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Tuesday, 27 April 2010
 A new recording of Olivier
Messiaen's two-piano masterpiece Visions de l'Amen (1944) is just out from
Bridge Records, performed by Marilyn Nonken and Sarah Rothenberg. Paul Griffith writes about the work:
From the mystical writer Ernest Hello came the four
meanings of Amen, which again are outlined in Messiaen's preface: the Amen
uttered by the Creator in creating, the Amen of obedience to the divine
will, the Amen of longing for union with God, and the Amen of the eternal
consummation of everything in Paradise. These meanings can be associated
in turn with the first, third, fourth and last movements, but the
fundamental sense of Amen, as a gesture of assent, can be felt throughout
the work, for the most obvious musical image of assent is the cadence, and
the whole cycle is founded on a theme of Creation, which is an enlargement
of a pentatonic cadence.
The CD is now available from the Superfluities Redux
store at Amazon.com here.
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
"All I describe is theatre even where theatre is not
the subject." The blind alleys and cul-de-sacs
down which many theatre writers wander result in a quick loss of energy:
all that spinning in place dizzies and tires one. Perhaps it is a matter
of time — all that theatregoing, writing and socializing leave
little room for reading and thought, even if we're constantly told that we
make room in our lives for what is important to us. In the past six
months, two books of essays by two very different American dramatists of
some stature — David Mamet's Theatre and Wallace Shawn's Essays — have been published to little
notice among theatre critics and reviewers, and one would have thought
their appearance would be some cause for celebration, let alone
meditation. (Would the same silence greet similar books from Tom Stoppard
and Caryl Churchill, for example?) Here are two playwrights with
substantial bodies of work holding forth, from quite distinct
perspectives, on what theatre and drama mean to culture: and not merely
the culture of the rehearsal room and the auditorium, but outside those as
well. These are not especially books of theory — Mamet describes his
own essays as "the otherwise incathectable expression of love for an
ever-widening mystery" — but of meditations on their work. I
hope to review them both here soon, but for now they demonstrate that some
American dramatists, at least, still see the need for contextualizing
their work, even if it's only for themselves, and for doing so in the
public forum of the hardcover book.
The possibilities and mysteries of imagination are limitless, the
exploration of these possibilities and mysteries perhaps the radical basis
of theatrical production itself. There is always more to write about, and
for those dramatists for whom the theatre is as much a part of their
bodies and wills as their limbs, every moment broadens the canvas, in both
their prose and their plays. The human is infinite in the theatre and the
drama, but quite finite within the allowable confines of behavior and
interest dictated by the limited social culture and the theatre
permissible there. Anything can be an "event" as Alain Badiou describes it
— a "rupture of being" in which the subject finds a new truth
— the birth of a child, a marriage, a death; that this rupture is
experienced as a catastrophe makes it the food of drama and theatre for
dramatist, performer and spectator alike. But the culture which cannot
accept these ruptures limits the autonomy of the individual imagination
that circulates within it: so most theatre, and theatre writing, remains
small and unambitious. Still, the signifying dance of language gives
expression to these events and the imagination. When one writes about the
theatre, one writes about the self in full. In passing through the
inevitability of time and place, the dramatist always finds more to write
about.
There is a sense that being bored with theatre and live performance is
being bored with
one's own body; in a culture of screens, the fascination is with the mere
two-dimensional image of the self, however false (and
however many prefer it) ...
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
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Superfluities
Redux home page
George Hunka
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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
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by George
Hunka
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