Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Wednesday, 06 August 2008 Quadruple FeatureSome intriguing visual and aesthetic parallels in the first two YouTube videos below. First, David Tudor performs John Cage's 4'33". The crawl at the bottom of the screen reads: "You are invited to turn down the volume of your TV set, and listen to the ambient sounds present wherever this program is performed." Tudor relates an amusing anecdote at the end of the performance; you should, of course, turn your volume back up for that. Second, Jeremy Irons performs Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu: Quiet meditative works for a quiet meditative moment. Third, there's this, very very rare video footage of Samuel Beckett
himself, speaking about a television adaptation of his play What
Where and his interest in "getting rid of every superfluity" from the
original theatrical text. Although both the video and audio quality aren't
quite pristine, it is nonetheless a brief (only 38- This brings back more than a few memories; What Where was one of the first Beckett plays I saw onstage, during its 1983 New York premiere directed by Alan Schneider (the New York premiere of Ohio Impromptu was a part of the same evening). Such is the way the stages of our lives are set. There's more on What Where, including information on the 1985 Stuttgart television adaptation to which Beckett refers, at the Wikipedia page devoted to the play. Beckett's Catastrophe was the third play to round out that 1983 evening. A version of that play, directed by David Mamet and featuring Harold Pinter, John Gielgud and Rebecca Pidgeon, rounds out this quartet below: Posted in /Videos Wednesday, 06 August 2008 From the ArchivesOriginally posted on 28 August 2006. Organum: Precision and desire. In his The Theatre of Howard Barker, Charles Lamb draws a parallel between the practices of Stanislavsky and Brecht, underlining the shared perspective of the rationality that informs both:
Coupled with Stanislavsky's statement to his colleagues in the Moscow
Art Theatre upon its foundation – "We are trying to create the first
rational, moral, public theatre and it is to this lofty aim we dedicate
our lives" – the 19th- A theatre minima approach, like the approach of the Theatre of Catastrophe, is to welcome and embrace the seductive operation of live performance: to make it explicit, rather than hide it under the rationalist consciousness. Seduction denies rationalism in the effort to transcend the suffering that the history of rationalism has foisted upon the race: audience and performer join beyond the field of questions, beyond the field of meaning. The rational individual cannot stand seduction: it is a giving-up of control, of the illusory integrated self, which is then set free into a field of experiential possibility. Instead of judging behavior and performance, as Brecht insists is necessary, auditor and artist join in accepting and experiencing behavior, widening consciousness instead of limiting it to the same bloodless perspective that led to twentieth-century tragedies of rationalist behavior. Unfortunately for the 20th-century anthropocentric rationalist, it also means an irrational acknowledgement of death and violence, of the erotic possibilities of theatrical and aesthetic presentation. (This it shares with the late Elizabethan, the Jacobean theatre.) We should despise a theater we can understand. Theater and drama not a crossword puzzle to be filled in by the audience from clues left by the playwright, the director, the performers. Some say that they desire to tear down aesthetic walls. Not possible until we tear down the walls that both Stanislavskian and Brechtian practices validate, the walls that continue to separate us from each other. Given its risk, then, we take not sledgehammers to that wall, but the most precise instruments of invasion: words that seduce. Beckett knew this; Pinter and Barker and Foreman know it. In our careen towards disaster, only the most extraordinary measures will eradicate our perverse yearning for self-torture. Posted in /Archives |