Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Saturday, 21 June 2008
On Michelangelo, Nietzsche and Nitsch
"Through my artistic production (a form of life worship) I take upon myself all that appears negative, unsavoury, perverse and obscene, the lust and the resulting sacrificial hysteria, in order to spare YOU the defilement and shame entailed by the descent into the extreme."
"I also believe that, with regard to both the tragic aspect of suffering and instants of extreme ecstasy and affirmation of life, art needs to have a sense of sacred solemnity. [...] We propagated a very aggressive type of art, not a cozy art but an art that displayed tremendous power and intensity."
Hermann Nitsch
The June 2008 issue of Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, which is online now, features new translations of the poetry of Michelangelo by Mark Daniel Cohen as well as several other elegant essays and reviews.
Those interested in theatre will certainly want to read David Kilpatrick's essay "Superficial Simulacra from Nietzsche to Nitsch," which explores theatrical representations of sacrifice and mythology in the context of Nietzsche's pronouncement of the death of God. Kilpatrick also draws upon the work of Georges Bataille (who almost single-handedly revived the reptuation of Nietzsche in France in the post-war years) in considering the performances of the Austrian Aktionist Hermann Nitsch, whose Orgien-Mysterien Theater exploited the intersections of violence and culture in almost 100 productions between 1962 and 1998. Nitsch's work culminated in the 6-Day Play, which took place at the Schloss Prinzendorf in 1998.
Erasing traditional Western dichotomies of body and mind, emotion and intellect, Nitsch's work shares with the plays of Howard Barker, Sarah Kane and David Ian Rabey and the production of I Am Blood by Jan Fabre's Troubleyn company (a review from their January 2007 visit to the United States is here) an obsession with sexualised violence and sacrifice, calling attention to both their contemporaneity and status as the basis of ancient and tragic rituals of radical, catastrophic experiences. The more one opens oneself to these texts and performances, the paler seems most contemporary theatre (often paling to complete nothingness); images and texts linger in the imagination long after the direct experience. And all of them are quite of this time and this world.
Powerful video footage from the third day of the 6-Day Play, the "Day of Dionysus," is available for online viewing below; it originally appeared at UbuWeb. The video is accompanied by Nitsch's "Geräuschmusik" ("Noisemusic"). A warning: like the plays of those theatre practitioners mentioned above, it is not for the faint of heart or mind, nor for the weak of stomach. Others, however, will be moved.
Posted at 8.58 am in /Miscellaneous
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