|
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
UPDATED (16 February) to include photographs of
the remarkable Ms. Schafer.
 It was a distinct
pleasure to offer What She Knew to the
audience who came to the ICL Avant-Yarde yesterday evening: my thanks to
all who attended, and especially to Fulya Peker and Irem Calikusu who
shared the stage with the play, and Nick Fracaro and the incandescent
Gabriele Schafer, without whom the performance would not have taken place
at all. I was distinctly gratified by your attention and appreciation for
a play which certainly doesn't seem mine any more (Gaby can lay claim to
it more than I can right now), but yours. We are looking forward to
staging a full production sometime this fall, and your response last night
makes that production all the more imperative. So thank you again.
At the end of the performance, Rainer Hanshe offered just a brief note
of appreciation and his best wishes for the holiday; for those who found
it as incisive, relevant (oh that word), heartfelt and contemplative as I
did, I repost it below; far better this than any panel discussion:
In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy
asserts that "If the community is revealed by the death of the other
person, it is because death is itself the true community of mortal beings:
their impossible communion." Death is what simultaneously unites and
isolates us. It is the house of being, and according to chemist
Jean-Claude Ameisen, it is the very carver of life, what shapes and gives
birth to us, cutting us to form as the sculptor carves stone or frees from
matter the precise structure concealed within it. In death there is a
profound opening, an opening in the sense of something beginning; it is an
uncovering or manifestation of the possible, of dangerous new ventures.
Aside from entailing risk or peril of some kind, what is dangerous is also
an attempt or experiment, a trial or essais threatened by the continuous
if not inevitable risk of failure, of the catastrophe. Just as the stone
may yield nothing, shatter into pieces with the wrong blow, or topple over
and crush its creator. To embark on a dangerous course is to be led
across, though one doesn't know where, even if one has a destination or
specific goal in mind. For one is led not only to a place or to an
achievement, if not most likely its failure, but also to certain
experiences: one is led into fires of sorts, into the exigent crucible of
being. And living is the dangerous experiment, the sustaining of an
altogether surpassing intensity to which we struggle to remain open, which
is the struggle to remain receptive before death.
Additional photos at the International Culture Lab's Avant-Yarde site. Regular posting resumes shortly.
|
|
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
|
