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06 Feb 2010 22:36
Saturday, 06 February 2010
Books: New Europe
If the literary geography of the
current American dramatic scene were rendered by Saul Steinberg like his
famous "View of the World from 9th Avenue", it probably
wouldn't look much different: New York foregrounded, the rest of the
country some distance behind, London peeking up in the distance, and in
one corner Yasmina Reza representing Paris.In the new New Europe: Plays from the Continent, editors Bonnie Marranca and Malgorzata Semil rearrange the map to offer seven plays from across Europe which received their world premieres over the past ten years. The playwrights — Igor Bauersima (Switzerland), Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk (Poland), Goran Stefanovski (Macedonia), Petr Zelenka (Czech Republic), Roland Schimmelpfennig (Germany), Juan Mayorga (Spain) and Jon Fosse (Norway) — address a variety of issues from a European standpoint, including terrorism, immigration, youth, globalization, families and post-
communist culture. Some years ago, PAJ Books published a series of anthologies under the umbrella title Drama Contemporary, which included volumes dedicated to France, Germany and India; perhaps the market and the critical interest isn't there to encourage the continuance of this series. But with anthologies like New Europe, the publishers continue to urge that dramatists and audiences look outside their own neighborhoods for a fuller, more inclusive theatrical life.
Highly recommended, and ideal for classroom use (at $22.95 a bargain), New Europe is now available from Amazon.com.
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04 Feb 2010 20:58
Thursday, 04 February 2010
A Critique of Tragedy: Perspectives
Let me pose the oscillation of the secret — its painful fascination — in a recollection of common childhood experience. We recall how as children we felt a peculiar resentment against a certain other child who appeared to be in possession of knowledge we were not party to; he or she would not tell. To make this child tell, to reveal its privileges, all sorts of tortures were devised. By contrast to this fury of persecution, to be in possession of a secret was a kind of ecstasy, which if shared with another (probably the most ecstatic moment of all) was done circumspectly, with the absolute inhibition of communicating it any further ... yet more ferocious punishment "if you tell ..." Telling or not telling, revelation or silence, the social and the private in a vertigo of seduction and punishment. This is potentially the ground for an aesthetic of theatre in an age of ostensible truths, total exposure and withering enlightment. And theatre is probably better equipped for this secretive, evasive, anti-
utilitarian aesthetic than any other form. Its store of techniques include the chorus, the aside, the soliloquy, rhetoric, a poetic idiom, symbolism, any number of forms of realism, an unparalleled range of mimetic devices which enable it to pose modes of existence, options for existence, which the great industrialized modes of entertainment can neither appropriate nor match. ... That this theatre will also be a theatre of text is fully contingent on some of the premises already described. If it is to articulate the secret it must do so in a language of secrets, a language which is not primarily concerned with the patina of social discourse — the conventional speech of transaction, communication, clarity, ostensible meaning — but a form which brings to the surface — erupts from beneath the surface — the normally unspoken, the counter-
discourse, the private, that which is not, in a Stanislavskyan sense, an intention at all, but a diversion. This language — almost certainly poetic in form, if only as a consequence of being invented — will be in contradistinction to the theatre language of realism, saturated with its author's personality, a language in which the anonymity of the author ... will be impossible to sustain, abolished by that eccentricity of tone that distinguishes all poetry. An audience will sense the total lack of objectivity, the startling absence of judgement, implicit in what it witnesses and hears. Far from feeling itself the subject of an episode of enlightenment, safe in the hands of a self- proclaimed moralist (an author) it will sense the terrible insecurity of being invited by a highly suspicious individual known as an actor, to become party to a secret, to share a transgression, in a darkened room. The more blinding the transparency of a culture ethic, the more subtly authoritarian its surveillance/ entertainment axis, the harder this information will be to refuse. Howard Barker
"The glass confessional: The theatre
in hyper-democratic society" (1995)
Arguments for a TheatreThursday, 04 February 2010
A Critique of Tragedy 8
The active contemplation for which the art of tragedy aims rehearses a contest between the noumenal and phenomenal. All of theatre's tools are phenomenal — the body, the word, the scene; time, space and causality — but it is only with these that the noumenal can be suggested, hinted at. The metaphysical union of subject and object in the ecstatic moment of recognition is impossible in the phenomenal world. But this tension presents to the spectator an opportunity for the contemplation of other worldly and phenomenal possibilities. It is a contemplation from within this attempted union, not outside of it, and for all its impossibility it nonetheless limns the thing-
in- itself of the body and the word. All the more reason for the spectator to resist losing herself in the story, a blindness: this is the Culture Industry's desire. Instead the spectator is engaged in a project to find herself, in an attempt to unite with the performer, in its lyrical duration ...
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here
Wednesday, 03 February 2010
Bricks and mortar
"The theatre is about plays and actors, not maintaining buildings," says Jim Hacker, fictional Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, about London's National Theatre in this 1988 clip from Yes, Prime Minster. Besides being very funny, it has some relevance to a few blogospheric conversations about the establishment of theatre in communities outside of New York, as well as the wisdom of government subsidy for the arts and the personalities and egos at play.
The clip begins with Hacker in conversation with fictional NT artistic director Sir Simon Monk about Hacker's proposed cuts to the NT's subsidy on the eve of a special dinner celebrating the arts, but the relevant bits begin at about three minutes in:
The Guardian's Andy Field has other thoughts on the NT today.
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26 Jan 2010 20:30
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
More on Quadrat
In regard to my posting of Samuel Beckett's Quadrat I and II on Sunday, Dr. Ulrika Maude of the University of Durham and Dr. Gaby Hartel (through the kind offices of Dr. Mark Nixon, co-
director of the Beckett International Foundation) have been similarly kind enough to provide the following information on the score for the television play. Their research also provides a glimpse into the close and precise attention Beckett paid to the soundscapes of his later work. Dr. Nixon writes:
My colleagues, Dr. Ulrika Maude at the University of Durham and Dr. Gaby Hartel in Berlin, have kindly provided relevant information to your question. First of all, Beckett's editor at the SWR (now SDR) [Reinhart] Müller-Freienfels writes that Beckett had written everything down beforehand: type of instruments, rhythm, volume. He then set out with his sound engineer, Konrad Körte, to check the instruments of the Rundfunkorchester. In the credits of the production, the percussion is attributed to the four percussionists, Gyula Raez, Hans-
Jochen Rubik, Jõrg Schäfer and Albrecht Schrade, who played two Javanese gongs, an African wood block and an African talking drum. Of the four musicians, it was Albrecht Schrade who composed the music, for a fee of 3000DM. This is not attributed in the credits, however. There is apparently some rehearsal material on tape at SDR Archive in which they can be seen playing. According to Körte, the original composition was developed through improvisation etc. In fact, there is a collection of essays which will be published by Suhrkamp in Germany later this year, edited by Gaby Hartel, to which Körte has contributed an account of the way the music was recorded etc.
My gratitude to Drs. Maude, Hartel and Nixon for providing this information (something, perhaps, of a Beckett "scoop") to me, and now to you.
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
A Critique of Tragedy 7
Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a particularly theatrical construct: an audience watching shadows on a wall in front of it. But a more tactile, sensuous allegorical statement of the metaphysical dramatic form is also possible. The same audience faces an opaque scrim — gray and silk for preference, stretched taut across the fourth wall — and perceive, through a dim light, shapes that press against the scrim from behind. They are at times violent, at times tender; they move, the outlines of the shapes perceptible but the precise nature and identity of these shapes impossible to define. It is a sensuous, tactile experience; they can be perceived like the limbs beneath clothing, like a leg pressing and brushing through a skirt or dress. The light plays on them and with them, shadows, which can't be identified with the shapes or movements themselves, providing darker grays for the eye to contemplate. It is the project of the artist (dramatist, designer, director, performer) to choreograph these movements, to describe them with body, voice, costume and words: to provide a visible map of the invisible territory that lies behind the veil. What lies behind the taut silk is impossible to know; only hints and suggestions are possible; but nonetheless, in their reaching to the audience's perception, their terrors, struggles and tendernesses become known and visible.
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25 Jan 2010 21:13
Monday, 25 January 2010
Upcoming: What She Knew
More details about the 14 February
workshop production of What She Knew are now available at the Web
page for the event at the International Culture Lab's Avant-Yarde site. A short description of the play:Drawing on the Sophoclean and Senecan versions of the Oedipus story, George Hunka's What She Knew is a contemporary meditation on the role Jocasta plays in the tragedy: a woman whose willful participation in Oedipus' guilt reveals an extraordinary capacity for erotic and sexual transgression as a means to freedom, as an avenue to outwit time, place and her own desiring and desirous body. She strides through centuries, balancing between the ecstasy of loss in anothers body and the agony of moral criminality.
Gabriele Schafer will be performing the role of Jocasta, and sharing the afternoon will be new work from Fulya Peker and Irem Calikusu. For more information, drop me an email.
Photo: Oedipus and Jocasta, Paris, by Joel-Peter Witkin (2007).
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24 Jan 2010 22:51
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Samuel Beckett: Quadrat I + II
A true rarity, recently posted at the indispensible UbuWeb: a video of Quadrat 1 + 2, a piece written and directed especially for television by Samuel Beckett. The video was premiered on the West German television network Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) on 8 October 1981.
Additional details are available at the UbuWeb site. More from James Knowlson's Damned to Fame:
Comic at first, their mobility comes to seem almost manic because of the speed and repetitiveness of the movements. Whether the piece reminds the viewer of busy traffic on the place de la Concorde, rodents in a maze, human beings scurrying frenziedly about their business, or prisoners exercising desperately in a courtyard, there is something eminently Dantesque about its imagery, with the figures resembling Gustave Doré's engravings of Dante and Virgil in Hell. ...
... the most important change came when [producer Reinhart] Müller-Freienfels took Beckett back home for dinner after the completion of the shooting and told him how impressive the piece looked in black-
and- white on the monochrome monitor in the production box. A friend then proposed that they show the color version first, then the black- and- white version. Beckett was fascinated by this idea and asked if they might record another version the next day at a slower speed and in black- and- white. The fast percussion beats were also removed, so the only sounds that were heard were the slower, shuffling steps of the weary figures and, almost inaudible, the tick of a metronome. Beckett was delighted when he saw this stunning effect, commenting that the second version (or Quadrat II, as he called it) took place "ten thousand years later." The video most uniquely demonstrates the Beckettian theatre's determination to render through a variety of forms is this dance, music, theatre, video? all or none? a metaphysical construct, quite sui generis. And still ahead (perhaps ten thousand years ahead) of its time.
(The music is uncredited; I hope to determine the composer shortly.)
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24 Jan 2010 02:48
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23 Jan 2010 08:44
of the work of Georg Büchner suggests that Büchner may have been familiar with Schopenhauer's philosophy (
Büchner demonstrated "a pessimism deeper and darker than any to be found in the previous history of German thought with the possible exception of Schopenhauer," Benn notes (61), but I wish to point out in connection with the play's structural relationship to time, space and causality — the three qualities which constitute the perception of the empirical world, according to the philosopher. The notorious structural difficulties of the play, unsolved by Büchner, stem from a deviation from the classical form which still inheres in the unities are entirely shattered: locations and times shift with an arbitrary rapidity. And not merely that: the great personages, kings and queens, of classical tragedy, even of Shakespearean tragedy, are absent from Büchner's collection of soldiers, bourgeois professionals and criminals.
Thursday, 14 January 2010
A Critique of Tragedy: Perspectives
At the same moment and drawn into the same breath with which Nietzsche teaches love of life, he underscores every last reason for despair, frustration, impossible desire. This is the tragic condition of life, where life always "presupposes suffering and sufferers." What is transformed in the possibility of love is the disposition of suffering, a transformation as rare as that same (impossible) possibility. Only lovers fully alive to everything in life, which means those arched not with right feeling but by what I have deliberately been calling "wrong feeling," commanded by eros beyond themselves (not in imaginative projection) but exactly incarnate in what and how they are. Lovers, bodily, physically representing "the over-
fullness of life," are able to desire the Dionysian, wholly erotic art Nietzsche consecrates as presupposing "a tragic view of life, a tragic insight." As an erotically charged being, the lover, precisely ecstatic, can "not only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable" as a spectacle to be admired at an aesthetic distance, but such a "Dionysian god and man" can also face the actuality of the "terrible deed and every luxury of destruction" (GS § 370). Babette Babich
"Nietzsche and Eros between the devil
and God's deep blue sea:
The problem of the artist as
actor — Jew — woman"Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
Long-form theory and polemic (2007)
NotesHoward Barker 1Howard Barker 2Richard Foreman 1Richard Foreman 2Samuel Beckett 1Samuel Beckett 2
Troublyn
Wierszalin Theatre
The Wrestling SchoolContact
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22 Jan 2010 13:23
Friday, 22 January 2010
Design
Over the weekend there will be some slight redesigns to Superfluities Redux, which may especially effect the appearance of some of the links in the gray box now to the right of the main content. These should be resolved in a day or two.
Friday, 22 January 2010
A Critique of Tragedy 6
Maurice Benn's study of the work of Georg Buchner suggests that Buchner may have been familiar with Schopenhauer's philosophy (The World as Will and Representation having been published in 1818, twenty years before the composition of Woyzeck in 1837, while Schopenhauer was still alive). "The world is chaos. Nothingness its due messiah," goes a line in Danton's Death, a line which echoes Schopenhauer's metaphysics (as well as the final line of WWR itself).
Buchner demonstrated "a pessimism deeper and darker than any to be found in the previous history of German thought with the possible exception of Schopenhauer," Benn notes (61), but I wish to point out in connection with Woyzeck the play's structural relationship to time, space and causality — the three qualities which constitute the perception of the empirical world, according to the philosopher. The notorious structural difficulties of the play, unsolved by Buchner, stem from a deviation from the classical form which still inheres in Danton's Death and even Leonce and Lena. This classical form bears resemblances to the idea of the wellmade tragedy as it came down from Aristotle in antiquity, but in Woyzeck the unities are entirely shattered: locations and times shift with an arbitrary rapidity. And not merely that: the great personages, kings and queens, of classical tragedy, even of Shakespearean tragedy, are absent from Buchner's collection of soldiers, bourgeois professionals and criminals.
Woyzeck, in which we find the first tentative steps towards the modern tragedy, suggests an attempt at the aesthetic project in Schopenhauer to deny the highly-
structured empirical mirror of the well- told story or the well- made plot: an empiricism, according to Schopenhauer, which necessarily denies a recognition of the Will or thing- in- itself. By the first half of the nineteenth century, the status of Reason as a controlling factor in the government of men had been seriously compromised by the bloody failures of the French Revolution to provide that democratic egalitarianism promised by the leaders of that revolution. It may, perhaps, have been a reactionary turn of the theatre in the face of that failure towards the well-
made domestic plays of the Victorian era: it was the era of Sardou and a little later Pinero, highly- constructed plots that were based most immovably in time, space and logical causality. It should also be noted that Schopenhauer preferred the tragedies of Shakespeare to those of the ancient Greeks, and one must note too that the stories of Shakespeare's plays are often extraordinarily ill- built from the point- of- view of logical development. Hamlet constructs a bewilderingly incomplete series of family, personal and political relationships, only to have nearly all of the characters die at the end from a combination of arbitrary chance, accident and spite. In nearly all the Shakespeare tragedies, everyone dies at the end: death as a deus ex machina to cut off, if not tie up, any loose ends of the plot. This is, from a classical view, poor storytelling. And additional proof, if any were needed, that it is not the story that drives the Shakespearean tragedy, but the language. The desire of some contemporary theatre practitioners to put "a good story" on the stage (by which they seem to mean a narrative that follows a logical plot development and persuasive if commonplace psychological characterization) demonstrates a refusal to consider the drama as an avenue to exploring the catastrophic expression of the noumenal reality within the phenomenal world. Indeed, the phrase "getting lost in a story" is more than just a desire for a blinding enchantment: it is a fetishization of the phenomenal. This is of an entirely different nature than the contemplation of the noumenal that forms the center of Schopenhauer's aesthetic experience: for it is catastrophe that is contemplated, rather than an easy curiosity served. The contemporary wellmade story brings blindness rather than knowledge.
Charles Lamb, in his book The Theatre of Howard Barker, suggests a different approach. Lamb took up the study of Barker's work upon noticing that traditional rehearsal practices seemed not to serve these contemporary tragedies. Barker's texts, like that of Woyzeck, are rich in catastrophic, irrational moments; the attempt to approach them from within traditional storytelling did not serve the work. "This gave me the idea of reversing the procedure," Lamb wrote: "Instead of working through the scene and elucidating it with a set of a priori 'rational' assumptions, what would happen if one started with the irrational moment? If, instead of treating it as a wholly inscrutable aberration [within the narrative], one posited it as the key to everything else?" (Lamb 2) This would mean that, in dramatic time, irrational and catastrophic events would radiate outward, stretching from the irrational moment to the more "rational" stage events that surrounded them, instead of directing those "rational" events towards the catastrophes that shattered empirical time within the drama — catastrophes that suggested and described the noumena that existed beneath and behind the phenomenal world.
Story in the drama and the theatre serves the same purpose as tonality in music or figurative, representational plastic arts: they root the aesthetic experience in the empirical world, rather than suggesting the noumenal. It is a necessity of the metaphysical, Schopenhauerian tragedy to smash the insistently empirical nature of the realistic or naturalistic play, a play which keeps us firmly a part of the world of blind suffering. It provides no knowledge: only ignorance.
Long-form theory and polemic:95 Sentences About Theatre (2007; Prolegomena to Organum I)Organum I (2006-2007)Organum II (2008-2009)Critique of Tragedy (2010-continuing)
Notes on:
Interview with Marilyn Nonken
Music
Bertolt Brecht
Howard Barker (and additional posts)
Jan Fabre's Je Suis Sang
Richard Foreman (and additional posts)
Samuel Beckett (and additional posts)
Sarah Kane
Theatre Wierszalin's Saint Oedipus:
Howard Barker
Paul Cava
Morton Feldman
Richard Foreman
Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics
Marilyn Nonken
David Rudkin
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Hans-Jurgen Syberberg
TheatreVoice (UK)
Anton WebernContact:
geh@panix.comCopyright © 2003-2010 by George Hunka
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21 Jan 2010 18:05
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Television: The Audition
NOTE: In the New York area, The Audition will repeat on WNET Channel 13 at 2.30am on Friday 22 January and at 12noon on Sunday 7 February, and on WLIW Channel 21 at 3.00pm on Sunday 7 February. Set your DVRs accordingly.
The Audition, a two-
hour film by Susan Froemke, follows the day- day lives of several opera singers in their twenties as they prepare for the Metropolitan Opera's National Council Auditions. Those who win have the opportunity to launch their careers, and even those who do not have the opportunity to sing from the Metropolitan Opera stage, accompanied by the Met Opera orchestra (perhaps the greatest in the world today), to a paying public. The young singers demonstrate that opera singing, as an art form, remains in brilliant health, even as a more philistine, barbaric cultural life may relegate opera to the wayside as an elite unnecessary luxury. Of course, it is not — the human voice, as a musical instrument capable of extraordinary and sublime expression of the extremes of passion, comedy, suffering and desire, is irreplacable, as indeed are the works that offer that expression a disciplined outlet. And discipline, as well as devotion to the art and the repertoire, is at the center of the audition process. Perhaps the most memorable sections of the documentary are those which take place during coaching sessions. Those who have seen Topsy-
Turvy , Mike Leigh's fictionalized account of the premiere of The Mikado, will recognize the extraordinary attention to detail and tentative hope (as well as profound self-criticism) that engages those within the rehearsal room. These men and women at work (and certainly singing for these auditioners is a profession, not a career) make the populist dreams of American Idol look like a high- school talent show. While all of the singers are influenced by the tradition of opera singing (they are unmiked and take from the history of the form bits and pieces of performance tradition), nonetheless their art is highly personal, as several of the coaches take pains to point out. The best of them indeed reveal themselves through their singing, an intimate revelation that demonstrates the ability of discipline and craft to release what can finally be called an aesthetic expression of some genius; this comes out most clearly in those moments when the singers perform unaccompanied, with the bare voice. Viewers are also privy to the judging process: an uncompromising, unsparing discussion of the virtues and vices of the individual competitors. Except for the to-camera interviews, The Audition utilizes hand-
held cameras and the fly- on- the- wall techniques of a Frederick Wiseman documentary, but these are shined and edited to a very high gloss indeed (and, as a documentary made with the support of the Met Opera itself, serves perhaps inevitably as a two- hour commercial for the Met). The film, however, is immediately engaging; it doesn't take long before favorites emerge, and you do root for your own. More than anything else, this is testimony that opera continues to be a living art form, the human voice raised to a high pitch of discipline and craft as well as spirit an irreplacable instrument. And it does have its poignant conclusion, communicated in a brief title card at the very end of the film. The Audition premiered nationwide on the PBS Great Performances series last night, and as usual with PBS programs, it will be rerun at various times on PBS stations over the next few weeks. A trailer for the film is below.
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20 Jan 2010 03:32
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