Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 OrganumHis canvases, Rothko insisted, were tragic: he was never in acceptance of those who characterized them as calm, or without conflict. Peering closer at them (as he would have us look at them – from eighteen inches away, he said, in his more dogmatic moments), there is seen the drama within the light. He said, too, that color was not the subject of his work, but light itself. Where the drama and the tragedy lay were in the fading of the color: where blues became black, or yellows white. Here were the violent scrapings of the imagination, the attacks, the brushstrokes or paintdrips that marred these seemingly calm works, that robbed them of that very stillness that many viewers championed. Here too the negative spaces that surrounded Giacometti's sculptures, or the silences that formed a profound base of Feldman's music. Giacometti's wire, Feldman's attacks, were excuses for the fadings of space and silence that they left behind: Beckett's "literature of the unword" writ in light and sound. Like Shakespeare. For what is Hamlet or King Lear but the elucidation of that vibrating – ultimately fading – energy between act and thought, word and silence, identity and self? In this context, questions of either hope or hopelessness become laughable. This is not the dramatist's call, but the call of the simpleton, who in his simplicity reduces all to simple moralistic goods and evils. (When we ask whether or not Lear or Hamlet are responsible for what happens to them, we put our own prejudice and compassion and ignorance, not the characters, in the dock.) Shakespeare offers neither optimism or pessimism, hope or hopelessness. And his offerings are beyond the call of mere 12-year-olds, who in all their purity remain unconflicted and pristinely ignorant. (Shall we valorize childhood and its vaunted if theoretical innocence as a special interest? Fine. Then what of adulthood, and experience? Or are these all lies, the past discarded as a toy with which we've grown tired or found embarrassing?) No. The call to the investigation of those grays, those near-silences, is for others. In the bodied art of theatre those grays and near-silences are the arenas of eroticism, of idiosyncratic sensation and sensuality. Shades of man/woman, masculine/feminine, dominant/submissive, sadist/masochist (like act/thought, word/silence, identity/self, if not identical to them), not dichotomies but spectra along the lines of which you play – play as necessary risk. You touch me somehow; the memory on my flesh lingers. I have it in my memory and it lasts, it can't be denied. This memory is the product of age, not youth. This comes only with time and is not the product of a review or feature story. (These are only of the day, not of the life.) This sensation and sensuality are far from a cause of celebration. That they contain the ecstatic is not an invitation to a party that lends self-congratulation to men and women. It is instead an invitation that leads to a contemplation of the distance and death that it also contains, a death of self and certainty in the midst of the orgasmic loss of self. It is also the miraculousness of birth, of which the orgasm is only a first step. Children's theatre? Today, all our theatre (for adults as well) is for children. I suspect that the task is not to draw children (of whatever chronological age) to theatre but to convince adults (of whatever chronological age) to return to it. The only imaginable product of the art of theatre is neither laughter nor applause, but silence in the face of the unspeakable horrors and joys it presents as a basis for new imaginings. Silence is borne best not by the young, but by those who recognize it as a prospectus of the future. It is beyond hope and hopelessness, optimism and pessimism. It does not teach, nor congratulate, nor flatter itself for its easy empathy and right-thinking, nor is it either true or false. You can neither agree nor disagree with it; it is there, beyond the easy confines of one's agreement with it. It is an art of theatre that barely exists. But for me, it is the only theatre I feel it necessary to create, and just about the only theatre I care to witness. Posted in /Organum |