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Thursday, 04 February 2010
Let me pose the oscillation of the secret — its
painful fascination — in a recollection of common childhood
experience. We recall how as children we felt a peculiar resentment
against a certain other child who appeared to be in possession of
knowledge we were not party to; he or she would not tell. To make
this child tell, to reveal its privileges, all sorts of tortures
were devised. By contrast to this fury of persecution, to be in
possession of a secret was a kind of ecstasy, which if shared
with another (probably the most ecstatic moment of all) was done
circumspectly, with the absolute inhibition of communicating it any
further ... yet more ferocious punishment "if you tell ..." Telling or not
telling, revelation or silence, the social and the private in a vertigo of
seduction and punishment. This is potentially the ground for an aesthetic
of theatre in an age of ostensible truths, total exposure and withering
enlightment. And theatre is probably better equipped for this secretive,
evasive, anti-utilitarian aesthetic than any other form. Its store of
techniques include the chorus, the aside, the soliloquy, rhetoric, a
poetic idiom, symbolism, any number of forms of realism, an unparalleled
range of mimetic devices which enable it to pose modes of existence,
options for existence, which the great industrialized modes of
entertainment can neither appropriate nor match. ...
That this theatre will also be a theatre of text is fully
contingent on some of the premises already described. If it is to
articulate the secret it must do so in a language of secrets, a language
which is not primarily concerned with the patina of social discourse
— the conventional speech of transaction, communication, clarity,
ostensible meaning — but a form which brings to the surface —
erupts from beneath the surface — the normally unspoken,
the counter-discourse, the private, that which is not, in a
Stanislavskyan sense, an intention at all, but a diversion. This
language — almost certainly poetic in form, if only as a consequence
of being invented — will be in contradistinction to the
theatre language of realism, saturated with its author's personality, a
language in which the anonymity of the author ... will be impossible to
sustain, abolished by that eccentricity of tone that distinguishes all
poetry. An audience will sense the total lack of objectivity, the
startling absence of judgement, implicit in what it witnesses and hears.
Far from feeling itself the subject of an episode of enlightenment, safe
in the hands of a self-proclaimed moralist (an author) it will sense
the terrible insecurity of being invited by a highly suspicious individual
known as an actor, to become party to a secret, to share a transgression,
in a darkened room. The more blinding the transparency of a culture ethic,
the more subtly authoritarian its surveillance/entertainment axis,
the harder this information will be to refuse.
Howard Barker
"The glass confessional: The theatre
in hyper-democratic society" (1995)
Arguments for a Theatre
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
Thursday, 04 February 2010
The active contemplation for which the art of tragedy aims rehearses a
contest between the noumenal and phenomenal. All of theatre's tools are
phenomenal — the body, the word, the scene; time, space and
causality — but it is only with these that the noumenal can be
suggested, hinted at. The metaphysical union of subject and object in the
ecstatic moment of recognition is impossible in the phenomenal world. But
this tension presents to the spectator an opportunity for the
contemplation of other worldly and phenomenal possibilities. It is a
contemplation from within this attempted union, not outside of it, and for
all its impossibility it nonetheless limns the thing-in-itself
of the body and the word.
All the more reason for the spectator to resist losing herself
in the story, a blindness: this is the Culture Industry's desire. Instead
the spectator is engaged in a project to find herself, in an
attempt to unite with the
performer, in its lyrical duration ...
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
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