Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Thursday, 22 October 2009 What's not to likeUPDATE: And speaking of 21 for 21, there's this article from Dominic Cavendish in yesterday's
Telegraph. Some thoughts here for those considering international
collaboration, criticism and funding. As he notes, briefly: "21 for 21
— as this worldwide tribute is called — feels like a
breakthrough moment in terms of the global theatre- In his post "Should we watch plays for pleasure?" in today's Guardian, Andrew Haydon, who wrote a mixed review of Howard Barker's Found in the Ground for London's Time Out, cogitates upon his critical reaction to the play:
Haydon's full article is here. Posted in /Dramatists/Howard_Barker Thursday, 22 October 2009 OrganumInternal memorandum. An official government organ of either
propaganda or
censorship is unnecessary when individuals have so thoroughly internalized
the assumptions of an ideology, moral dogma, government or culture
industry that they will give up individual autonomy for the unquestioning
furtherance of an abstract goal defined by those organs. What need for
propaganda when the artist will without external compulsion do the same
work in support of an ideology, or will censor himself and repress his
doubts as irrelevant? Especially if his aesthetic goals are those lauded
by the culture industry — entertainment, self- It is a truism of the progressive collectivist that the "individual" himself is a mere historical and social construct; so he will be expected to say, and it is valid insofar as the individual will bear within him certain traits or beliefs, certain common knowledge, lent by collective experience. But this is only a partial answer that does not account for the complexity of human experience within and without the community, nor does it validate the sufficiency of those collective beliefs. The tragedies of Oedipus and King Lear lie in the fracture between collective cultural abstractions (fatherhood, justice, matrimony, kingship) and the individual autonomous self. There are two avenues to freedom: resignation and repudiation, rejection. Neither are necessarily "happy" in the sense that American culture is a pursuit of happiness. But they deny the stupor of the collective and embrace the possibility of imagination and ecstasy in the process of that contemplative resignation or repudiation. (Imagine Oedipus unpunished by himself or Creon ...) In the culture industry, freedom of choice is the cereal aisle of the supermarket, the 800 channels of cable television or the hundreds of offerings of performances in New York theatrical circles. For the autonomous individual, freedom of choice is in choosing to refuse what the culture industry offers, and to imagine something other, to put the individual secret on stage ... Their collective ideologies are embodied too, and they set that decaying fluorescent flesh to laughing and dancing, crying and moping, and dig their hands deep into those bodies ... Posted in /Organum |