3/19/06 Thoughts on theatre, literature, memory
Sabbatical thoughts 3/19/06:
After talking to Ron Bashford for three hours and reading more in Roach (Cities of the Dead): My questions about "virtual" vs. "actual" performance--whether theatre is or has to be narrative--are really worries about literature and an expression of my long-held and very ordinary discomfort with plays as enacted literature. But to use a text in performance isn't necessarily to assume that the text is the performance. Especially if, as Roach (and Schechner and all the others) proclaims, performance is enacted memory or restored behavior. The point is to bring all the participants into the present moment. If we are enacting the past or the memory of the past, implicit in the very idea of a text (thought not, emphatically not, implicit in the idea of "rehearsal"), we are doing it right now. If we are telling stories, what's important is not so much the story itself as the experience we are sharing right now.
One way to get around the illusion that the text is the event (the narrative trap? the "virtual" aspect?) is to make the text evident as text and to construct the present experience as an encounter with the text--or with the memory of the text (redundant if the text is itself embodied memory). Which prepares me, I guess, for The Wooster Group's Emperor Jones.
I suppose Ron's question is: If the performers are living in the present moment, creating the absolute now-ness of the event, why is it necessary to belabor the obvious through a constructed "confrontation with the text"? I suppose my answer would be, to avoid the temptation to slip into the comfortable past: the event is constructed to help keep us in the present, to reinforce and aid the performer in that task. Pretty much as Thornton Wilder does with his text, which is, yes, a blueprint, not a finished piece of literature.
Furthermore: If I were serious about separating theatre from literature--and teaching students that theatre is not a branch of literature, which is something I've always tried to teach--I would have succeeded in separating the Theatre Department from the English Department by now. Instead, through timidity and a desire to please everyone (letting loyalty to friends or fear of alienating them trump integrity), I've kept things more or less static for twenty years. Amazing.
In my defense (and thinking of Havel): Would I have demonstrated integrity by letting an idea like "theatre is not a branch of literature" determine my actions and lead to a possible sacrifice of friendship, collegiality, and collaboration? Isn't that the thinking of an ideologue?
After talking to Ron Bashford for three hours and reading more in Roach (Cities of the Dead): My questions about "virtual" vs. "actual" performance--whether theatre is or has to be narrative--are really worries about literature and an expression of my long-held and very ordinary discomfort with plays as enacted literature. But to use a text in performance isn't necessarily to assume that the text is the performance. Especially if, as Roach (and Schechner and all the others) proclaims, performance is enacted memory or restored behavior. The point is to bring all the participants into the present moment. If we are enacting the past or the memory of the past, implicit in the very idea of a text (thought not, emphatically not, implicit in the idea of "rehearsal"), we are doing it right now. If we are telling stories, what's important is not so much the story itself as the experience we are sharing right now.
One way to get around the illusion that the text is the event (the narrative trap? the "virtual" aspect?) is to make the text evident as text and to construct the present experience as an encounter with the text--or with the memory of the text (redundant if the text is itself embodied memory). Which prepares me, I guess, for The Wooster Group's Emperor Jones.
I suppose Ron's question is: If the performers are living in the present moment, creating the absolute now-ness of the event, why is it necessary to belabor the obvious through a constructed "confrontation with the text"? I suppose my answer would be, to avoid the temptation to slip into the comfortable past: the event is constructed to help keep us in the present, to reinforce and aid the performer in that task. Pretty much as Thornton Wilder does with his text, which is, yes, a blueprint, not a finished piece of literature.
Furthermore: If I were serious about separating theatre from literature--and teaching students that theatre is not a branch of literature, which is something I've always tried to teach--I would have succeeded in separating the Theatre Department from the English Department by now. Instead, through timidity and a desire to please everyone (letting loyalty to friends or fear of alienating them trump integrity), I've kept things more or less static for twenty years. Amazing.
In my defense (and thinking of Havel): Would I have demonstrated integrity by letting an idea like "theatre is not a branch of literature" determine my actions and lead to a possible sacrifice of friendship, collegiality, and collaboration? Isn't that the thinking of an ideologue?
posted by Graham at 6:34 AM
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