation and abstraction are secondary to imagination, to the lived moment, always. In the dark of his study, however, the dramatist gives reading and influence play among his memories: experience relived in contemplation and elective affinity. Before King Lear, King Leir; without King Leir, an empty stage, a blank page remains before the dramatist. And would we have Krapp's Last Tape, Ghost Trio, without Schubert?
One cannot build a theatre out of books. But, if the dramatist is exiled and without a theatre, the books enliven the imagination and produce a play, or a theatre, quite unwittingly. And, like the pianist with her Proust, the actor, designer, dramatist finds his work invested with the intermingling of words and practice. Primary sources, all more profoundly clear than the massive secondary literature that has grown up around them and therefore essential:
The World as Will and Representation
The work of Shakespeare
The prose and drama of Samuel Beckett, after 1962 (Prose: How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstword Ho; Plays: Play, Come and Go, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, What Where)
The work of Bertolt Brecht
The music of Anton Webern
The plastic arts: Rembrandt, painters of the Northern Renaissance, German Expressionism and pre-war German painting and drawing, Klimt and Schiele, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany
Secondary sources (an ever-
The plays of Howard Barker, and his theory: Arguments for a Theatre; Death, The One and the Art of Theatre; A Style and Its Origins
The work of Harold Pinter
The work of Richard Foreman
Posted at 9.36 am in /Organum
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