Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Home > Archives Tuesday, 02 March 2010 From the archivesFrom Organum II, originally posted on 22 April 2009. Lightly edited. The theatre is my representation. There is no
more certain knowledge, once achieved, than this: that the theatre, like
the world, is a re- Once this realization, with all its horrifying, isolating, exhilarating
and ecstatic possibilities, has been experienced, it cannot be
unexperienced, unlearned, unrealized, and it will color all my theatre and
theatrical experience from then on. Only the hard press of voluntary,
willful ignorance — and this is not uncommon, for some of us fear
our own bodies and desires more than anything else in this world —
will be able to eradicate this realization from my consciousness. I remain
a member of what is called the collective of the audience, or the
collective of the experience, but I now define myself as simultaneously a
constituent and opponent of it. I gauge my reaction, consciously and
unconsciously, from within that collective, from my privileged unique
perspective. I am also aware that my own perspective is colored by the
culture of that collective: not merely the aesthetic and cultural
perceptions with which I enter the theatre, but as an individual body
amongst other individual bodies, sharing perceptual tools such as the eyes
and the ears. Though ultimately it is not through their eyes and ears with
which I witness the play, but through my own. Like Creon, Antigone and the
chorus of Sophocles' tragedy, I am empathetic and antipathetic to the
collective simultaneously (any chance of ultimate reconciliation between
these is illusory; violence unutterably and always follows upon violence,
whether Creon or Antigone's perspective is privileged, the play would end
in slaughter in either case, witnessed by the silent and in any event
illusory gods). I am always a unique and individual object, when alone or
with others, but the collective is a mere abstraction and does not exist
without the voluntary or involuntary gathering of several individual
bodies within one space at one time. For this reason my individual
perspective becomes primary, the primus inter pares in the
individual/ If I were a performer rather than an audience member, I would still experience the theatre as my representation, and whether I am an individual member of a theatrical company or a member of the audience, this experience is identical. On stage I move my body through space among objects and other bodies, and my movement and perspective remain unique. His lehrstücke, Brecht insisted, were learning plays not for the audience (at least not primarily for the audience), but for those who performed in them. As cast member too I remain individual. If the theatre remains my representation, we have an understanding of the perspective of cast members of Richard Foreman's plays, for example, many of whom have told me they feel no more utterly and fully themselves as individuals than when they appear in one of his plays. Finally there is the evidence of performers of other contemporary work, which demonstrates the untapped resources that can be called into practice once (but not before) the realization of the theatre as my representation occurs. My theatre is then charged with desire, disgust, fear, ecstasy,
possibility from each moment to each moment. It is a charge which both
unites and separates auditor and audience, spectator and performer,
performer and performer, in a process of seduction. Theatre is there and
not there, always passing, explicit and present only in my representation
and my body's status as privileged object. What differentiates the theatre
from the world is its disciplined self-
Once the representation is evacuated, my imagination rushes into it. Possibilities form, and all else necessary is the courage to explore them. Posted in /Archives Home > Archives Wednesday, 02 December 2009 From the archives: Rothko ChapelRecently my daughter celebrated her first birthday, and to mark that occasion I wish to repost below an entry from the Organum, which was originally published on 27 January of this year. It has been slightly revised. For Marilyn 
Houston's Rothko
Chapel is a small unremarkable building set just off a suburban
corner, adjoining a series of plain, low houses and a college campus.
Within it, however, is a world entirely itself, as real as the houses and
classrooms surrounding it but an enclosure of myth and tragedy. The
fourteen maroon-
Within this chapel, and within the bodies of work by artists such as Wagner, Syberberg, Beckett, Feldman, Rothko and Barker, we find a new definition for the tragic epic. Ordinarily the word "epic" is treated as genre, or formal description, but more precisely it is the representation of the will's noumenal cosmology through phenomenal means. In this sense "epic" ties Homer's poems to Beckett's. As a cosmology the body of work is necessarily precise and detailed, requiring more than a mere story or anecdote – or a single painting – for its full expression. It requires that imaginative extension besides. Lest we balk at the word "tragedy" itself as mere genre, let us
consider it here as a dynamic, a consciousness, a perspective, rather than
a form. The epic artist insists upon tragedy's expression through lengthy
duration in time and and expansive extension in space. (Leaving aside for
the moment the idea of "comic epics," which will have far more numerous
defenders, unlike the tragic epic, which in post- Extension through space may be another matter. As impressive as it is,
the Rothko Chapel is not a large building. In a letter to Dominique de
Menil, Mrs. Gifford Phillips reported on a conversation she had with
Rothko: that Rothko had described to her his project of one- I have discussed before my affection for small spaces, for the
fifty- These artists invite us in to these cosmologies, these worlds. In the case of Rothko's Chapel, these cosmologies are shorn of traditional figuration to reveal the essence of tragedy: beyond names and story (so many artists make the mistake of thinking that a mere recycling of a story or the use of a name like Oedipus is a means of confronting the tragedies that lay behind these stories and figures; these artists lay claim to them in a desperate attempt to lend their own work significance), but inherent in the very real instruments of the art form: the pigment, the canvas, the body, the sound. The substance lies in the real, the world of the phenomenon. Rothko warns of this fetishization of story and name:
In his late work, Rothko's titles too were shorn of mythic resonance, often mere descriptions of the colors within the painting. But he still insisted upon the tragic resonance. And his work was prone to the same kinds of misunderstandings as Beckett's. Once, an observer called Rothko's canvases of bright yellows and oranges optimistic "celebrations." Rothko responded that these colors, to him, were the colors of an inferno. (This is something I must remember the next time somebody describes the "hope" that Beckett's work elicits from them.) The contemporary epic, tragic vision is rare. The more lacerating
self- Posted in /Archives Home > Archives Thursday, 29 October 2009 From the archivesFrom the Second Organum, originally posted on 6 October 2008. Body of words, body of text. The dramatist writes with regard to
his words as fleshed in space, not inked on paper, which opens the play of
physical signifiers and signifieds in language and in the performing body.
He speaks tyrant and victim, beggar and emperor, woman and man, which he
finds within himself. He unleashes the possibilities of flesh and its
representations, all of its organs and sensations free for the exchange
with those of an auditor in the dark. Flesh, blood, hand, eye, phallus,
womb: the physical evidences of gender and engendering themselves freed
for imagination. They are traded and exchanged through the writing body,
the speaking body, the hearing and watching body, representations caught,
caressed and tossed back again. Symbology made flesh. Words that
penetrate, and welcome penetration, and exchange visions, world
constructs, perceiving selves and ecstasy. (This is far beyond youth,
chronological and psychological, especially beyond the blind adolescent
self- The highest artifice, the disciplined theatre. Torturous distance separating physical selves. But not for that reason any the less real, indeed far from surreal (especially the closed surreality of the deadly, final interpretation of a dream, which the art of theatre most assuredly rejects), perhaps more real for their attempted expression ... Posted in /Archives
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