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Wednesday, 10 February 2010
 Seating for this Sunday's
workshop/reading of What She Knew is now "sold out" (if a
potlatch can be said to be sold out); I hope to see those who can't attend
at the full Fall 2010 production, details to be announced later this
season.
I am very pleased that What She Knew will be first performed
as part of a "potlatch" — a ceremony and social construct
highly amenable to Georges Bataille, and which gives rise to a variety of
thoughts about the nature of the individual and community, especially for
tragedy. Far from an abstraction, community for the tragic consciousness
is a profound individual activity based in voluntary gift exchange, not a
concept to be bandied about in terms of demographics or
self-aggrandizement of one subgroup or another (whether it's based in
age, race, sexual preference, gender, religion, what have you), and
"community" itself becomes a dynamic, protean force. And community
changes: there is one such community in which the work is first conceived
(the Albee Foundation retreat a few years ago), another in the rehearsal
room (in this case, Gabriele Schafer, Nick Fracaro and myself), another
brought together for performance, yet another which permeates the
gathering that remains when the performance is over. The community of
artists and work that have come in the thousands of years before. And,
most certainly, that community which finds joy in the exploration of
elective affinities (even those distant friends and colleagues overseas
who are unable to attend, but whose spirit informs the work). It is
particularly relevant to What She Knew — a tragedy which
examines that conjunction between and autonomous alienation of individual
and the state, readable as culture, society and family. Of course, the
economic strictures of theatrical production make it impossible to make
every production a potlatch such as those of the Avant-Yarde series. But
the performance of dramatic tragedy, especially as a far more elitist
endeavor in the 21st century than crowd-pleasing musical or comedy,
might best be conceived as a reciprocal gift, rather than the purchase of
an industrially-produced entertainment product.
Full information on the event is available at the International
Culture Lab's Avant-Yarde site, as well as the most recent theatre minima newsletter. I'm looking forward very much to Sunday; perhaps I'll have
further thoughts following.
Photo: Oedipus and Jocasta, Paris, by Joel-Peter Witkin
(2007).
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Superfluities
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