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Tuesday, 01 December 2009
United Colors of Benetton. A cry for more
customers, this, the talk of diversity in the consumerist age. The
theatre's leadership, artistic practitioners and audience should reflect
the demographic of the modern multicultural democratic state, goes the
valorous idea (and raising the question, "When is a quota not a quota?");
but after decades of labels — Black Theatre, Queer Theatre, Women's
Theatre — and the slow but undoubted inclusion of these tropes in
the mainstream theatre, do we have a theatre that has somehow eradicated
or even alleviated injustice, any more than we have a culture that has
done so? Or has injustice simply driven itself deeper underground, to
emerge in the gross perversions of the smiling progressive state, which
continues to send agents of violence to far-off lands? The
stages have changed and made room for these new tropes, but has the
theatre become any more necessary — or necessary at all — as a
result? Or do we simply propose a Benetton advertisement as the ideal
mirror of the theatre's audience and creative and administrative
communities, selling images of multicultural contentment (married to a
grinning or pouting youth which denies maturity), as well as the
desiccated products of the corporation behind the advertisement?
Such a theatre cannot survive — its mere economic inefficiency
will see to that. Nor should it, for then it becomes merely another
instrument of discouragement, a monolith of self-congratulatory
contentment that presence expresses all. It is not necessary. Howard
Barker in his essay "Ignorance and instinct in the Theatre of Catastrophe"
suggests what kind of theatre may indeed be necessary, but that necessity
must be recaptured:
Theatre is no longer capable of entertainment, despite its
continual degeneration into the realm of entertainment. It is no
longer possible to make it product, despite being part of mechanistic
production processes [...] and it is perfectly inefficient, the
worst nightmare of accountancy. That is its profound redemption. In
comparison with technological forms, information-systems, the
capitalisation of education, the relentless flow of life-imitation
and fantasy available on television and film, it asserts its problematic
nature and resists incorporation by its very form. And beyond
this ... wherever theatre offers itself as entertainment it reveals itself
as degradation even in the eyes and ears of unknowing audiences
who desert the theatre and continue to desert it the more slavishly
theatre attempts to win them by catering for its perceived taste. Another
triumph of human nature over the market. Another triumph of the soul over
the ethics of pleasure. Precisely because such a theatre is
audience-led it is doomed to extinction. The demise of such a theatre
should be welcomed as the peace of death gives welcome relief to an
incurably suffering man. We assert the contrary practice. The theatre
which is to be necessity repudiates the audience as the
gratifying principle of production. It exists for itself, and
paradoxically, by existing for itself it becomes a necessity for an
audience for the reason that men and women ache for the representation of
tragedy — which is pain — and this secret longing for the
incomprehensible nature of pain — is beyond politics,
beyond social order, and beyond conscience. It is instinct.
Incomprehensible pain — the ignorant text — is loathed by
society as society loathes instinct itself; society has an institutional
investment in the eradication of pain and the elimination of tragedy from
the sphere of art. Tragedy is inherently irrational, it affirms the
limits of social action and therefore is fundamentally immune to
the propaganda of the state and the revolution alike. It is no surprise
then, that in an age of ideology and welfare the conventional dominant
forms of popular theatre have been comic or musical, and no wonder that
governments and their allies in the leisure industry have tried to smear
tragedy as "pessimistic" and "elitist ..." two terms we would be wise to
adopt, cherish and advertize.
And, along with the comic or musical, there is now the panel
discussion, where they wear badges of compassion which are not large
enough to conceal the snakes beneath — which also resist the tragic
theatrical experience, and so are ever so popular at home and abroad.
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Superfluities
Redux home page
George Hunka
home page
theatre
minima home page
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
Barker 2
Samuel
Beckett 1
Samuel
Beckett 2
Bertolt
Brecht
Richard
Foreman 1
Richard
Foreman 2
Je Suis
Sang
Sarah
Kane
Music
Marilyn
Nonken
Saint Oedipus
Contact
geh@panix.com
Copyright © 2003-2010
by George
Hunka
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