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18 Mar 2010 09:26
Thursday, 18 March 2010
Jonathan Swift
[The] chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it, and if I could compass that designe without hurting my own person or Fortune I would be the most Indefatigable writer you have ever seen ... Since you will now be so much better employd when you think of the World give it one lash the more at my Request. I have ever hated all Nations professions and Communityes and all my love is towards individualls for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Councellor such a one, Judge such a one for so with Physicians (I will not Speak of my own Trade) Soldiers, English, Scotch, French; and the rest but principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I hartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth. this is the system upon which I have governed my self many years (but do not tell) and so I shall go on till I have done with them I have got Materials Towards a Treatis proving the falsity of that Definition animal rationale; and to show it should be only rationalis capax. Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy (though not Timons manner) The whole building of my Travells is erected ...
Mr. Lewis sent me an Account of Dr Arbuthnett's Illness which is a very sensible Affliction to me, who by living so long out of the World have lost that hardness of Heart contracted by years and generall Conversation. I am daily loosing Friends, and neither seeking nor getting others. O, if the World had but a dozen Arbuthnetts in it I would burn my Travells. ...
Jonathan SwiftLetter to Alexander Pope, 29 September 1725 Greenberg/Piper edition, Norton, 1973
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16 Mar 2010 20:11
Theory and polemic
Copyright © 2003-2010
by George Hunka -
16 Mar 2010 13:30
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Aleks Sierz on British new writing
When I had drinks with Aleks
Sierz, author of In-Yer- and The Theatre of Martin Crimp, in London last October, I of course asked him what he was working on, and he mentioned a book about "new writing" in the British theatre. I also of course pestered him with silly questions — new writing by whom? new writing by new playwrights? by old playwrights? in what does newness inhere? — until we parted at the underground station, much I'm sure to his relief.Face Theatre Well, now I have a better idea of what he was talking about, thanks to a transcript of his speech, "British New Writing," delivered on 16 February at a meeting of the Society for Theatre Research, at the Art Workers Guild in London. After offering his brief precis of in-
yer- face theatre ("in- yer- face theatre is both a sensibility and a series of theatrical techniques. As a sensibility, it involved an acuteness of feeling and a keen intellectual perception of the spirit of the age. As a series of theatrical techniques, it is an example of experiential theatre, and its techniques include a stage language that emphasizes rawness, intensity and strong words, stage images that show acute pain or comfortless vulnerability, characterization that prefers complicit victims to innocent ones, and a 90-minute running time that dispenses with the interval. That these techniques of experiential theatre thrived in the hothouse environment of studio theatres can surely be no surprise"), he goes on to look at developments in British theatre over the past ten years since his book was published. The recrudescence of political theatre and the broader sociocultural canvas of the British play are noted, but most interesting is what Aleks calls an "underlying aesthetic tension" between two approaches to the drama, a tension which may be just as applicable to plays on these shores: ... Despite the deluge of the new, for a while there's been a real tension in contemporary British theatre between the literal, on the one hand, and the metaphysical, on the other. On the literal side, most new plays in Britain are still small in just about every respect: small in cast, small in space and small in theatrical ambition. Soapy dramas for couch potatoes. Whether they are about "me and my mates," teenage angst or underclass violence, they normally squat on territory that is already known — there's little sense of exploration, or experiment, or excitement. Boundaries remain unbreached; fantasy is grounded by the twin ballast of naturalism and social realism. Literalist theatre is a theatre style that Scottish playwright David Greig evocatively and provocatively calls "English realism." This new writing genre, which has thrived in subsidised theatres for the past 50 years, shows the nation to itself. It voices debates and deals in issues. Its stories are linear and based firmly on a recognisable social context. Its dialogues are convincing and down-
to- earth. It is distrustful of metaphor and suspicious of fancy foreign stuff, which is usually characterised as abstract, complex and humourless. By contrast, English realism is earthy, simple and, yes, funny. It is lite on metaphor and heavy on social commentary. With English realism, concludes Greig, "the real world is brought into the theatre and plonked on stage like a familiar old sofa." But what of metaphysical theatre? Well, we're all familiar with that kind of writing too. Just think of one William Shakespeare. To quote director Dominic Dromgoole (head of Shakespeare's Globe): "When Shakespeare wrote his great historical plays, he chucked everything in: nonsense about witchcraft, battle scenes, father-
and- son stuff, pageants, ghosts, wild coincidences, philosophical introspection. History, the record of facts, was a release for the great heap of images inside him — not a clamp on his imagination." Today, writers whose imaginations are similarly unclamped include people such as Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp, Mark Ravenhill and Philip Ridley, Dennis Kelly and Debbie Tucker Green to name just six. So I'd argue that it is this tradition of metaphysical theatre, with its weight of metaphor, mythic contours, visionary imagination and willingness to experiment with theatre form, that provides some of the most compelling examples of the truly contemporary. In fact, it is not a little ironic that Anthony Neilson, the bad boy of 1990s experiential drama, spent most of past decade writing what he calls absurd dramas. At the end of Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness!, he even stages a debate between one character, Ludd, who wants social realism — "real life as it is lived" — and Gant, who says that his art is about "all that is superfluous to survival: love and dreams and imagination."
So although too many British plays are literal representations of reality, and not very interesting theatrically, there are also plenty of examples of highly imaginative and highly provocative new work. Before winding up, I'd just like to quote from director Peter Brook's The Empty Space. In this classic 1968 book, he wrote: "in theory few men [sic] are as free as a playwright. He can bring the whole world on to his stage. But in fact he is strangely timid." In 2010, perhaps the best antidote to the insular curse of timidity that comes from literalism in British theatre is the irrepressible, untamed quality of the imagination — and perhaps the best mission for a theatre of the future is no less than the project to create a new idea of the human.
And indeed I would hope that a renaissance of tragedy, much maligned as it might be, might suggest at least one new idea of the human.
What is also interesting, as I compare this to American theatre of the past twenty years, is that there is also an American form of this "metaphysical theatre" that can be identified in plays like those of Tony Kushner and Sarah Ruhl, but what's lacking is experience and creation of those darker canvases of the plays that might be identified as those with an "in-yer-face" sensibility: "rawness, intensity and strong words, stage images that show acute pain or comfortless vulnerability, characterization that prefers complicit victims to innocent ones," as Aleks has it (though the emphasis here is my own). This aesthetic history gives considerable weight to the British plays that come after it, for those darker explorations have been made and they indeed inform and underlie these new texts. Here in the U.S., where theatre on or off Broadway seems to bear more intent to entertain — indeed, to provide comfort, diversion and collective absolution — in the most commercial sense, that darker edge is lacking; our dramatists never took the plunge into the darker self that Kane, Ravenhill, Crimp et al. exemplified; these plays were (and still are) rarely done. The American plays of the same period, many of them, seem unbearably light as a result.
You can read a transcript of Aleks' remarks or listen to it straight from the personable and wry Aleks himself at theatreVOICEhere. It's the least I can do; I believe I may owe him a drink or three once he gets to New York.
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04 Mar 2010 15:58
Thursday, 04 March 2010
Barbara Bray (1924-2010)
The Guardian brings
news of the passing of Barbara Bray in late February.Bray was a unique behind-
the- scenes champion of twentieth century theatre, sharing a close personal relationship with Samuel Beckett for three decades as she tirelessly worked to bring his work, as well as that of Harold Pinter, Bertolt Brecht and others, to public notice. Notes Andrew Todd: Strikingly beautiful, opinionated and headstrong, Bray had run the course of her career at the BBC by 1961. At the age of 36, she moved to Paris with her daughters, partly to be closer to Beckett (who was 55) and partly to pursue a freelance career as a translator and critic. Besides writing for the Observer and appearing regularly on the BBC programme The Critics, she translated almost all of Duras's work; Anouilh's Antigone; Pinget's Clope; Genet's Prisoner of Love; Michel Tournier's The Ogre; works by Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Michel Quint, Frederic Richaud and Amin Maalouf; Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand; and Elisabeth Roudinesco's biography of Jacques Lacan. She won the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation four times.
An extraordinary woman by any measure, Bray's final years were marked by the same fierce independence as the rest of her life: "A stroke in 2003 limited her activity, and left her using a wheelchair. She remained doggedly independent in a studio flat in the Rue Seguier, proudly reciting swathes of Shakespeare, Donne and the King James Bible from memory. After a steady decline in her health, she moved last December to Edinburgh to a nursing home near her daughter Francesca's house. Resolutely rational and atheist to the last, Bray eschewed a funeral and donated her body to science." The full obituary, well worth reading, is here.
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03 Mar 2010 11:52
Quotes: Howard Barker and Morton Feldman on indifference
I do these things
Oh how I persist I am at least persistent
And I ask
Does anybody want them?
The answer comes back
Nobody at all
So I go on.Howard Barker
The FortyI never felt, for example, that I was remaking society, but I felt that my work demonstrated a kind of intellectual atmosphere of the most formulative, creative part of my life, my early twenties. I was in a society of painters and writers, that were absolutely free, but for another reason, [had] nothing to do with politics. They were free, I was free, because nobody cared. And maybe that not caring is the best type of freedom possible, either for society or composer. Nobody cared. My father cared, because he didn't want me to be a composer, but no one else cared. I gave performances, people really didn't care. They didn't have the energy even to hiss or boo, that's how disinterested they were. And I always felt that that was the best type of environment to be an artist — indifference — I don't mind indifference.
Morton Feldman
In conversation, 1972Tonight, Wednesday, 3 March, at 8.00pm, Marilyn Nonken performs the 95-
minute Morton Feldman piano solo Triadic Memories at the Players Theatre, 115 Macdougal Street. Tickets are $20.00 and available online here. Wednesday, 03 March 2010
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03 Mar 2010 07:50
Wednesday, 03 March 2010
A Critique of Tragedy 12
An audience for a theatre that does not yet go to the theatre. Perhaps the worst advice ever offered in creative writing classes is: "Write what you know." All too often, this leads to a paralysis of imagination — that it is the immediate cultural world, the class, the biographical anecdote that should be the inspiration for the dramatic work. It values the knowledge of immediate personal experience over that of the imagination; the knowledge won by a deep penetration of imaginative experience is the knowledge proper to the theatre; the knowledge of immediate personal experience, the anecdote, proper to the barroom conversation. Perhaps this is an American trope; perhaps too this is a reason for the paucity of imaginative political theatre on U.S. stages. The denial of the knowledge provided by individual imagination keeps the theatre in the immediate neighborhood. It does not create a larger world.
Sarah Kane's statement "I am quite happy to aim at the smallest audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is definitely going to see this play anyway. That's why I try to please myself" is not a motto of artistic arrogance but more a motto of humility. It speaks instead to common humanity, not an aristocratic conception of imagination or the aesthetic project. If a British woman in her 20s with a fairly conventional education and upbringing can draw parallels between a middle-
aged man and a developmentally- disabled woman in a Leeds hotel room and a battle in a Bosnian city, her statement implies, anyone, any audience, may be able to draw these same parallels. They are available through the same imaginative power of the individual audience member, should they be open to it and despite the efforts of the Culture Industry to kill the individual imagination itself. But these parallels are won not through personal experience but through an individual imaginative reach inwards towards the core of their humanity and outwards towards the world beyond the self. The resulting drama is an offering of this personal imaginative experience to the audience, not an imposition of a perspective that seeks to tie up loose ends — to teach or to entertain. The Culture Industry's corporations through the media (its music, its newspapers, its television channels, its plays and its films) increasingly suffocate the individual imagination through this so- called education and entertainment to provide the kind of puling, paralyzing resignation (room for the natural disasters of Haiti and Chile, none for the genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia) that is a far cry from Schopenhauer's conception of the word. And yet, the products of this industry are what contemporary American dramatists apparently "know" best. David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker, although his comments offer a perspective for other dramatists and theatre practitioners as well, rather than being limited to Barker's individual body of work:
Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art, different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-
hand association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience. Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of pleasure. Here the actor, through his/her diction, rhythm and movement, has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it encountered a theatre ... which offered something more than what is currently conventionally associated with "theatre." This is a theatre that proposes that nothing is impossible. "Raising Hell: Introduction"Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (pp 13-14)
Emphasis my own.
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts
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02 Mar 2010 11:44
Tuesday, 02 March 2010
From the archives
From Organum II, originally posted on 22 April 2009. Lightly edited.
The theatre is my representation. There is no more certain knowledge, once achieved, than this: that the theatre, like the world, is a re-
presentation of objects and events that I assemble in my consciousness, and mine alone, for each individual's consciousness is his or her autonomous possession. I witness a theatrical event from my own personal physical perspective, seeing the stage and its arrangements of bodies, objects and events from a unique physical and perceptual vantage point. It is true that I am a body among bodies, placed within a collective audience, but this does not mitigate my essential isolation, for my response is preconditioned by this status as individual object, as a unique vision of a perceiving subject. Our language here gives us away, as always. "I feel pity for him"; "I think this play is good (or bad)"; "I desire that actress's body; see how she displays it to me"; "I am bored (or excited, or exhausted)"; "I don't think that actor's performance is very good" — all of these, in their linguistic construct, reveal the essential uniqueness of our perspective, the subject "I" of the grammatical structure, my own construction of the theatrical elements presented for me, and once the performers, designers and dramatists have let the play loose, it is mine. The theatre is my representation. Once this realization, with all its horrifying, isolating, exhilarating and ecstatic possibilities, has been experienced, it cannot be unexperienced, unlearned, unrealized, and it will color all my theatre and theatrical experience from then on. Only the hard press of voluntary, willful ignorance — and this is not uncommon, for some of us fear our own bodies and desires more than anything else in this world — will be able to eradicate this realization from my consciousness. I remain a member of what is called the collective of the audience, or the collective of the experience, but I now define myself as simultaneously a constituent and opponent of it. I gauge my reaction, consciously and unconsciously, from within that collective, from my privileged unique perspective. I am also aware that my own perspective is colored by the culture of that collective: not merely the aesthetic and cultural perceptions with which I enter the theatre, but as an individual body amongst other individual bodies, sharing perceptual tools such as the eyes and the ears. Though ultimately it is not through their eyes and ears with which I witness the play, but through my own. Like Creon, Antigone and the chorus of Sophocles' tragedy, I am empathetic and antipathetic to the collective simultaneously (any chance of ultimate reconciliation between these is illusory; violence unutterably and always follows upon violence, whether Creon or Antigone's perspective is privileged, the play would end in slaughter in either case, witnessed by the silent and in any event illusory gods). I am always a unique and individual object, when alone or with others, but the collective is a mere abstraction and does not exist without the voluntary or involuntary gathering of several individual bodies within one space at one time. For this reason my individual perspective becomes primary, the primus inter pares in the individual/
collective dichotomy. If I were a performer rather than an audience member, I would still experience the theatre as my representation, and whether I am an individual member of a theatrical company or a member of the audience, this experience is identical. On stage I move my body through space among objects and other bodies, and my movement and perspective remain unique. His lehrstücke, Brecht insisted, were learning plays not for the audience (at least not primarily for the audience), but for those who performed in them. As cast member too I remain individual. If the theatre remains my representation, we have an understanding of the perspective of cast members of Richard Foreman's plays, for example, many of whom have told me they feel no more utterly and fully themselves as individuals than when they appear in one of his plays. Finally there is the evidence of performers of other contemporary work, which demonstrates the untapped resources that can be called into practice once (but not before) the realization of the theatre as my representation occurs.
My theatre is then charged with desire, disgust, fear, ecstasy, possibility from each moment to each moment. It is a charge which both unites and separates auditor and audience, spectator and performer, performer and performer, in a process of seduction. Theatre is there and not there, always passing, explicit and present only in my representation and my body's status as privileged object. What differentiates the theatre from the world is its disciplined self-
consciousness as the object of my representation. It knows itself to be an art, a lie that tells my singular truth. Stephen Greenblatt aimed at this in his book Shakespearean Negotiations: [The theatre is] a fraudulent institution that never pretends to be anything but fraudulent, an institution which calls forth what is not, that signifies absence, that transforms the literal into the metaphorical, that evacuates everything it represents.
Once the representation is evacuated, my imagination rushes into it. Possibilities form, and all else necessary is the courage to explore them.
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01 Mar 2010 18:33
Monday, 01 March 2010
Narrow roads to the theatre
"Political theatre, it seems, just won't go away," says the narrator in this video that accompanies David Edgar's "Enter the new wave of political playwrights," published in the Guardian yesterday. It's a bracing if perhaps unintentional response to the Ben Brantley/
Charles Isherwood dialogue about the dearth of U.S. political theatre published in the 17 February New York Times. The six rather grim- faced playwrights profiled in the Guardian piece are young men and women who seem to be enjoying some time in the sun: their work is being featured at several of London's more prominent off-West-End theatres such as the Royal Court, the Bush and the Arcola. Edgar's piece itself notes that even some of the more notorious in- yer- face plays of the previous generation, often dismissed as sensationalistic shockers, nonetheless had deep roots in political issues: The so-called in-yer-face generation of playwrights emerged in the mid-1990s. The eventual biodegradation of in-yer-face drama into plays about young people shooting up in south London flats has tended to obscure the fact that Sarah Kane's Blasted is about the Bosnian war and Gregory Burke's Gagarin Way about anti-capitalist protesters. Mark Ravenhill's big subject is a mordant elegy for lost political certainties. As a character puts it in his Some Explicit Polaroids: "I want communism and apartheid. I want the finger on the nuclear trigger. I want the gay plague. I want to know where I am."
Edgar goes on to note the formally exploratory nature of this work, adding, "[U]ltimately, fact-based drama seems like a kind of abdication of the writer's role to inhabit and to explain (as opposed to just assembling the documentary evidence, and inviting the audience to make of it what it will). No surprise, perhaps, that much verbatim drama became decadently metatextual, less about the subjects it dealt with than about the business of assembling the evidence. In one wittily effective case, playwright Dennis Kelly fooled audiences into thinking that a fictional play about a woman accused of murdering her baby was a real documentary drama."
One of America's most notable political playwrights (if I can be forgiven labelling her so) is Naomi Wallace, whose The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek closed last night at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where Theatre Ideas' Scott Walters hangs his hat. This morning in his post "Formal Exclusion," Scott is troubled by the reaction of two audience members who attended the show on Saturday night:
These are two people, probably in their late 70s or early 80s, who attend all of our productions, many of which are very challenging. Last night, after having watched the 2 hour and 30 minute production, they stayed for the post-show discussion afterward. By now, it was past 10:30 — they were very tired, but they stayed out of some desire to understand what they had just seen. They listened carefully to the discussion, which was quite good, but afterwards they approached the director and pleaded with her to give them a synopsis of the play's events that they could take home and study. When the director explained that she didn't have one, they asked again — "Are you sure you don't have a synopsis? Maybe I can find one of the internet — you can find anything on the internet."
These were two people who in 1936 were likely around the same age as Pace and Dalton, people who perhaps could identify with having a parent who had lost a job in the Depression, or who knew what it felt like to have the wolf at the door. In other words, this was a play that could have deeply affected them. But instead of being able to bring their experiences to bear, instead of being reminded of the parallel between then and today, they were left desperately trying to figure out what the hell happened. Instead of trusting the power of her story and the humanity of her characters, Wallace had turned her play into an elaborate puzzle.
Scott lays the blame for their confusion flat at the door of the playwright herself. "Many of her plays are about the poor and uneducated, and she has a deep sense of commitment to such people. But she writes like an artist-specialist with a grad degree (Univ of Iowa) writing for other artist-specialists and for people whose education makes them capable of deciphering narrative lines and exploring obscure symbols. The people about whom she writes, like the elderly couple in the audience a few nights ago, would find it very difficult to understand what she was writing about, even though she is writing about ... them."
I do not know this play, though I did see Wallace's more recent Things of Dry Hours at the New York Theatre Workshop last season, which with its rather flat naturalism and even flatter lyricism didn't seem to me to exhibit the kind of deliberately alienating aesthetic audience obfuscation that Pope Lick Creek demonstrated to Scott. A self-
described populist and anti- Modernist, Scott concludes, "[Most people] simply want to experience a story that helps them to understand themselves and their world more fully, helps them experience life more vibrantly, helps them find significance in the experiences that make up their lives. And instead, they encounter plays that deny them this, that seem to exist to confuse them, to point out their interpretational inadequacies, to tell them that they are not part of the 'in' crowd that understands these things. ... I want to find ways to reach everybody, not just the educated, not just the wealthy, and not just the city dwellers. I seek a profound theatre that enriches everybody, not just people who have as much education as I have." No doubt Scott believes what he says, but something about it seems as much a shame as this alienating formal experimentalism that he excoriates. Works of art do not exist to provide answers, or even clarity: not to provide synopses for audience members to take home and study afterwards, or to reconfirm the interpretive adequacies of its audience. Art provides experience, not a moral lesson or even entertainment (which remains dear even to the Guardian's new wave of political dramatists), and this experience should lead us into deeper places, not readily interpreted — into a personal chaos that provides new possibilities for seeing our lives and experience afresh. There will always be those who find this kind of chaos alienating; Scott fails to mention those who may have attended Pope Lick Creek and had their eyes thereby opened to new connections that the dramatist offered to them. Surely they are just as worthy an audience as any other, whatever their cultural, educational or personal background. The populist theatre apparently seeks to be all things to all people — and there's no surer way, perhaps, to be nothing to anybody.
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25 Feb 2010 11:49
man museum exhibition of works by Dix in North America, the show includes more than 100 items, divided into the themes of the military, portraiture, sexuality, and religion and allegory. -
25 Feb 2010 07:20
Thursday, 25 February 2010
Upcoming: Feldman, Dix, Barker
Next Wednesday, 3 March, at
8.00pm, Marilyn
Nonken performs the 95-minute Morton Feldman piano solo Triadic Memories at the Players Theatre, 115 Macdougal Street. Her highly- regarded recording of the piece for Mode Records was described by John Rockwell in The New York Times as "a lovely performance of a lovely piece," and Ivan Hewitt in The London Times said, "Any pianist wanting to play Feldman needs the most exquisite touch, and also great stamina, and Marilyn Nonken clearly has both in abundance." Tickets are $20.00 and available online here. 
The following week, on 11 March,
a major exhibition of the work of German painter Otto Dix opens at the Neue Galerie on the
Upper East Side, just steps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first
one-man museum exhibition of works by Dix, the show includes more than 100 works, divided into the themes of the military, portraiture, sexuality, and religion and allegory. Otto Dix runs through 30 August; more information about the show Finally, the Web page for the 10 May Howard Barker at the Segal Center, co-produced by theatre minima, went up only yesterday. I am looking forward to the event and to posting additional details about participants and the schedule of the day's offerings shortly.
Bottom graphic: Otto Dix, Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925. Oil and tempera on plywood, 120 x 65 cm (47 1/4 x 25 5/8 in.).
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