Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Tuesday, 03 June 2008
"A theatre ... must above all things be irresponsible and disloyal"
"I would like to propose a different theatre, in which conscience is
removed from its dominant function and criticism is confined to that fatal
axis where it alone operates to the common good – that which lies
between the artist and the text, the self-criticism exercised in deletion,
excision, self-denial of the banal and the routine. I would like to
propose that the value of works of art, in social circumstances such as
the present, lies not in their entertainment value, nor in their ability
to 'change perceptions' in pursuit of some common purpose, but in their
power to devastate the received wisdom of the collective, which conspires
to diminish individual experience at all levels. A theatre which addresses
the individual and ceases to regard the audience as an entity, which
denies the existence of audience as singular at all, must above all things
be irresponsible and disloyal. It cannot hope for the status of social
critic, since the social critic is fully incorporated, and it must not
clamour for the comforts of solidarity, the much-
Howard Barker
George Orwell Memorial Lecture, Birkbeck College, 1991
In Arguments for a Theatre
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Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Quotes: Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin
A perennial suffering has just as much right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream. For this reason it may have been wrong to write that after Auschwitz poetry could no longer be written. ...
The concept of a resurrection of culture after Auschwitz is illusory and senseless, and for that reason every work of art that does come into being is forced to play a bitter price. But because the world has outlived its own demise it needs art as its unconscious chronicle.
Theodor Adorno
Only for the sake of those without hope, has hope been given to us.
Walter Benjamin
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Tuesday, 06 May 2008
"[Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett] had met in Berlin in 1976. Feldman wanted to do something with Beckett for the Rome Opera. Beckett indicated that he didn’t like opera – and Feldman agreed. Out of this understanding grew the collaboration on Neither (1977), and Beckett's pleasure with that work accounts for the fact that he recommended Feldman for the music of Words and Music ten years later. ...
"[Feldman said:] 'I never liked anyone else's approach to Beckett. I felt it was a little too easy; they were treating him as if he were an existentialist hero, rather than a tragic hero. And he's a word man, a fantastic word man. And I always felt that I was a note man. I think that's what brought me to him. A kind of shared longing: this saturated, unending longing that he has, and that I have.'"
Samuel Beckett and Music
Edited by Mary Bryden
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Monday, 28 April 2008
[Rodolphe] could not see – this man of such broad experience – the difference of feeling, beneath the similarity of expression. Because wanton or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he only half believed in the sincerity of those he was hearing now; to a large extent they should be disregarded, he believed, because such exaggerated language must surely mask commonplace feelings: as if the soul in its fullness did not sometimes overflow into the most barren metaphors, since no one can ever tell the precise measure of his own needs, of his own ideas, of his own pain, and human language is like a cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary (1856)
Translated by Margaret Mauldon
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Wednesday, 23 April 2008
I do not know the theatre, and the theatre does not know me. ...
One has heard talk of many theatres existing, and of many forms, as if theatres tolerated one another. The fact is that theatres annihilate one another as all religions annihilate one another. Is this because theatre is a religion? Let us confess, the art of theatre has many of the characteristics of religion. For example, it finds so much theatre anathema. It excommunicates. Its methods are akin to prayer. What distinguishes it from all religion is this, however: that it recoils from truth. It repudiates truth as vulgarity.
Howard Barker
Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (2005)
§§ 1, 8
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