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Tuesday, 03 February 2009
From the Organum;
originally posted 2 October 2006; lightly
revised.
Ain't Got No Body. The dramatist is invisible after the
theatrical text is created and passed along to the performer for
expression, which begs the question: If the dramatist is not expressing
during the performative instant, if her work is perceived to have been
finished months or years before, what is she doing there? Why there at
all, especially in the transgressive performance styles of Antonin Artaud
and Reza Abdoh? As profoundly physical as the act of physical performance
is, the psychic investigation of the writer requires that she use her body
as an open conduit for the perception, investigation, and description of
the unconscious Schopenhauerian Will that runs through it. The performer
expresses; the dramatist reads impressions of Representations on her body
and describes (and inscribes into a hopelessly inadequate language) the
linguistic scrapes and leavings of that Will. The dramatist answers the
question that is directed to her ("Why your text at all?") with this
response: "I leave my markings with what the long culture and history of
writing has given to me, adding my own scratchmarks to go a little further
along the road to destruction and light: the Will offers both." To be
fully open and aware of the Will's operation the writer's body needs to be
as trained and supple, as well-equipped for physical observation as
the performer's is well-equipped for physical expression, this
training a cleansing of the skin's lenses. The avenues towards
transcendence are often those which are most obscured by sloppiness,
waste, laziness, carelessness, trivia, and garbage. To the noisy
representation, oppose the more precise eye; to the language's inadequacy
before the experience, oppose the more carefully considered word. Every
word, from noun and verb to preposition and article, carries with it its
own theoretical antonym. The dramatist works against this inherent irony
and self-contradiction of language. She keeps trying to express lucidly,
without irony. To do so she needs the lucid, limpid eye to still her
inscribing, shaking, imperfect hand. Which nonetheless, as physiological
expression of the Will, is always working against itself. The dramatist
writes herself out of her expression and disappears into the performer's
body and voice. Nonetheless, a bodied presence herself in those words,
though invisible, requiring a continuing effort at physical perfection of
the perceiving instrument, the writer's body (always aging, always
decaying, always at the mercy of the amoral microbe that offers
dis-ease).
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Thursday, 15 January 2009
Originally written for the Organum
and posted on 8 January 2007. Slightly revised.
"The Death of Tragedy." As if to say, at the
beginning of 2007, that tragedy is no longer necessary? Accessible?
Possible? As with most "death of ..." tropes, it represents wishful
thinking more than anything else. Such phrases make good book or essay
titles. The attempt to reinvent the old forms in the guise of the ancients
or the Elizabethans falls short (mere archaeology, slapping bright paint
on the pain of the ancients and wrapping it in Christmas lights, bringing
joy to the childish). Contemporary Americans, it appears, have neither the
history nor the vocabulary for it (ideologies of left and right, in
seeking the ameliorist heaven on earth, a heaven politicians and
ideologues think can be found at the center of hell, can't contain the
tragic consciousness), and therefore not the interest. But this is merely
appearance. The human craves a recognition of the tragic, the American as
human as anyone else. If the theatre does not give it to him, he goes
elsewhere. No wonder the stage so desiccated and sick. Some will insist
upon their fun, and they shovel it onto the center of the stage. It reeks
of waste.
The place for childlike play in tragedy, to find pleasure in the
transgression of cultural and social bonds, to laugh, to have one's breath
caught short in pleasure, surprise, even fear. But this is not the same
thing as fun. Fun amuses, is safe, consumerist society and culture keep
fun penned in the barricades of its puritan limits. Play, on the other
hand, is dangerous: it leaps over the barricades of the allowable, it
seeks excess and freedom. And is therefore liberating. Play is joy,
irrational wonder,
the laugh that shatters community. Fun finds ironic giggles,
trivialization, nothing of the self or identity risked. (Laughter can
close off discussion through ridicule, or it can recognize through
surprise; nothing is value-free.) Fun can be incorporated in the Las
Vegas spectacle; it constitutes no threat. The ecstatic cry of play, on
the other hand, denies the validity of the mob's wishes. It is purely
bodied pleasure, to which tickets can't be sold. Fun is amusement for the
Costco shopper. Play places assumptions, conformity to any ideology, at
risk. It imagines other places, other bodies, other possibilities.
More, and perhaps most important, it is not afraid of limits to
expression; it does not care what is culturally acceptable.
Of course tragedy is alive. It is alive in the work of Barker, Kane,
and Crimp. It is alive in the late work of Beckett, in the sexual
tragedies of Harold Pinter. In music: in Feldman, Barraqué, Murail.
In painting (Rothko) and photography (Cava). Joy can be drawn from it, but
it is not necessarily imposed, and it is, in its experience, hard-won
and not a simple thing. This is not the case in the Microsoft Word
documents of American playwrights in the early 21st century, or the stages
to which MFA and play development programs grant them entry. Tragedy in
America has yet to be invented. (Our poets have made a start, but their
work remains pagebound.) Its place is the theatre. Rather, its place
was the theatre. (Perhaps those who would like to integrate
television and film into the theatrical experience should admit their
professional ambitions – and the commodification and simplification
of the human that drives the culture industry in which these disciplines
thrive commercially – and go and work in television and film.) Greece
had existed for hundreds of years before it staged its first tragedies;
England for 500 years before the birth of Shakespeare. Perhaps one day on
these shores; we had a beginning with O'Neill, Williams, Miller and Albee,
but where is that daring now? Unless we trivialize ourselves out of
existence and bastardize all human possibility into a series of YouTube
videos long before then.
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Tuesday, 06 January 2009
Originally published in Organum I on 16
January 2007; lightly revised here; an amplification of views expressed in
last
Friday's post.
Terror of the everyday and the necessity of glamour. The embrace
and worship of the everyday tedious and repetitive gesture suggest a
hatred, even abhorrence of extremity, of transgression, this hatred and
abhorrence born (as most hatreds and abhorrences) of fear: A
well-founded fear that these will undermine the security and
assurances of the everyday. (Tragedy doesn't provide health insurance.)
Never mind that this love of the quotidian is composed of a thin veneer of
self-importance and an unwarranted expectation of permanence. The
possibilities of experience that extremity and transgression invite are
drowned in tedium: the tedium of meaningless repetitive work to no end
except that of money and security (there is repetitive work in art, in
practice, essential to art's necessary precision, but its end neither
fiscal nor safe). The tedium of possession, again born of fear: new cars
and condominiums, things to anchor us more deeply into the phenomenal, the
dull but insatiable throb of its everyday desires. In their tedium is our
security. For some it is air and water, this security. For some it is a
drowning death-in-minimal-life.
Small pleasures, greater pains: nothing like the body in the throes of
death and decay. How self-absorbed, without explanation, the living
bodies surrounding those of the dead and dying. Clothed in bluejeans and
sneakers. These living bodies adorn their self-hatred with the
democratic casual.
Erotic tragedy is a glamorous art. It holds comfort and ease as
abominations. It's no wonder that it's so informed by luxurious clothing,
robes and well-wrought nets. Clothing fetishizes the body as the body
fetishizes the spirit, but the fetish provides access to the signified,
which stands beyond the object itself. (Costume has always been more
signifying than scenery. The eros of the mask, mask of the face as
costumes mask the body: tragedy is a clothed art.) Lush, beautiful
costumes, a couture by definition tailored to the individual body of the
performer who wears it. Hence the costume's individual expressivity, hence
it contains the self's loneliness and desire for union, its vulnerability
reaches for the Other. As far from tedium and the quotidian as can be
achieved.
Tragedy is not about sensible shoes, as Howard Barker suggested when he
discussed the meaning of costume in Gertrude – The Cry:
[Gertrude's shoes have] heels of such extravagant dimensions how can
you move except by dislocating your entire anatomy [...] should shoes not
enhance the action of our limbs should they not encourage us to act in
sympathy with the body's functioning not trick us into grotesque parody
... [the intention of] all nakedness in my own work where the gesture of
revelation is endowed with performance, above all, challenge to transgress
the social/political routine, to subvert the situation and thereby
disorientate, to force a collapse on the spectator (by spectator I mean
the opposite character in the play ...)
Couture, elegance, glamour are by definition theatrical and
presentational of the human body. Rediscovery of the expression of erotic
tragedy. The clothed onstage body to encourage in the spectator (by
spectator I mean the individual sitting in the audience) an unclothed
exploration offstage, in secret, conspiratorial and intimate; a new
self-awareness too in the public world: to render that world too a
place of beauty and elegance emerging from the phenomenal self. Instead
of, by encouraging that democratic casualness and comfort, murdering the
spirit through tedium and trivia that mask only boredom and despair.
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