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, 01 July 2008
Originally posted on 29 June 2006. Slightly revised.
Barker's whole technique in staging was to eliminate extraneous detail and direct concentration onto the physicality and voice of the performer, to elevate the actor out of conventional realism into a condition that dispensed with identification, making the performer lucent with her difference, a difference born of suffering.
Howard Barker
A Style and Its Origins
As deadly as
literality may seem, literality is in a sense
theatre itself: the body as body, language as language, and theatrical
presentation is a crude metaphor for consciousness, much more crude than
film or television which has a wider technological and perceptual palette
at its beck and call. The literality of theatre is worse than the
literality of photography, even; Paul Cava's photography wrests the bodied subjects of
his photographs into another palimpsestic realm, where the
two-
The tension between literality and metaphor in theatre is the source of
its most sublime power: it is always bound to the body and a language,
ever-
As theatre must try and always fail to burst its own borders as a
worthless and useless art. Lyricism, whatever its dictionary definition,
emerges from the lyre, melodiousness, musicality. I would hope that
productions of a theatre
minima consider the possibility of lyrical theatre to approach the
quality of contemporary chamber music: each instrument of the
stripped-
Contemporary chamber music bears with it always a remembrance of the history of its form as it either disassembles or reassembles the traditions of the past body of work, as it makes ever more radical calls on the physicality of the performer. At its most profound extreme is something like the six-hour duration of Feldman's Second String Quartet or, on a smaller scale, the Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time. And more: the sublime discipline, precision and years of training required for this music, which is becoming ever more philosophical (academic philosophy having abandoned us, we turn to art). Composer Jonathan Harvey has something about this in the preface to his book In Quest of Spirit:
The initial spiritual idea, that music was an explanation of the divine universe, has a long and distinguished history. The symmetry of numbers presents itself as both an attractive way to account for an underlying structure in apparently chaotic nature and a fitting way to think of the beauty of God's creative mind; the important idea of music as perceptible numbers, which exemplified this symmetry, thus stretches through history from Pythagoras and his followers to Plato, Boethius, the Corpus Hermiticum. ... The writings of Hindemith, Schoenberg, and Stockhausen are not far removed from it either. The idea of music as being essentially entertaining was as alien to such people's attitudes as the idea of philosophy or psychology being essentially entertaining would be today.
Further: this music attempts to limn and touch the ecstatic realm, to
suggest Unity; this requires training, practice, a devotion and discipline
to the sound and the body as instrument; a theatre minima would require
this same training, practice, devotion, a spiritual discipline of the body
and the word. Number may be the basis of music as the phoneme is the basis
of the spoken word, but as music is a deliberate act of presence,
sound-
Lacking discipline and precision, sound and theatre making – the human capacity to ever stretch the bounds of our expression beyond our expression – remains mere noise and spectacle. As bodied as we are, this music and this drama, our ascetic spiritual exercises and our attitude towards our own physicality, should urge us toward the spectral.
Posted at 9.39 am in /Music
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