Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Organum: Tragedy, Style and the Inarticulate
Cross-
Despite the power of Nitsch's work he does have a fatal enemy: theatrical time. At least in films of his performances, the duration of preparation stands in for the duration of narrative – we see the preparation of the performance in all its mundane objecthood (meat, tomatoes), and even in the realisation of the performance the profane never truly approaches the sacred. And this is because it is theatre, and all theatre is a lie. Theatrical ritual and sacrifice are conscious imitations of ritual and sacrifice, therefore on some level ridiculous. The rehearsal of ritual and sacrifice never reaches the status of ritual and sacrifice themselves; it remains "theatrical," a status recognised in the name of Nitsch's collective.
The second ineradicable flaw in the work as theatre is the deliberate subsumation of the tragic individual in the collective mass. Lacking any expression of the self from within (that self the seat of metaphysical knowledge), the bodies themselves also remain mundane. (I must quarrel with this; what, then, is the difference between Nitsch's theatre and that of the Culture Industry, which also seeks the subsumation of the individual into the mass?) That expression is properly lyrical, linguistic: and words are dispensible in this theatre. As well as in the theatre of most followers of Artaud and Grotowski. Artaud's silent scream remains a scream. As Beckett knew, one takes this as a given: "The tears of the world are a constant quantity. ... The air is full of our cries." Drama begins when you start talking, especially tragedy, at the center of which is the individual, not the mass, fleshed body.
Nitsch's tragic theatre is primarily visual and so perhaps doomed to ultimate failure. (It must be said that the paintings and photographs reproduced under Nitsch's name are far more haunting than film of the performance itself.) Perhaps at the root of it is that language is the expression of style, and style is at the root of the individual expression. The image emerges from the word: otherwise (especially in theatre as the nexus of dishonesty) image remains unexplored.
In rereading Sarah Kane's plays recently I came across a quote from her
in which the question of style and language comes surprisingly to the
fore. Kane's last two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, have
given rise to perhaps the most varied of performance styles and
production. James Macdonald, who directed the London premiere of 4.48
Psychosis, told Graham Saunders in an interview in 2000: "[Sarah]
taught me a lot about using language precisely in theatre, especially
about punctuation. Her telling of a story through images – I think
that has influenced the way I now work on plays." And yet the texts of the
plays themselves become far more driven by the spoken word.
Cleansed has perhaps the most stripped-
[In writing Crave] I wanted to find out how good a poet I could be while still writing something dramatic ... As soon as you've written and used a theatrical form, it becomes redundant.
Ultimately her refuge was in spoken language alone – and in a blisteringly individual style; all of Kane's dialogue is instantly recognisable as hers. "Form" itself becomes redundant because of its external imposition upon a speech; instead the form, both linguistic and theatrical, emerges from within the content. For this, speech is indispensible.
Theatre as an experience of collectivity is perhaps its greatest lie: while individuals come together to rehearse, perform or watch a play, in their deepest minds they remain individual. The richness of performance emerges when each of those individual participants contributes to the experience itself. But style remains within the individual, and tragic consciousness as an element of style is profoundly solitary, shared with other individuals, never the mass-mind. In its overarching concern for its own cultural health, theatre takes on elements of mass culture: of television, film, comics. This addition itself is ultimately suicidal to the nature of theatre. The theatre worker who draws from the essence of his individual tragic experience remains profoundly alone and more and more marginalised as theatre pursues its own death as an art. These workers and exemplars remain solitary, few and alone. (Finding and honing this individual style alone is tortuous, slow and unrewarded, littered with failures and false starts, the more deeply painful because of their larger ambitions, the more internal origin, that exploration of the personal wound; even one's friends shy away and fall silent, increasingly ashamed of that failure or apathetic, growing ever more distant and uncommunicative.) It drives some to bodied suicide. But then one wants style, to sharpen it, hone it, as expression of eroticism and catastrophe. Style becomes compulsion, and it begins in the clothed, bodied word.
Posted at 8.35 am in /Organum
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