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Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Joy. There are some who would consider the provision of joy to be the mission of theatre or art, to its
audience or to its practitioners. Most also believe that government should
subsidize this provision, perhaps even as a "public good." (Thus they show
their propagandist slips; the provision of sorrow, pain or tragedy, of the
mirror of a fragmented experience, certainly of the individual imagination
over the collective celebration, is therefore not a public good, but its
opposite.) A thin line exists between provision of joy and its imposition
upon the audience or the culture, which laps it up as readily as it would
any self-congratulatory trope. As an aesthetic end, the provision of
joy is the provision of a cold, lifeless, collective thing, a
dead-end street: a blinder to darker experience. Attempting to
convince itself of its validity in the face of this experience, collective
joy is a weapon to silence, marginalize and destroy the darker imagination
... the tragic suggests that there is more, a path to freedom that may
contain a joy and ecstasy to be drawn from the path, but much else besides
... but as this dilutes or undermines the simple pleasure it is best
ignored and passed over in silence. The joy infantilizes, without pain and
a rigorous determination and discipline of self-determination and
self-fashioning, it is simple and childish. It is a joy that leads
to the continuation and valorization of ignorance rather than knowledge.
The blinder is tightened ...
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Superfluities
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George Hunka
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Long-form theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum
II (2008-2009)
Critique of
Tragedy (2010-continuing)
Notes
Howard Barker
1
Howard
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Samuel
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Samuel
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Bertolt
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Richard
Foreman 1
Richard
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Je Suis
Sang
Sarah
Kane
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Marilyn
Nonken
Saint Oedipus
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