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Friday, 02 January 2009

Organum

Skin, veil. The flesh is a tender fabric, as language a tender noise. The costume draped over the body is as music draped over sound, words draped over thought, expression: there's your elegance. The turn of the leg (caught but sensed beneath the lithe and cool fabric), the breath of the player, the word's syllable suggest the passion, pleasure, ecstasy beneath. They simultaneously restrain and express the unfathomable possibilities for suffering and pleasure within – necessary disciplined restraint, necessary expression, for public exhibition. (Street clothes, which turn the body ugly and sexless, have no place in the theatre. Uncomfortable? Transgression and anxiety, desire, are uncomfortable.) Is it any wonder that we insist on couture and lyricism in the art and especially the silence of our theatre? The consciousness of the audience reflects from the metaphors of costume and sound, its reflection thrown back upon itself (unbridgable distance between spectator and performer, even as they so painfully seek to join), but transfigured in lace, silk, animal skin, sentences. Drama is the scalpel that cuts through costume, thought, sound so tenderly, piercing the veil of the phenomenon ...

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Tuesday, 23 December 2008

Organum

On necessity. If only 21 million Americans saw a non-musical play last year, that leaves about 280 million Americans who did not, and in many respects it's hard to see how they're the worse for it. Whatever personal needs (for communal empathy, for social catharsis) that theatre itself, as a generic art form, may have met in the past, they are being met by other media now.

When we speak of the kind of needs that art speaks to, we must specify the nature of those needs: the personal, the psychological, the cultural. And specify too whether these needs are of an individual or a social nature. In a culture dominated by a mass media industry, theatre itself becomes an elitist act, and as an elitist act, tragedy is most appropriate to it. Tragedy operates within a paradox: its consciousness available to any participant (hence its democratic nature), but those who experience it are self-selected (hence its elitist quality). Comedy's appeal is towards either condescending ridicule of human frailty or the reification of communal comfort and hope – neither of these are characteristics of the tragic. Comedy faces the populace; tragedy faces the self. Comedy wants numbers (it's hard to laugh out loud in a theatre when no-one else is doing so), and accountants are happy with numbers, the higher the number the better. The tragic offers no escape in laughter and is experienced today as an inward, individual wound.

Lest I flirt with sociology, anthropology or politics, subjects in which I am not expert, I can't offer ideas about any communal or social need for tragedy. As a dramatist, however, I am driven by both need and compulsion, and though these qualities are similar they are not in any sense identical; often they are in conflict. The compulsion to express in conflict with the need to express in words, which fail the original expressive impulse, its origin in the body. The compulsion to the linguistic, in conflict with the need to hone those words to a hard, icy, steel-like clarity. The compulsion to the theatrical, in conflict with the limitations of the theatre. It seems to me that the comic form forgives more easily than the tragic. I find in myself that the originary impulse is in the tragic, not comic, consciousness: this is the peculiar compulsion of the tragic dramatist. The conflict is long, painful and isolated (and it must be said that no one guessed it could be so isolating). The project then is in matching compulsion with need, and to stay silent when the need is not met, to present an audience with work that fails less and less, however inevitable the failure.

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Thursday, 30 October 2008

Organum

"Be liked and you'll never want." Last night at Le Poisson Rouge, the JACK Quartet performed the complete string quartets of Iannis Xenakis quite brilliantly and authoritatively. The earlier quartets, ST/4 and Tetras, uncompromising examples of what Xenakis called stochastic music, were particularly energetic and convincingly conceived, for want of a better phrase. A short excerpt of the Quartet's performance of Tetras can be heard here.

Le Poisson Rouge itself is not a traditional concert hall, but instead more of a cabaret-cum-cafe, serving food and drink. Much has been said about the need to desanctify the experience of new and classical music; hence the casual, stripped-down atmosphere, with background music played before the concert and during the intermission, waiters and waitresses taking and serving drink orders before and during the performance. The performers themselves, in streetclothes and casually addressing the audience during the show, are loose and relaxed.

And while all this is greeted with considerable approval, judging from the size and response of the audience for the Xenakis quartets last night, something rankles. For all the imagination and enthusiasm that venues like this exhibit in their advocacy for getting difficult work to audiences, something may be lost, and this something may be the challenge of the work itself. Listening to ST/4 and Tetras particularly, I was caught once in a while by the sounds of glasses clinking and whispered bar orders; the casual, friendly remarks from the stage seemed to undermine the work's challenging and difficult intent. Certainly the music could speak for itself, and though the remarks were not apologetic for the strangeness of the music, they seemed unnecessary. The music did indeed speak for itself, as the audience sat rapt. Why, then, the necessity for that aggressive informality of the moment, as self-conscious and deliberate as any solemn formality?

Speaking to Sarah Benson, the director of Soho Rep's production of Blasted (which has just been extended through 21 December), I asked her some months back about the difficulty of casting American actors in such emotionally and physically strenuous work as Sarah Kane's plays. "American actors often like to be liked," she told me. "It's important to me to work with actors who are not afraid to be disliked." While it's simplistic to reduce Xenakis' music and Kane's plays to some kind of "in-yer-face" aggressive status, it's also true that this work shuns the casual, the informal stance. In stripping the presentation of this work of the solemnity too often condemned as an elitist practice, a disservice may be done to the work itself (all apologies to Herr Brecht, who thought differently on the matter).

It's all very well to want to be well-liked, and many American theatre workers in this collectivist era (so many of them Willy Lomans already, regardless of their age) seem to have no further goal than to be thought likeable, to make new friends. Xenakis did not write his music, and Kane did not write her plays, to make friends, to become well-liked. They wrote specifically to be heard; "friendly" is among the last words to come to mind in describing this theatre and music. The laughing, smiling noise of conviviality surrounding its presentation may soften the sharper edges of the work, which no longer cuts, then, but runs the dangerous risk of dully passing over the surface of the flesh and the consciousness, leaving no mark.

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