Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Tuesday, 03 February 2009 Archives: The Writer's Body as an Instrument of InvestigationFrom the Organum; originally posted 2 October 2006; lightly revised. Ain't Got No Body. The dramatist is invisible after the
theatrical text is created and passed along to the performer for
expression, which begs the question: If the dramatist is not expressing
during the performative instant, if her work is perceived to have been
finished months or years before, what is she doing there? Why there at
all, especially in the transgressive performance styles of Antonin Artaud
and Reza Abdoh? As profoundly physical as the act of physical performance
is, the psychic investigation of the writer requires that she use her body
as an open conduit for the perception, investigation, and description of
the unconscious Schopenhauerian Will that runs through it. The performer
expresses; the dramatist reads impressions of Representations on her body
and describes (and inscribes into a hopelessly inadequate language) the
linguistic scrapes and leavings of that Will. The dramatist answers the
question that is directed to her ("Why your text at all?") with this
response: "I leave my markings with what the long culture and history of
writing has given to me, adding my own scratchmarks to go a little further
along the road to destruction and light: the Will offers both." To be
fully open and aware of the Will's operation the writer's body needs to be
as trained and supple, as well- Posted in /Archives |