Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Thursday, 03 July 2008
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Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto (I am human; nothing human is
alien to me). The ameliorist theatre, a fully-
Though a play must not be moralistic and therefore a sermon, it always has a moral quality. The condition of a pallid and puritanical culture's theatre is thus a reflection of its pallid and puritanical morality and ethics.
Posted at 8.47 am in /Organum
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Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Organum: Tragedy, Style and the Inarticulate
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Despite the power of Nitsch's work he does have a fatal enemy: theatrical time. At least in films of his performances, the duration of preparation stands in for the duration of narrative – we see the preparation of the performance in all its mundane objecthood (meat, tomatoes), and even in the realisation of the performance the profane never truly approaches the sacred. And this is because it is theatre, and all theatre is a lie. Theatrical ritual and sacrifice are conscious imitations of ritual and sacrifice, therefore on some level ridiculous. The rehearsal of ritual and sacrifice never reaches the status of ritual and sacrifice themselves; it remains "theatrical," a status recognised in the name of Nitsch's collective.
The second ineradicable flaw in the work as theatre is the deliberate subsumation of the tragic individual in the collective mass. Lacking any expression of the self from within (that self the seat of metaphysical knowledge), the bodies themselves also remain mundane. (I must quarrel with this; what, then, is the difference between Nitsch's theatre and that of the Culture Industry, which also seeks the subsumation of the individual into the mass?) That expression is properly lyrical, linguistic: and words are dispensible in this theatre. As well as in the theatre of most followers of Artaud and Grotowski. Artaud's silent scream remains a scream. As Beckett knew, one takes this as a given: "The tears of the world are a constant quantity. ... The air is full of our cries." Drama begins when you start talking, especially tragedy, at the center of which is the individual, not the mass, fleshed body.
Nitsch's tragic theatre is primarily visual and so perhaps doomed to ultimate failure. (It must be said that the paintings and photographs reproduced under Nitsch's name are far more haunting than film of the performance itself.) Perhaps at the root of it is that language is the expression of style, and style is at the root of the individual expression. The image emerges from the word: otherwise (especially in theatre as the nexus of dishonesty) image remains unexplored.
In rereading Sarah Kane's plays recently I came across a quote from her
in which the question of style and language comes surprisingly to the
fore. Kane's last two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, have
given rise to perhaps the most varied of performance styles and
production. James Macdonald, who directed the London premiere of 4.48
Psychosis, told Graham Saunders in an interview in 2000: "[Sarah]
taught me a lot about using language precisely in theatre, especially
about punctuation. Her telling of a story through images – I think
that has influenced the way I now work on plays." And yet the texts of the
plays themselves become far more driven by the spoken word.
Cleansed has perhaps the most stripped-
[In writing Crave] I wanted to find out how good a poet I could be while still writing something dramatic ... As soon as you've written and used a theatrical form, it becomes redundant.
Ultimately her refuge was in spoken language alone – and in a blisteringly individual style; all of Kane's dialogue is instantly recognisable as hers. "Form" itself becomes redundant because of its external imposition upon a speech; instead the form, both linguistic and theatrical, emerges from within the content. For this, speech is indispensible.
Theatre as an experience of collectivity is perhaps its greatest lie: while individuals come together to rehearse, perform or watch a play, in their deepest minds they remain individual. The richness of performance emerges when each of those individual participants contributes to the experience itself. But style remains within the individual, and tragic consciousness as an element of style is profoundly solitary, shared with other individuals, never the mass-mind. In its overarching concern for its own cultural health, theatre takes on elements of mass culture: of television, film, comics. This addition itself is ultimately suicidal to the nature of theatre. The theatre worker who draws from the essence of his individual tragic experience remains profoundly alone and more and more marginalised as theatre pursues its own death as an art. These workers and exemplars remain solitary, few and alone. (Finding and honing this individual style alone is tortuous, slow and unrewarded, littered with failures and false starts, the more deeply painful because of their larger ambitions, the more internal origin, that exploration of the personal wound; even one's friends shy away and fall silent, increasingly ashamed of that failure or apathetic, growing ever more distant and uncommunicative.) It drives some to bodied suicide. But then one wants style, to sharpen it, hone it, as expression of eroticism and catastrophe. Style becomes compulsion, and it begins in the clothed, bodied word.
Posted at 8.35 am in /Organum
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Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Cross-posted to the theatre minima journal.
All abstract time, past and future, is contained in the present moment, the only time that is not an abstraction, as even animals know: the moment of our birth (and that of the world), the moment of our death (and that of the world) both inhere in the present breath. The theatrical performance is a succession of present moments: necessarily a process of erasure of the past and extension into the future. Comedy looks back to the first terminus, its memory ever-present, tragedy forward to the second, its fact inescapable. Only silence touches on what lies before and after us in the world; noise and laughter distract us from it. In terms of form, duration stretches the present moment and holds it open for examination. Comedy as a genre seeks to cut it short as soon as possible, hence its speed (and its noise and its desperate need to amuse and comfort). Tragedy steeps us in the present, and that knowledge of the moment of our death, which exists in this time, in this theatre. It provides no escape. This is the basis of Proust's own conception of time, deadening habit preventing us from living in full knowledge and potential of the present moment. To habit and the illusion of well-being, the full realisation of the present moment's potential is catastrophic. This is the specific power of Sophoclean tragedy. And therefore Krapp's Last Tape, Old Times, No Man's Land, and longer works from Morton Feldman, in which time is the subject. Like the present body, the presence of death in the theatre is inescapable, and its end.
Only that person who lives in full knowledge and acceptance of that death lives fully, accepts its sublimity, and touches on what lies beyond it. T.S. Eliot, in "Burnt Norton":
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the beginning and the end were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
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Friday, 13 June 2008
Cross-posted to the theatre minima journal
On reading David Ian Rabey: "On Being a Shakespearean Dramatist", "Liberations from the Literal"
If a pianist reads Proust, will her performance become invested with a Proustian element? One must ask her, but it seems safe to say that this investment, conscious or unconscious, should not be unexpected, any more than the originals of the composer Vinteuil and the painter Elstir (and if composers and painters, why not performers?) invested Proust's literary work itself with influential threads, suggesting the mutability of time, place and imagination. The division of aesthetic modes into written literature, music, plastic art, dance, drama and all else may have its Aristotelian elements, separating genus into all its species. But the separation depends upon difference rather than similarity and is useful only for the purposes of categorisation, the arena of the pedant and the academic. Such categorisation is exclusionary by its nature, when exclusion should be recognised for the stifling limitations that it imposes on the artist. It does not explain the role of Vinteuil's original in Proust's creative imagination; Synge and Caspar David Friedrich in Beckett's; Holinshed, Ovid and Plutarch in Shakespeare's. Division in imagination leads to the alien, the alone, the solitary. It keeps one from the community of imagination across history and within the individual artist. That this influence is not identifiable by the artist, cannot be pinned by him or her like a butterfly to a wax tablet, does not mean that, under the skin, the affinity and affordance is not shared.
Without a theatre a dramatist builds instead a library of affordances and influences on his shelves and within his own imagination. In his mind and spirit their ideas and words are bodied and live; mingling and coupling they produce new plays, the products of a seeded imagination, the impregnation of a talent. This is not to deny the primary place of experience, without which no conceptual or abstract thought is possible; conceptualisation and abstraction are secondary to imagination, to the lived moment, always. In the dark of his study, however, the dramatist gives reading and influence play among his memories: experience relived in contemplation and elective affinity. Before King Lear, King Leir; without King Leir, an empty stage, a blank page remains before the dramatist. And would we have Krapp's Last Tape, Ghost Trio, without Schubert?
One cannot build a theatre out of books. But, if the dramatist is exiled and without a theatre, the books enliven the imagination and produce a play, or a theatre, quite unwittingly. And, like the pianist with her Proust, the actor, designer, dramatist finds his work invested with the intermingling of words and practice. Primary sources, all more profoundly clear than the massive secondary literature that has grown up around them and therefore essential:
The World as Will and Representation
The work of Shakespeare
The prose and drama of Samuel Beckett, after 1962 (Prose: How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstword Ho; Plays: Play, Come and Go, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, What Where)
The work of Bertolt Brecht
The music of Anton Webern
The plastic arts: Rembrandt, painters of the Northern Renaissance, German Expressionism and pre-war German painting and drawing, Klimt and Schiele, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany
Secondary sources (an ever-
The plays of Howard Barker, and his theory: Arguments for a Theatre; Death, The One and the Art of Theatre; A Style and Its Origins
The work of Harold Pinter
The work of Richard Foreman
Posted at 9.36 am in /Organum
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Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Originally posted 20 May 2007.
Though he has watched a decent age pass by,
A man will sometimes still desire the world.
I swear I see no wisdom in that man.
The endless hours pile up a drift of pain
More unrelieved each day; and as for pleasure,
When he is sunken in excessive age,
You will not see his pleasure anywhere.
The last attendant is the same for all,
Old men and young alike, as in its season
Man's heritage of underworld appears:
There being then no epithalamion,
No music and no dance. Death is the finish.Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
And then to go back quickly whence we came. ...
The tragedian's urge is to the pointless description of the light that the chorus of Oedipus at Colonus mentions, its expression through himself. The anatomization of that light is what the artist senselessly is compelled to express (the soul's work), in Beckett's formulation of the artist's activity ("The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express"): as Pozzo insists, "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." It is ironic that the Art of Theatre, then, is pursued in small dark rooms: not a Brechtian showing of the apparatus, but a demonstration of the difficulty of seeing clearly. In pursuit of that clarity the stage is ruthlessly stripped to its own devices: no commingling with television or film allowable. Given the difficulty of the artist's work, it's only fair not to burden him with media not his own.
Tragedy never loses sight of the dark: it is presupposed, the ugliness of existence upon which a human-made beauty is imposed. This is a difficult, sensuous beauty: it is not mere cosmetic prettiness (this is for melodrama). This imposition requires a rejection of Schopenhauer's Quietism: it is a call for action, not resignation. A transgression against the condition of man's illness, a finding of strength after the experience of profound, bitter recognition. And a movement, that expression, towards the awakening of possibilities within a world which would thrust and confine all experience into collective culture's own crude mold -- a mold first created to deny the catastrophic realization experienced at Colonus, and to validate its own illusory status as the only truth.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 8.43 am in /Organum
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