Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Home > Tragedy Tuesday, 27 April 2010 A Critique of Tragedy 15"All I describe is theatre even where theatre is not
the subject." The blind alleys and cul- The possibilities and mysteries of imagination are limitless, the exploration of these possibilities and mysteries perhaps the radical basis of theatrical production itself. There is always more to write about, and for those dramatists for whom the theatre is as much a part of their bodies and wills as their limbs, every moment broadens the canvas, in both their prose and their plays. The human is infinite in the theatre and the drama, but quite finite within the allowable confines of behavior and interest dictated by the limited social culture and the theatre permissible there. Anything can be an "event" as Alain Badiou describes it — a "rupture of being" in which the subject finds a new truth — the birth of a child, a marriage, a death; that this rupture is experienced as a catastrophe makes it the food of drama and theatre for dramatist, performer and spectator alike. But the culture which cannot accept these ruptures limits the autonomy of the individual imagination that circulates within it: so most theatre, and theatre writing, remains small and unambitious. Still, the signifying dance of language gives expression to these events and the imagination. When one writes about the theatre, one writes about the self in full. In passing through the inevitability of time and place, the dramatist always finds more to write about. There is a sense that being bored with theatre and live performance is
being bored with
one's own body; in a culture of screens, the fascination is with the mere
two- Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here. Posted in /Tragedy Home > Tragedy Thursday, 15 April 2010 A Critique of Tragedy 14UPDATE (17 May 2010): A few days after I posted the below, an a propos story about an upcoming production of Sarah Ruhl's Passion Plays appears in the Sunday 18 May New York Times. Says Zak Berkman, artistic director of the Epic Theater Ensemble, which is producing the plays in Brooklyn's Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church: "I missed the sense of community religion gives you growing up. Theater should feel like a secular church." It is interesting to note that the theology of Jones' Peoples Temple perhaps owed more to a secular, progressive, even Marxist egalitarianism than traditional Christianity itself. In any event, Celia McGee's full article is here.
Tragedy in America. Even one who defines himself as something
of an internal exile (aesthetically, if in nothing else) turns once in a
while to his own country: it is unavoidable, for this is where art first
and most intimately impinges on the self. In tracing the stream of tragic
consciousness through American drama, I am first faced with the dilemma
that this is a country deliberately founded, that it is early in its
evolution, unlike the millenia of civilization in Africa, Asia and Europe,
which was not ideologically deliberate. The tropes of American
self- Not that there isn't an American tragic consciousness, which first
emerged in the novels of Melville and Hawthorne, and early
twentieth- I noted the post- My thoughts are drawn to Jonestown. Like America, it was founded as a community
in exile, dedicated to social justice and in flight from perceived
religious persecution; it too aimed for a progressive, politically
ameliorist community; it too used sex as a means of control and submission
than free experiential exploration (despite a puritan sexual ethos).
Although the community itself was largely composed of black and poor men,
women and children, it was almost entirely administered by
upper- This is the stuff of an American tragic consciousness as profound as
that of Europe's. Within the American ideal, it is unacceptable: and
rather than explored, it is ignored, though its traces linger in our
language. The phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" entered the language as a
result, but its meaning changed somewhat over the years, indeed diluted:
it has come to signify a firm belief, or a faith in what might possibly be
a delusion. But the Flavor- Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here. Posted in /Tragedy Home > Tragedy Tuesday, 23 March 2010 A Critique of Tragedy 13
The idea that an acknowledged metaphysics underlying a drama
necessarily leads to a thesis play, an intellectualized representation of
experience, is easily dismissed: the Greek tragedians worked during the
era of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and though they share a
deep- Between the political materialism of Marx (and its optimism for progressive improvement of the race) and the psychological darkness of Freud (and its pessimism for the ability of the human individual to finally adjust to the tragedy of experience), and therefore between their forebears Hegel and Schopenhauer: this is a dynamic in which the dramatic work operates not as the statement of a problem but as the exploration of bodied consciousness, both a historic construct and a metaphysical condition. It should come as no surprise that aesthetics is central to the project of Critical Theory, as it was to Schopenhauer's metaphysics: each informs the other, and any reconciliation between the two appears impossible. But again, this is not a problem, but a condition, perhaps the condition of the race, and it is informed too by the bloody history of the twentieth century, perhaps the bloodiest of histories. As the Greeks knew, it was the dramatic stage upon which the philosophical dynamic plays itself out, the speaking human body the fleshed dynamic: but offering in the end not a dead conclusion, but an organic experience; the start of a new road into the unknown, into the dark, and possibility. It is difficult not to acknowledge the difficulty of the task, and the responsibility of the dramatist and performer towards not only history (the history of the form as well as the history of the race) but also the autonomous self within it ... it is dangerous, thankless work ... but why else write or stage a play at all ... Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here. Posted in /Tragedy
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