Category Archives: Obituaries

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

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Vaclav Havel.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. …

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

Vaclav Havel
“The Power of the Powerless” (1978)

W.L. Webb’s obituary in the Guardian is here.

Ruby Cohn (1922-2011)

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UPDATE (31 October): Bruce Weber’s obituary, which includes a remembrance of the critic from actor and Cohn’s former student Bill Irwin, appears in today’s New York Times here.

Ruby Cohn, whose Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (1962) established her as the foremost first-generation Beckett critic and introduced Beckett’s work to a huge general audience, passed away on Tuesday 18 October at the age of 89. Ms. Cohn spent most of her professional career as one of Beckett’s greatest advocates after seeing the first night of En Attendant Godot in Paris in 1953. She followed this first volume of criticism with several others, including Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre (1980), which remains indispensable, as does her most recent book, A Beckett Canon (2001), wherein she undertakes an inimitably personal and knowledgable survey of all of Beckett’s work, from first to last. Ms. Cohn also pursued a continuing interest in contemporary French and British drama — last year in a used bookshop in California I purchased a play by Howard Barker; in the upper right hand corner of the first page of the book, Ms. Cohn had inscribed her own name. I’m delighted to have this.

Hot Review posted this obituary by Elin Diamond earlier this month.

Ellen Stewart: 1919-2011

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Ellen Stewart.

Just a few hours after my post on the origins of the off-off-Broadway movement comes news that Ellen Stewart, who founded La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1961 at 321 East Ninth Street, died today. The New York Times obituary, by Mel Gussow (himself 1933-2005) and Bruce Weber, is here.

Although in the past few decades La MaMa ETC has been an important home to director-based theatre, she originally dedicated both her theatre and her career to the playwright. Early on, every La MaMa performance would begin with Stewart ringing a bell and announcing from the front of the stage, “Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theatre.”

Some of the most important evenings I’ve spent in the theatre over the past ten years have been at La MaMa’s current home at 74A East Fourth Street: Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf’s Major Barbara, Teatr Wierszalin’s Saint Oedipus and Scena Plastyczna KUL’s Odchodzi (Passing Away) all broadened my sense of the possibilities inherent in the art form and made deep personal impressions as well. Although I never had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Stewart myself, several people involved with these productions have shared very warm thoughts of her with me in the past, and I know that their sense of loss far surpasses my own.

Ellen Stewart will no doubt be missed by the New York theatrical community; perhaps the best memorial to her would be for practitioners, critics and producers alike to continue to follow her example in welcoming both new and established writers and artists from around the world and nurture the experimentation that can reconceive the form.

Below, from YouTube, is a 30-minute WNYC-TV interview with Stewart from 1979, conducted by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel:

Kazuo Ohno, 1906-2010

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Photo of Kazuo Ohno by H. Tsukamoto.

Kazuo Ohno, one of the central founders of the Japanese theatrical style Butoh, died yesterday at the age of 103, the Web site of the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio is reporting. A full obituary by the New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning is available here. Writes Dunning:

Kazuo Ohno, a founder of Butoh, the influential Japanese dance-theater form whose traditional look of darkness and decay evoked for many the horrors of the wartime bombings of Japan, died on Tuesday in Yokohama, Japan. He was 103 and had continued to perform beyond his 100th year. …

Mr. Ohno’s solo performances, for which he was known, were irresistibly powerful and fraught with ambiguity. A humanist, he communicated the themes of the form through identifiable characters, most often flamboyantly female. The tottering women whom he personified onstage, his body twisted and grotesque, were both forces of nature and fragile creatures with flapping shoes and skewed wigs.

In this, Mr. Ohno also embodied the dual nature of Butoh, developed in Japan after World War II. It mines the primeval darkness of life and death in harrowing theatrical physical imagery yet is also capable of the dramatic equivalent of raucous, often bawdy laughter.

Many thanks to Andy Horwitz of Culturebot for the news.