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Home > Theatreminima
Monday, 26 April 2010
 On top of everything else, my play What She Knew is now online in the latest
issue of Midway, a semi-regular publication of
new
prose, poetry and drama.
Photo: Oedipus and Jocasta, Paris, by Joel-Peter Witkin
(2007).
Home > Theatreminima
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
UPDATED (16 February) to include photographs of
the remarkable Ms. Schafer.
 It was a distinct
pleasure to offer What She Knew to the
audience who came to the ICL Avant-Yarde yesterday evening: my thanks to
all who attended, and especially to Fulya Peker and Irem Calikusu who
shared the stage with the play, and Nick Fracaro and the incandescent
Gabriele Schafer, without whom the performance would not have taken place
at all. I was distinctly gratified by your attention and appreciation for
a play which certainly doesn't seem mine any more (Gaby can lay claim to
it more than I can right now), but yours. We are looking forward to
staging a full production sometime this fall, and your response last night
makes that production all the more imperative. So thank you again.
At the end of the performance, Rainer Hanshe offered just a brief note
of appreciation and his best wishes for the holiday; for those who found
it as incisive, relevant (oh that word), heartfelt and contemplative as I
did, I repost it below; far better this than any panel discussion:
In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy
asserts that "If the community is revealed by the death of the other
person, it is because death is itself the true community of mortal beings:
their impossible communion." Death is what simultaneously unites and
isolates us. It is the house of being, and according to chemist
Jean-Claude Ameisen, it is the very carver of life, what shapes and gives
birth to us, cutting us to form as the sculptor carves stone or frees from
matter the precise structure concealed within it. In death there is a
profound opening, an opening in the sense of something beginning; it is an
uncovering or manifestation of the possible, of dangerous new ventures.
Aside from entailing risk or peril of some kind, what is dangerous is also
an attempt or experiment, a trial or essais threatened by the continuous
if not inevitable risk of failure, of the catastrophe. Just as the stone
may yield nothing, shatter into pieces with the wrong blow, or topple over
and crush its creator. To embark on a dangerous course is to be led
across, though one doesn't know where, even if one has a destination or
specific goal in mind. For one is led not only to a place or to an
achievement, if not most likely its failure, but also to certain
experiences: one is led into fires of sorts, into the exigent crucible of
being. And living is the dangerous experiment, the sustaining of an
altogether surpassing intensity to which we struggle to remain open, which
is the struggle to remain receptive before death.
Additional photos at the International Culture Lab's Avant-Yarde site. Regular posting resumes shortly.
Home > Theatreminima
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Seating for this Sunday's
workshop/reading of What She Knew is now "sold out" (if a
potlatch can be said to be sold out); I hope to see those who can't attend
at the full Fall 2010 production, details to be announced later this
season.
I am very pleased that What She Knew will be first performed
as part of a "potlatch" — a ceremony and social construct
highly amenable to Georges Bataille, and which gives rise to a variety of
thoughts about the nature of the individual and community, especially for
tragedy. Far from an abstraction, community for the tragic consciousness
is a profound individual activity based in voluntary gift exchange, not a
concept to be bandied about in terms of demographics or
self-aggrandizement of one subgroup or another (whether it's based in
age, race, sexual preference, gender, religion, what have you), and
"community" itself becomes a dynamic, protean force. And community
changes: there is one such community in which the work is first conceived
(the Albee Foundation retreat a few years ago), another in the rehearsal
room (in this case, Gabriele Schafer, Nick Fracaro and myself), another
brought together for performance, yet another which permeates the
gathering that remains when the performance is over. The community of
artists and work that have come in the thousands of years before. And,
most certainly, that community which finds joy in the exploration of
elective affinities (even those distant friends and colleagues overseas
who are unable to attend, but whose spirit informs the work). It is
particularly relevant to What She Knew — a tragedy which
examines that conjunction between and autonomous alienation of individual
and the state, readable as culture, society and family. Of course, the
economic strictures of theatrical production make it impossible to make
every production a potlatch such as those of the Avant-Yarde series. But
the performance of dramatic tragedy, especially as a far more elitist
endeavor in the 21st century than crowd-pleasing musical or comedy,
might best be conceived as a reciprocal gift, rather than the purchase of
an industrially-produced entertainment product.
Full information on the event is available at the International
Culture Lab's Avant-Yarde site, as well as the most recent theatre minima newsletter. I'm looking forward very much to Sunday; perhaps I'll have
further thoughts following.
Photo: Oedipus and Jocasta, Paris, by Joel-Peter Witkin
(2007).
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