Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
At Newsstands (and Online) Now
"The Evolving Relationship between Artist and Patron," my review of Robert Schanke's Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy in the latest issue of Yale University's Theater magazine, is now available at better newsstands everywhere. Those with subscriptions can download the article itself right here.
Posted at 4.33 pm in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Cross-posted to the theatre minima journal.
All abstract time, past and future, is contained in the present moment, the only time that is not an abstraction, as even animals know: the moment of our birth (and that of the world), the moment of our death (and that of the world) both inhere in the present breath. The theatrical performance is a succession of present moments: necessarily a process of erasure of the past and extension into the future. Comedy looks back to the first terminus, its memory ever-present, tragedy forward to the second, its fact inescapable. Only silence touches on what lies before and after us in the world; noise and laughter distract us from it. In terms of form, duration stretches the present moment and holds it open for examination. Comedy as a genre seeks to cut it short as soon as possible, hence its speed (and its noise and its desperate need to amuse and comfort). Tragedy steeps us in the present, and that knowledge of the moment of our death, which exists in this time, in this theatre. It provides no escape. This is the basis of Proust's own conception of time, deadening habit preventing us from living in full knowledge and potential of the present moment. To habit and the illusion of well-being, the full realisation of the present moment's potential is catastrophic. This is the specific power of Sophoclean tragedy. And therefore Krapp's Last Tape, Old Times, No Man's Land, and longer works from Morton Feldman, in which time is the subject. Like the present body, the presence of death in the theatre is inescapable, and its end.
Only that person who lives in full knowledge and acceptance of that death lives fully, accepts its sublimity, and touches on what lies beyond it. T.S. Eliot, in "Burnt Norton":
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the beginning and the end were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
Posted at 8.30 am in /Organum
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