Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Cross-
Two forms of spectacle. The first: that which is revelatory when
the dramatist writes his self, the performer gestures hers, creating and
unveiling body and spirit in word, speech and movement. In the study and
the rehearsal room (the sites of discipline) following exploration, the
dramatist un-
The second: that which hides, which draws new curtains over the self and the world. Curtains of flashing light and loud noise, concealing torture and lusts for power even as it welcomes laughter and cheap wonder. A blanket that drowns the self and world. A light that blinds, a noise that deafens, the self. This is the condition of the contemporary drama. A spectacle that hides, rather than reveals, and rewards only our infantile or animal attraction to sound and light. In its pretense to human warmth, it commodifies emotion, our sense of wonder, manipulates it, cold and sterile: no life comes from it. It lies. Entertainment for dull children who desire deception and distraction, who fear the mature body's possibilities and inevitable tragedy ...
Of the second spectacle we have the contemporary manifestations of industrialised television, film, sport, politics. All well suited to the second. Is that not enough, or must the art of theatre operate under its subsumation, instead of in conflict with it? As if the screens, from those above Times Square to those we carry in our pockets on our iPods, were not numerous enough. If the theatre is uniquely suited for the first kind of spectacle, its most significant arena, why pursue or praise the second? The suspicion that there is not enough time in these years of ours (of mine) for both. ...
Posted at 9.33 am in /Organum
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Sunday, 17 August 2008
In her biography of Austrian dramatist and novelist Thomas Bernhard, Gitta Honegger discusses Bernhard's theatrical practice:
Schopenhauer, in his World as Will and Representation [WWR], offers the conceptual tool for Bernhard's poetics of comedy:
The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy. The never-
fulfilled wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate, the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end, always gives us a tragedy. Thus, as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy. [WWR 1:322]
In Bernhard's dramatrugy the serious seeps through the cracks in his
split-
Most important, The World as Will and Representation provides
the radical dramaturgical model for Bernhard's revisionist view of the
Shakespearean world as a stage conceived, perceived, and manipulated
from within the individual's skull as playwright, director, and
audience. Schopenhauer's concept of Vorstellung, as the
representation of an all-
[Emphasis added]
And, nota bene, the title of this study of Beckett's late plays and prose.
Posted at 2.20 pm in /Organum/Quotes
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Sunday, 17 August 2008
Nightlanguage; nightwork. A common trope of near-
As the illumination of the electric light has more and more thrust
theatre into its status as a primarily night-
... I favor drama which works in terms of what Brendan Kennelly terms nightenglish which reaches beyond reason in its surprising and speculative interrogative presences, rather than the dayenglish of rational communication and explanation which is usually predicated on some utilitarian terms, beyond those of the theatre itself. ...
The demands of what might, appropriately in this context, be termed my "day job" inevitably tend to take precedence: the busyness of exposition and explanation in teaching students, the placating of bureaucratic demands which are ... all I suppose in the service of the (sometimes heartwarmingly) ludicrous attempt to make a living and raise a family. But then there is the nightwork, in individual imaginings or interpersonal encounters and rehearsal, which yields its own promptings, and becomes resentful if denied for too long. ... [Emphasis added]
What the dark of the night (and the dark of the theatre) requests is an
experience beyond the merely visual, the object distanced from us but
recognisable; in the dark, in the night, denied our daytime eyes, the
touch of our flesh is hyper-
The light of entertainment is perverse because it means the death of
the individual imagination and possibility; it may be that we are so
passionately in love with the flickering pixel, with the light that
pretends to show us truth (though a corporately-
The trope is corrupted but ecstatically so. Now, night and darkness are
life and possibility: the theatre as a night-
Can a word emerging from the dark seduce and excite us, even when the speaking body is distant? Most emphatically, yes, though no one can answer in the positive without having experienced that himself. In this recognition we realise the power of language, for ourselves and in others.
Instead of inviting the audience into the light of the stage, the art of theatre invites them into the nightworld surrounding it, defining that nightworld with its negative illuminatory space.
It is this sublime ecstasy that Schopenhauer experiences in aesthetic,
musical and theatrical epiphany, an epiphany verging on the mystical. It
is a nighttime ecstasy, fully charged with the consciousless will, and
containing within it the deepest wounds and most ecstatic caresses of the
fleshed word. This is, perhaps, what those who condemn these
so-
Posted at 2.01 pm in /Organum
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Tuesday, 05 August 2008
Cross-
I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. ...
But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available." A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance ... spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Richard Foreman (2005)
The conception of the individual self as a cathedral, possessed of both
sacred and earthly objects, possessing its own self-
All this under the design of a single architect, or artist: the self as
the plan, the structure as its aesthetic achievement. As the body of the
self contains and consists of flesh, blood, bone, the cathedral itself
contains and consists of light, stone, air. And art and theatre: body,
music, vision, language. (Wagner, with Bayreuth, insisted on all three
structures simultaneously.) But all are consciously constructed, all
consist of carefully contrived, disciplined architectonics. The great
works of art are profound, massive spaces for contemplation. (For example,
the extraordinary conception of The World as Will and
Representation, more appealing to artists than perhaps any other
philosophical work because the book itself is a grand work of art,
possessed of an aesthetic four-
What we shall have otherwise are minor structures that turn the soul to the contemplation of the simple ground, rather than the vast darkness that spreads above. The construction and the experience of a cathedral require more than a lifetime. Our damnation, and our hope, is that a cathedral is never finished.
Posted at 9.38 am in /Organum
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Thursday, 31 July 2008
Cross-
Slush puppie. Like Proust's madeleine,
any object or image experienced in the noumenal aesthetic moment is seized
by the senses and rendered as a possession of the subject, along with its
emotional and psychic resonances. A man comes across in his
mid-
I am old enough to remember too that the Ritz
cracker (an advertisement for which I saw on the side of a truck this
morning) was not arbitrarily named. They first came on the market in 1934,
during the Depression years; those who purchased them and served them to
their guests were attracted by and aspired to the glamour of the name
"Ritz," originally the name of a series of high-
The observer seizes the signifiers for his own internal contemplation, for the echoes within. When a composer calls a work a "symphony" or a "sonata," the aspirations and the emotions associated with these generic titles draw personal associations to the fore, for the composer, the performer and the listener. With discipline and precision, composer, performer and listener explore the signifier together, but it is always the individual who defines the signified for himself. The same is true of the designations "comic" and "tragic," or any narrative tropes exploited in their construction and experience.
The greatest and most provocative subversion is to wrench the image,
the word, from its signified: to allow the imagination to play among the
signs that surround him: to create an individual world, leaving himself
open to the unexpected resonances of an image to which he brings his own
personal history. This is the only truly subversive and revolutionary act
of the post-
The most common things of this world are sufficient, as Brecht wrote in what was perhaps his final poem:
And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.
That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.
Only to add: For, surely, no one else will stand up for you.
Posted at 9.11 am in /Organum
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