Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Tuesday, 26 January 2010 Samuel Beckett: Quadrat I + IIUPDATE: The name of the composer in question is Albrecht Schrade. More on the composition of the score for Quadrat here. A true rarity, recently posted at the indispensible UbuWeb: a video of Quadrat 1 + 2, a piece written and directed especially for television by Samuel Beckett. The video was premiered on the West German television network Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) on 8 October 1981. Additional details are available at the UbuWeb site. More from James Knowlson's Damned to Fame:
The video most uniquely demonstrates the Beckettian theatre's determination to render through a variety of forms – is this dance, music, theatre, video? all or none? – a metaphysical construct, quite sui generis. And still ahead (perhaps ten thousand years ahead) of its time. (The music is uncredited; I hope to determine the composer shortly.) Posted in /Dramatists/Samuel_Beckett Tuesday, 26 January 2010 More on QuadratIn regard to my posting of Samuel Beckett's Quadrat
I and II on Sunday, Dr. Ulrika Maude of the University of Durham
and Dr. Gaby Hartel (through the kind offices of Dr. Mark Nixon,
co- Dr. Nixon writes:
My gratitude to Drs. Maude, Hartel and Nixon for providing this information (something, perhaps, of a Beckett "scoop") to me, and now to you. Posted in /Dramatists/Samuel_Beckett Tuesday, 26 January 2010 A Critique of Tragedy 7Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a particularly theatrical construct: an audience watching shadows on a wall in front of it. But a more tactile, sensuous allegorical statement of the metaphysical dramatic form is also possible. The same audience faces an opaque scrim — gray and silk for preference, stretched taut across the fourth wall — and perceive, through a dim light, shapes that press against the scrim from behind. They are at times violent, at times tender; they move, the outlines of the shapes perceptible but the precise nature and identity of these shapes impossible to define. It is a sensuous, tactile experience; they can be perceived like the limbs beneath clothing, like a leg pressing and brushing through a skirt or dress. The light plays on them and with them, shadows, which can't be identified with the shapes or movements themselves, providing darker grays for the eye to contemplate. It is the project of the artist (dramatist, designer, director, performer) to choreograph these movements, to describe them with body, voice, costume and words: to provide a visible map of the invisible territory that lies behind the veil. What lies behind the taut silk is impossible to know; only hints and suggestions are possible; but nonetheless, in their reaching to the audience's perception, their terrors, struggles and tendernesses become known and visible. Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here. Posted in /Tragedy |