Category Archives: Drama

Ezra Pound’s anti-theatrical prejudice

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Ezra Pound in 1967.

Ezra Pound in 1967.

Unlike the situation in continental Europe, the relationship between Modernism and the English-language stage has always been uneasy. Several “High Modernists” wrote for the stage — Yeats, Eliot, Stein, and notoriously Henry James — but, at least in the American drama, Modernist trends were never fully embraced. In America, only Eugene O’Neill wrestled with these ideas and sensibilities at length. Most of the plays of his middle period were attempts to fuse his Modernist sensibilities with the American tradition of melodrama (according to Marc Robinson, melodrama may be the most pervasive and characteristic genre to be found in American theatre), which sought to elicit emotional responses from the collective audience through the manipulation of plot and character, leading, more often than not, to a “happy” ending that satisfied audiences. But somehow it never quite worked. In O’Neill, the Modernist and the Melodramatist were in constant struggle throughout his plays of the 1920s and 1930s. The struggle, more often than not, came to a draw.

Among the High American Modernists it would be hard to find a Higher one than Ezra Pound. Though he translated both Greek tragedies and Noh plays, he never felt the necessity to write directly for the stage himself. In September 1915, James Joyce sent the manuscript of his play Exiles to Pound for his comments, which elicited from Pound this characteristically spiky, polemical response about the theatre in general:

My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together, whereas a novel or a poem can lie about in a book and find the stray persons worth finding, one by one seriatim. …

and if I had written this letter last night (2 a.m.) just after finishing the “Portrait”, I should have addressed you “Cher Maitre”.

Now what would he want to write for the stage for

?????

Can one appeal to the mass with anything requiring thought? Is there anything but the common basis of a very few general emotions out of which to build a play that shall be at once

A. a stage play
B. not common, not a botch.

There is no union in intellect, when we think we diverge, we explore, we go away.
When we feel we unite. [1]

In the contemporary American drama, it seems that this union is by far the driving force. Unfortunately, it leads to the death of the individual mind, at least in the theatre.

Footnotes
  1. Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read. New York: New Directions, 1967, p. 57. [↩]

Richard Foreman: Plays with Films

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Plays_With_FilmsPlays with Films, a collection of three of Richard Foreman’s recent theater texts, is forthcoming from Contra Mundum Press on 30 April, just in time for the opening of Foreman’s new play, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance), at the Public Theater. With an introduction by yours truly, the book features Foreman’s Zomboid!, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!, and Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, which constituted the final three productions of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. According to the publisher:

Extending the model of theater as a “reverberating machine,” Foreman’s use of film in these plays is intimately integrated into the complex network of impulse generators, creating an unprecedented experience of multi-dimensional scriptural space, a new kind of total theater that effectively recharges and redirects the issues of consciousness he has been exploring with indefatigable intensity since the establishment of his theater in 1968. The bodied reality of theatrical experience, and the recognition of unconsciousness within that experience, becomes more fraught with peril in today’s screened world. These plays, originally conceived as his final theater works (though he later changed his mind), engage in ways that continue his ambition to upend habitual thinking and may prove transformative for the individual’s ability to interpret and understand the threats of deadening conformity and loss of identity through the new digital culture.

The book, edited by Rainer J. Hanshe, will be available for pre-order shortly; in the meantime, there’s more at Contra Mundum’s Web page for the volume.

From the archives: New Expressionism

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As I continue to write Erlkönig I’ll be republishing several entries to keep the fire here going.

Originally posted on 18 October 2010.

In Schopenhauer’s conception of knowledge and the world, mankind is phenomenon par excellence, the object through which subjectivity can be known and the will as thing-in-itself recognized, if not described or describable in the symbol-system of language available to the individual. The will itself, because it is not describable, can’t be characterized as tragic, but this locution is available to describe the phenomenal world in relation to that will. Only that which can be directly experienced by the individual can be said to exist: it is far preferable to the abstract concept as a valid recognition, as a valid object of knowledge. Just as color cannot be described to the blind, or music to the deaf (for the vibrations under foot and hand at the concert hall are not in essence dissimilar to the vibrations of the subway or the earth), one who does not experience an extreme or a quality cannot recognize it as something known. The individual body through which the will can be recognized, and the words with which it can be explored, become the instrument of exploration and experience.

This places particular weight on the theatre and drama as aesthetic means of this exploration of the phenomenon; it is a quality of the art which most theatre practitioners (dramatists, directors, producers and critics alike) and audiences today are loathe to admit. It makes of the art a far more urgent discipline than they’re comfortable with, in that it renders the entertainment, amusement and business that attaches to the form irrelevant, especially in the forms of mimetic social realism or ironic post-modernist distance that attach to its practice even today. Obviously, in this conception, theatre and drama are the truly experiential arts, for the mediation is through the body, not the page or canvas, and it is the body that is the primary vehicle for experience. Apart from music, tragic drama is at the apex of the aesthetic imagination as conceived by Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was prophetic in more senses than one, inspiring many of the artists, writers and composers of the Expressionist school that arose in Austria and Germany beginning in the late 19th century. But there is a New Expressionism as well, and one which has its philosophical roots in the old. David Ian Rabey in his English Drama Since 1940 identifies a stream of post-war drama which he names a “New Expressionism,” which predated In-Yer-Face theatre, an off-shoot of this New Expressionism, by several decades, citing the work of David Rudkin, Heathcote Williams and other dramatists. “This involves a consciously heightened form of presentation which is unapologetic about its anti-conventional strageness, in which often ‘exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized,’ in a passionate expression of, and search for, individual regeneration. … This form of renewal is prioritised as preliminary to epic theatre’s foregrounding of social relations to address the political collective. [Emphasis mine] … Unlike Absurdism, which may reflect a loss of faith in language, reference, action and consequence, Expressionism recreates an unconventional faith in consequence: the power of individual defiance to trigger wider seismic upheavals of power, countering ‘information’ and passivity with a demonstrative capacity for active transformation.” (Rabey 128) [1]

Rabey’s description takes in a broad swathe of post-1970 drama in his book, but it is also a useful corrective to the characterization of a dramatist like Samuel Beckett as “absurdist,” especially when it comes to Beckett’s prose and drama after 1960, when the novel How It Is and the play Play marked a division between his early work and his later; especially in the late plays Catastrophe and What Where, political and ideological considerations are secondary and founded upon a metaphysical ground. What’s more, all of this later work, especially pieces like Not I, are experiential rather than discursive, and the subjective psychic events are those which provide the necessary sensation. Because they also exhibit “a demonstrative capacity for active transformation,” they are immediately relevant to a consideration of the plays of Howard Barker, David Rudkin and Sarah Kane.

The later work of Beckett and the plays of Barker, Rudkin and Kane are beyond considerations of optimistic and pessimistic. Or, more accurately, they may be both. A capacity may exist, but it may or may not be fulfilled, and possibility may or may not become probability or ever realized: it is these that are demonstrated in the theatre; it remains to the individual spectator to fulfill or realize these capacities and possibilities in their own lives, having first recognized them through the aesthetic experience. But it is this capacity and possibility that is demonstrated in the theatre, and because it is beyond the currently fashionable Procrustean formal beds of social realism or post-modern irony, it remains marginalized, however awesome may be its power to transform both the art of theatre and the experience of those who attend it.

The “In-Yer-Face theatre” that emerged in the 1990s, and of whom Sarah Kane is a common (if inappropriate) exemplar, is described by Aleks Sierz; it is interesting to note in this context, since it too is a theatre founded in experience:

[In Yer Face theatre] is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation. … Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort. Crucially, it tells us more about who we really are. Unlike the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we see in detachment, the best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under our skin. In other words, it is experiential, not speculative. [Emphasis mine] (Sierz 4)

This is correct in so far as it goes, but I would insist that it is this theatrical experience itself that becomes the object of speculation; it must do so, if it is not to remain a solipsistic sensual experience which ends at the theatre door. Howard Barker’s conception of theatre as a crucible for moral speculation certainly does not obviate the practice of extreme and excessive stage activity and dramatic language. Indeed, speculation and experience revolve and feed upon each other on the New Expressionist stage. The theatre remains an arena of contemplation and speculation, even as this is generated by the experiential events that take place between performer and spectator, mediated by the symbol-system of dramatic language.

It is my hope in this series of posts to explore this conception of New Expressionism as described by Rabey and Gritzner, and trace its development back through the original Expressionist movement to its philosophical origins in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and aesthetics. This is not to say that Beckett, Barker, Rudkin and Kane share much beyond these bare outlines. Beckett’s constricted, de-eroticized landscape is a far cry from Barker’s expansive, even excessive, re-eroticized imagination, and they are barely recognizable, perhaps, as exemplars of the same school. But it seems to me that their emphasis on the subjective experience, their deliberate intent to operate as far outside the Culture Industry as it may be possible to do, is a critique of the same metaphysical, moral and aesthetic stance in which that Industry stands as was Schopenhauer’s opposition to the ameliorist Enlightenment of his time.

All four dramatists begin with dislocation: dislocations of narrative and character. These dislocations are similar, if not identical, to the freeing of dissonance — that is, the thing-in-itself allowed liberty to express itself phenomenally — that defines the work of Arnold Schoenberg, that twentieth-century composer who provided the underscore to the Expressionist movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Footnotes
  1. Rabey’s discussion is the basis of Karoline Gritzner’s 2008 essay “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment,” which is crucial to the start of any discussion of this dramatic and theatrical mode. It was published in Contemporary Theatre Review: 18:3. [↩]

Drama of new consciousness

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I’ve spent some of this weekend thinking about what draws me as an artist, critic, writer, and unabashed enthusiast — not to mention as all of these wrapped up, along with everything else, into what we might call “my person” — to the plays of three very disparate English-language dramatists: Richard Foreman (b. 1937), Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), and Howard Barker (b.1946). Readers of Superfluities Redux will be aware that I’ve written about all three at some length, and at first glance the work of all three writers seems to share little in common. The unique idiosyncrasies of approach, language, and form of each of these writers forestalls extended comparison, either with each other or with the work of other playwrights of the period. I’m not entirely sure that if you put all three of them in a room together, they’d even have much to talk about, and might even regard each other with some suspicion and ambivalence.

But there may be more linking these dramatists than first meets the eye. It is no coincidence, I think, that all three first emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Foreman’s first Ontological-Hysteric play, Angelface, premiered in 1968, and Barker’s professional debut, Cheek, came only two years later. Our Late Night, written in the early 1970s, opened at the Public Theater in 1975. All three writers matured in the political, cultural, and sexual storms of this most chaotic and revolutionary period, and their work reflects a confrontation and negotiation with these storms; they also matured as theatre was turning from traditional dramatic texts to explore more experiential strategies in the forms of performance art developed by a variety of practitioners.

So much can be said for so many playwrights, but Foreman, Shawn, and Barker share more than this. Foreman and Barker, of course, saw the need to form and lead their own companies apart from the institutions of both commercial and non-commercial theatre for a continuing exploration of their very individual projects, and Shawn has similarly devoted a great deal of his professional career working outside the confines of mainstream theatre. But beneath this there is more, I think. I gingerly describe a few strains of similarity below.

The theatres of all three dramatists are text-based; their plays first originate in the generation of a text for the stage created by an individual author. The three dramatists in question accept the primacy of written and spoken language as the driving force of the theatrical experience. Similarly, their approach to language is lyrical, rather than dramatic, epic, or narrative: it is an approach that suggests a vertical rather than horizontal approach to the confrontation with language, an absorption in the individual moment of experience rather than a story. Language creates character; characters do not “speak” their own language, and notions of subtext take a subservient role to the explicit sound and surface of language itself.

The theatres of all three dramatists employ strategies of post-Brechtian estrangement — literally, a “making strange.” Foreman’s description of his plays as a series of “unbalancing acts” and Barker’s notion of a “theatre of catastrophe” indicate an impatience with, and repudiation of, accepted norms of theatrical and dramatic experience: an effort to undermine the preconceptions of both theatre and culture with which audience members enter their theatres. Similarly, Shawn’s plays confront his audiences with a series of shocking, disturbing images and linguistic structures that aim to unsettle the audience’s sense of a predictable and comforting self.

The theatres of all three dramatists suggest all-encompassing landscapes of experience largely divorced from realism and naturalism. While none of these dramatists have written what might be called “site-specific work” — plays written for performance in a particular non-traditional space — they nonetheless situate their plays in scenic environments that challenge norms of narrative drama. Both Foreman and Barker direct and design their own productions, generating unique landscapes and soundscapes for the presentation of their texts; and while Shawn does neither, his work has been staged in a variety of non-theatrical environments, including individual apartments and disused gentlemen’s clubs, for example. They are more interested in providing theatrical and dramatic environments for exploration rather than telling stories or preaching to the converted.

The theatres of all three dramatists center in a contemplation of eroticism and death. If these three dramatists explore the extremes of experience, they do so through presenting the fragility and the ecstatic potential of the human body. All three dramatists press against the confines of cultural taboo and transgression, and they do so through the most intimate physical and spiritual of the body’s potentials, sexuality itself.

The theatres of all three dramatists aim to explode conventional notions of consciousness in an effort to free the individual spectator to think for himself, providing the promise of change and rebirth, rather than as a collective — they are politically, socially, and culturally anti-ideological. Taken together, the above characteristics represent a challenge to culturally conventional ways of thinking about experience, and ways of experiencing thought. They do not seek to teach or explain; they do not seek to provide catharsis; they do not seek to tell a story (though they still seek to amuse and entertain in the most profound definitions of these words; if anything else, they are showmen). Instead, they intend to provide a theatrical experience that undermines convention and provokes new ways of seeing, new forms of consciousness that are more inclusive of the world’s possibilities and impossibilities than traditional theatrical and dramatic forms. They are, in this sense, radically open works that repudiate closure. While they do not exclude or dismiss the necessity of living within a collective, they place emphasis on the individual consciousness and the ways this consciousness impinges on the definition of collectivity itself. Additionally, the plays of these three dramatists undermine and parody Cartesian definitions of existence that would divide consciousness into thinking, feeling, or spiritual experience. The dramatists encourage thinking with the body, feeling with the intellect, recognizing the spiritual in the material, the quotidian in the noumenal, and so on.

Foreman, Shawn, and Barker, then, each in their own idiosyncratic ways, provide examples of the revolutionary potentials for the 21st century drama, theatre, and culture: revolutions of perception and consciousness that, in the wake of the disastrous social and cultural revolutions of the 20th century, may provide new promise for experience and redemption. I do not find it mere coincidence that these writers came of age in the chaotic but uniquely promising 1960s, nor that their work became increasingly complex and confrontational as the 20th century progressed towards its technocratic, postcapitalist, electronic and digital end: their projects of dramatic and theatrical revolution always were conceived in confrontation with and in opposition to these impulses.

It is not necessary to fit them into aesthetic or critical boxes or definitions to recognize certain interesting similarities. But tracing these threads allows us to see the broader implications of their work for the theatrical and dramatic art of the 21st century, and hope for a renaissance of theatrical and dramatic sensibility in a culture which increasingly seems to be hostile to it.

Friday videos: Visionary film

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A still from Richard Foreman's film "Once Every Day."

A still from Richard Foreman’s film Once Every Day.

Richard Foreman has a busy spring ahead. Along with the opening of his new play Old-Fashioned Prostitutes at the Public Theater this April, his film Once Every Day will begin a short run at the Anthology Film Archives on Friday 8 February, following its premiere at the New York Film Festival last year and simultaneously with its screening at the Berlin Film Festival next month.

The Anthology Film Archives screening is appropriate; one of Foreman’s acknowledged direct influences was the American independent avant-garde film movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Thanks to Ubu web, I’ve been able to revisit several of these films over the past few days after having been first exposed to them during my college years in the early 1980s. Films like Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, George Landow’s Film In Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (“the dirtiest film ever made”), and Michael Snow‘s Wavelength approach philosophy in their contemplation of the filmic image. These three filmmakers especially, more than the better-known Stan Brakhage of the movement, seem to me to have a direct relationship with Foreman’s theatre and film work. These meditative films deserve to be more widely seen again; fortunately, the Anthology’s Essential Cinema series rescreens them every now and again. Keep an eye out; if you’re not familiar with this remarkable part of American film history, I recommend taking a look at P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film, now in its third edition.

So many of these films have to deal with the imperfections of the recording media and how they draw attention to the images they reproduce — making comparison with the clean, cold surface of digital video inevitable and surprising. One of my favorite filmmakers of the period was George Landow, later known as Owen Land; one of his first films, Film In Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965-66) is below. His later Wide Angle Saxon and other films were witty and philosophical reflections on religion and art, but Film In Which There Appear … is also remarkable, bearing comparison to the music of Morton Feldman (as do Michael Snow’s films), in which so much happens among such little movement: