Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
|
Thursday, 04 June 2009 OrganumOf the spirit. The Christian conception of fleshed word as a
means of access to spirit (through the bodied god, his sacrifice, rituals
such as the eucharist in which flesh is taken into flesh; though
Christianity is not alone in this conception, it is among the most recent
Western exemplars) finds unique aesthetic equivalence in theatre. Here it
is the actor and dramatist who explore these roads to access, as does a
musical performer, who allows a musical composition to pass through her
body
(without the body, even that of the synthesizer operator or the composer
in a recording studio, unheard), sacrificing
its cultural and social position to the aesthetic position: an offering to
the individual audience member, which differentiates aesthetic performance
from the organized church. The physical and perhaps emotional discomfort
and suffering of the performer in a Samuel Beckett or Sarah Kane play, for
example, is an act of sacrifice offered up to the individual auditor, who
may be expected to either share in it, contemplate it, or find offense in
it: the discomfort and suffering transcended in the grace of its
performance towards a spiritual end. Instead, however, of these ecstasies
offered to god and to the witnessing of fellow celebrants (for the church
audience is well- And beyond words, the noumenal always beyond the panel discussion ... Posted in /Organum |