Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Monday, 20 October 2008
Archives: Changing the Subject
Originally published on 28 October 2005. It has been lightly revised.
Again and again these days I see films and plays being promoted to audiences on the basis of the many "interesting" real-
life subjects presented in those works. It seems we live in a world where everyone is interested above all else in "interesting subjects." But shockingly – I maintain, that the desire for subjects of "interesting subject matter" is, in fact, an avoidance of the REAL subject of real art, which is – What?
The real subject is presence itself, the scintillating "presence," of any and all selected items – but presented in such a way that one's primary experience (the aesthetic experience) is to realize that the SUBJECT ITSELF doesn't matter – but is always in fact the TRIVIAL aspect of the art event.
That trivial aspect (the "subject") is what we focus on when we choose NOT to be deeply engaged with what art is deeply about – the full, multi-
dimensional "presence" of whatever subject is being obliterated by the power of "present- ness." However, by the usual gluing of our attention onto the ostensible "subject matter" – we try to protect ourselves from the deep ego- shattering experience of art. Richard Foreman
"Notes on Zomboid!"
Traditional metaphysics from Plato on suggests that our perception of
the world is rooted in a formal subject/
The object par excellence in the theater is the speaking human
body, of course, and it relates philosophically speaking to our own
somewhat schizophrenic status in the world. Hopping onto my
Schopenhauerian/
Foreman is right to locate the aesthetic experience in "presence" rather than "subject matter," that is in the perceiver's experience of the object rather than the perceived object itself. What is interesting to me is in how this relates specifically to the theatrical experience of the body: the body of the actor, but also the body of the individual audience member, or the perceiver. And in a way this suggests an association with Grotowski's "selfless" actor.
One of the aims in Grotowski's project is to train the actor to use his
body "selflessly," that is, to discipline his technique to the extent that
this Kantian thing-
Far from cold and academic, far from theoretical, the bodied
experience is on the contrary warm, accessible, passionate. And it
must be so, for two reasons: suffering and sex, Thanatos and Eros. Our
bodies are vehicles for the Thing-
Where does the playwright come in all this – in this Grotowskian,
Foremanesque theater? As I mentioned above, the speaking human body is the
essential element of the theater, as the moving human body is that of
dance, the sound-
I'm trying, at the moment, to consider the craft of playwriting contemplated by the Grotowskian or Foremanesque project of theater, and I've come to no firm conclusions, except that as a dramatist I have to train myself as the actor trains himself or herself: to work to minimize, discipline or eliminate that self so that this will, as a linguistic construct, can emerge through the work. This does not lead to a concept of anything like automatic or extemporaneous writing as a text for the theater. Instead, it leads to the need to allow those complex linguistic constructs, as we've experienced them through our interactions with myth, character and narrative ourselves, free and unfettered rein through our own personal experience and consciousness; by discipline I mean the ability to strip away everything that is linguistically extraneous to our expression of the will as reflected through myth, character and narrative, as the performer him or herself struggles against all the blocks and restraints that prevent a full bodily expression of that will.
This differs from the strictly literary project of poetry or prose in that it presents an opportunity for the dramatist to further eradicate that self and to enter into a new relationship with the performer and the audience: a new sympathetic, compassionate relationship.
Posted at 9.12 am in /Archives
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Monday, 20 October 2008
This Thursday night, 16 October, at 7.00pm at NYU's La Maison Française (16 Washington Mews in New York), Marilyn Nonken will perform music by Tristan Murail and join the composer himself for a discussion of his work. Admission to both the concert and the talk is free. Marilyn's recording of Murail's complete piano music was praised by Fanfare's Peter Burwasser, who in his review of the set said that Marilyn "stands out among American pianists for her intense devotion ... and the enormous scope of her technique."
Just to whet your appetite, here is a clip of Marilyn's performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstuck IX (like Murail, Stockhausen was a student of Olivier Messiaen), recorded live in concert at NYU in September 2007.
And I wrote about Murail's piano music generally in May 2006. My comments are reprinted below.
Can one still write for the piano today? ...
I think that my response, at first subconscious, but gradually more and more clearly articulated, has been to return to the true essence of the piano, to its acoustic realities, and to ignore the trivialities of fashion as well as the weight of history.
The piano: undoubtedly a percussion instrument, but above all a collection of vibrating strings, a vast reverberant chamber.
"To return to the true essence of the piano, to its acoustic realities, and to ignore the trivialities of fashion as well as the weight of history": this is a call to relearn the means by which we listen to music and sound. There are two means by which to do so: through exercise and rote learning alone (the way most of us go about it, scales and Czerny exercises: technic before soul), or by playing and listening to the works which integrate this theory and discipline to create artistic expression (technic with soul).
Murail's work (better described as exploration rather than investigation, perhaps, though both words suit) therefore cuts the listener loose from fashion and history: one is left hanging with the self, with one's own ear and acoustic experience. How to listen, then? With solitude, attention and tenderness, and a vulnerability to the unexpected (a willingness to accept and embrace the unexpected). Murail deliberately strips the pianistic experience to its essence, for both listener and performer, veering wildly in volume, speed and muscularity (for it is uniquely strong and demanding physically): it's wrong, however, to describe this as abstract, for the sensual experience, the ways in which tone and duration fall upon the ear without referent to history or fashion, is undeniably experienced in the body. The music invites the listener's exploration of the piano's resonance as well, but first the invitation needs to be accepted, and you're expected to bring your own bottle.
Territoires de l'Oubli, or Lands of the unknown: performed with the damper pedal depressed through the work, which allows the overtones and undertones of each individual note, singly and chordal, to resonate. Goethe's Elective Affinities has its musical equivalent in Sympathetic Vibrations, a musical phenomenon unique to the piano: because the soundboard and the case of the instrument constitute a huge reverberating chamber for the percussive effects of the 88 strings, sound bounces back, the vibrations of those strings struck by the hammer cause other strings (which represent tones mathematically related to the strings struck) to vibrate as well, though they haven't been themselves struck by the hammer. The mathematics, striking the ear, translate into the sense of sound: the mystery of music.
(Therefore: so important for the piano to be tuned correctly for this music or the Sympathetic Vibration does not occur. The instrument, too, needs to be able to permit and distribute the vibration to the listener. The instrument needs to be trained to "hear" as well as the listener. For the piano, we have tuners. For us, it's much more difficult. We have only ourselves and our willingness to listen and hear, our discipline for rigorous recognition, and our determination to explore ever more deeply.)
Murail's music urges you back to first principles in your own art and experience: you want to tear up everything you've done and begin again, with the essence of the instrument the true subject, to find the sense and sensuality in the taut organic possibility of the acoustic and organic components (the wood case, the strings of copper and steel, the ivory keys, cloth for the damper).
The word is a sound as well, placed in juxtaposition with other words inviting the recognition of sympathetic vibration, elective affinity. (We hear it in our minds and souls, if we're vulnerable enough.) And of course the theater itself, in our time, one large resonating chamber containing the taut trained organic instruments of voice and body. (The piano is a modern instrument, which remembers the harpsichord and its more primitive ancestors like the lute, as the contemporary theater is a modern instrument, remembering the amphitheater and the ritual.) Richard Foreman's second collection of plays is titled Reverberation Machines: like pianos, mechanical; like pianos, echo chambers; like pianos, organic. But the instrument needs to be trained and ready: this music requires profound discipline, profound vulnerability to the over- and undertones of the explicitly struck note and chord (this can't be learned, perhaps, and is easily smothered under a noise we think we already understand; who wants to be bothered with beginning again?; this requires a recognition of the habits that have rendered our lives a sort of death-in-living; Adorno's recognition that our all-embracing system has smothered us as individuals, except those who can approach this music willingly and open to its sensual and psychic possibility; it is what makes music, for Schopenhauer, the greatest of all the arts). It is experienced only in solitude, utter silence and isolation, whether in the auditorium or at home, but felicitous recognition seeks and desires companion recognitions. The unseen and unheard ephemeral is intimated and suggested, painfully and beautifully recognized, in the essences of sound, the tone stripped of the palimpsest of fashion and history. Is it in this intimation, suggestion, recognition, perhaps, that compassion and love begin?
More on Murail in the context of Richard Foreman's theatre in Section 36 of the first Organum.
Posted at 8.22 am in /Openings
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