tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post7855526269789039728..comments2023-09-20T14:34:21.102+02:00Comments on Postcards from the Gods: Our theatre, right or leftAndrew Haydonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05568061302451610140noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-5503398516697527582007-11-16T18:30:00.000+01:002007-11-16T18:30:00.000+01:00I think you make a nuanced, textured and strong re...I think you make a nuanced, textured and strong response Andrew. <BR/><BR/>Incidentally, I read some articles by Peter Whittle and was very interested in what he said, about the need for the ‘liberal left group-think’ of the arts world to be challenged. I agree with this, because I hate some of the complacencies and assumptions that I see around the theatre and other art forms. So I spent some time on the New Culture Forum and watched a few of the TV discussion shows on there that he hosts, and some of the debate was dire. All that there seemed to be was a replication of the same kind of dogmatic criticism of works on the basis of how far they cleaved to an imagined (and at times paranoid) assumption of ideological offence that we see on the more self-parodying side of the Left, or even the more doctrinaire critiques of art proffered by various religious or racial theorists --- ie: it’s not like me or us, therefore it’s wrong.<BR/><BR/>This whole thing seems to dissipate as quickly as anything else into pitiful pleading. As such, apart from protest and squeals, often from, to put it frankly, individual twits who seemed to be letting off steam rather than truly engaging with the aesthetics or meanings of a work, I could not find any original thought there at all. At best this is a lighthouse, a useful reminder and warning against the lazy thinking that can prevail, but in and of itself it offers as little as any other rigidity and conspiracy minded default. <BR/><BR/>I remain convinced that an instinctual skepticism, a tender sneer, a fleet-footed and lean suspicion underlying a childlike love of the form is the appropriate mode to approach theatre with in this time of complexity and ideological fuzz. For the culture of theatre, the impulse of theatre and the achievement of the work itself.<BR/><BR/>~Pali~Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-51525944207205216552007-11-14T14:17:00.000+01:002007-11-14T14:17:00.000+01:00Hmm, I posted a great, articulate and nuanced dist...Hmm, I posted a great, articulate and nuanced distinction between "collective" and "communal" responses here - reneging on my own use of "collective" in the process - then alluded to it on Chris's blog, only to find that my browser never delivered the bleeder! Let me try to reconstruct:<BR/><BR/>I know it can look precious and pedantic to go back to etymology, but I think in this case it's a help. A collective response, is something collected, lit. laid together: something composed of other things, those being the individual responses. A communal response is something held in common, one thing held by many hands - is, here, the response, singular, of the superbeing Audience of which we are members... members with some subsequent autonomy, but at this point members, limbs, under the command of common impulses.<BR/><BR/>No, it was better first time round.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-13542623487170131032007-11-12T23:53:00.000+01:002007-11-12T23:53:00.000+01:00Binaries are being scattered everywhere! No, I am ...Binaries are being scattered everywhere! No, I am not arguing at all against communal experience: I am saying that the communal experience is made of a whole bunch of individual experiences, and to forget that (as marketers tend to) is to forget something crucial about what a communal experience is and to begin to second-guess in a way that ends up with work that on the whole I find deeply depressing. ("Our audience expects...our audience wants...) <BR/><BR/>I've seen collectively made work that is extremely focused (Dood Paard, Theatre Du Soleil), and singularly authored work that is all over the shop (names suppressed to keep me out of trouble). And vice versa. Maybe I mostly agree with Chris in his call for rigor, only I'd apply it to all kinds of theatre.<BR/><BR/>Linking form and process to ideology has imho whiskers all over it. Such linkings may be generally true in one context, but in another wildly misleading.Alison Croggonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-34596726398440450142007-11-12T22:44:00.000+01:002007-11-12T22:44:00.000+01:00Just to say that I've tried to reply to Ian's comm...Just to say that I've tried to reply to Ian's comments about individual vs. collective experience as constituted in the artist/audience relationship over at <A HREF="https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=28051672&postID=8131853324620900174" REL="nofollow">my place</A>. <BR/><BR/>I think a bit of flakiness in my original post is probably at fault for having given a slightly misleading impression of my actual perspective on this: which is, simply put, that the communal experience within theatre is immensely valuable, but that it has to be activated by the event itself rather than being assumed to be inherent.<BR/><BR/>In other words, the same point that I make about liveness, specificity, risk, "the magic of theatre" and all stations to Amersham. xxChris Goodehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17993698000314709291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-28923202093681696992007-11-12T10:22:00.000+01:002007-11-12T10:22:00.000+01:00I think it's because theatre tends to be concerned...I think it's because theatre tends to be concerned with failure of one kind or another and right-wing people have no truck with failure.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-21968105319265895762007-11-12T02:36:00.000+01:002007-11-12T02:36:00.000+01:00Yes, I agree that that's Chris's primary drive, bu...Yes, I agree that that's Chris's primary drive, but I think that along the way his remarks about treating an audience (or not) as an "undifferentiated mass" implicitly set up a fictitious binary opposition similar in structure to the one that so depressed him in Billington's argument. And I think you might be doing the same, Alison, when you say that "it seems rather nonsensical to speak of a singular audience experience." Certainly it seems nonsensical to speak of that alone, but I'm not doing that. I'm saying that a <I>collective</I> experience - which, notwithstanding that there may only be one such, is not quite the same as a <I>singular</I> experience (though it's a nice distinction) - has to be the primary mode in which a live piece performed to a plurality of people works, and has also to be the primary consideration in creation. Again, it simply seems axiomatic to me that if you intend a work to convey anything - be it political argument, sensory experience, whatever - then you must have a collective "the audience" in mind; otherwise, all you're doing is deciding to create a piece of work, without any further specific intentions as to perceived form or content.<BR/><BR/>I don't go along with rejection of the terminology of left and right - it seems to me to be of a piece with end-of-history-type positions, which are themselves products of the dominant ideology of the moment in question (which happens, in that case, to be of the right). But if it helps, we might consider using them instead as descriptions of modes of argument rather than content: thus, a left-wing play would work along consensual, collaborative, communicative lines, a right-wing play along declamatory, disseminative ones, regardless of what the "message" was in each case. Cf. John Carpenter's distinction between "left-wing" and "right-wing" horror movies, "left-wing" being that kind in which the monsters are to all intents and purposes us, or are indistinguishable from us until it's too late, as opposed to "right-wing" in which they are distinctively Other. Thus, for instance, <I>Invasion Of The Body Snatchers</I> in its various forms is left-wing horror even though the first movie version was a rabidly paranoid anti-Commie tract; conversely, although Carpenter is a card-carrying Republican, most of his movies such as <I>The Thing</I>, <I>Prince Of Darkness</I> and <I>They Live</I> work in a "left-wing" way. And in that respect, the "muscular" plays of my previous comment, whether socialistic or individualistic in ideology, are alike "right-wing" in the way they work as theatre. Which means that there are even <B>more</B> of the bleeders around :-)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-78001178246283777192007-11-11T22:03:00.000+01:002007-11-11T22:03:00.000+01:00PS I loathe the brute division of artworks into "r...PS I loathe the brute division of artworks into "right" and "left" <I>so much</I> I really don't have anything to say about it.Alison Croggonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-70673316903978943262007-11-11T21:54:00.000+01:002007-11-11T21:54:00.000+01:00Hmmm - not enough time to address all this in any ...Hmmm - not enough time to address all this in any reasonable way. But I did read Chris as objecting primarily to the idea that "content" can only be authored, or authorised, by writers, or more specifically by A Writer, a stance which seems pretty unarguable to me. I've seen quite a lot of substantial work that doesn't have a writer, as such. (Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Dernier Caravanserail as one example - one of the few she did without Cixous - hugely attacked by Robert Brustein for that reason, and I think very mistakenly).<BR/><BR/>Nor am I certain that he is about atomising audiences. The fact remains that even in a singularly Authored play, the audience is made up of a bunch of individuals, each of which is going to have his/her individual experience. And as any post-performance converstion reveals, these can vary so wildly even when you're sitting <I>right next to that person you're disagreeing with</I>, that it seems rather nonsensical to speak of a singular audience experience.Alison Croggonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08398213223487458758noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-90963795283673641022007-11-11T00:55:00.000+01:002007-11-11T00:55:00.000+01:00Reading your comments here after a few hours of pe...Reading your comments here after a few hours of percolating Chris Goode's latest essay has me groping towards a social and cultural theory of everything. At the moment it's nebulous, but I'll give it a go...<BR/><BR/>Perhaps (it's all <I>perhaps</I>) one factor that we should take into account is that notions of the centre have shifted, and shifted to the right: (alleged) absence of right-wing plays does not mean preponderance of left-wing plays. <BR/><BR/>To some extent this is covered by the notion of consensus, but in another way this seems to be precisely what left and right tend to have it in for: liberalism, pluralism, consensus arrived at through conversation. <BR/><BR/>Again, nothing new there, but when it's applied to culture it may make fresh sense of general criticisms of work and arguments as wishy-washy, timid, lacking in vigour. What these criticisms mean is that a view is prepared to listen, think and develop, always, without ever imagining to have arrived. In that respect, what's being yearned for in "right-wing plays" is a firm stance, or as I'd prefer to put it a pretence to have the answers. What left and right alike value is ideological testosterone: thinking that has muscle rather than, paradoxically, thought.<BR/><BR/>But pluralism is not relativism, not atomisation. This is what I've started to consider with regard to Chris's piece: the possibility that maybe in one respect the artistic-cultural conservatism he and others perceive as being so tenaciously rearguarded by Michael Billington and others is a surrogate, or a consolation, for a social-cultural conservatism, and that the atomisation of modes of creation, presentation and perception is perceived on some subconscious level as analogous to the atomisation, or at least the increasing fractal subdivision, of our society as a whole in a globalised, polyglot, multicultural era.<BR/><BR/>And this is the point in the argument at which I have to conquer my fear of finding myself overtly conservative.<BR/><BR/>Because if I try to re-apply this argument back the other way...<BR/><BR/>I don't fear the loss of a culture that I think of as mine, or as ours, or indigenous, or properly national, or whatever, in such a life. But - really, I shudder to find myself saying the same things Blunkett has said - it seems to me not unreasonable, and indeed pragmatically essential, that a <I>lingua franca</I> be available to a certain degree and level, and by available I mean required. And here the pedant in me is muttering about calling English a <I>lingua franca</I> in an attempt to drown out the realisation that I've just said immigrants should be required to attain a certain level of English. BUT WAIT...<BR/><BR/>Because it seems to me that, as it's not possible to communicate adequately beyond a certain affinity group unless a common linguistic framework is used, the same is true of art, and in the case at hand, theatre. (This, for instance, is one reason why so much conceptual art is up itself.)<BR/><BR/>The next sentence is incredibly tortuous, sorry...<BR/><BR/>I have shadows of worry that thought such as some of what I perceive in Chris's piece, thought of the atomisation of performance relationships, of working on the relationship of the work to the audient, singular, rather than the audience as a distinct and more powerful entity than all its members put together... I have worry that this is analogous to the social position, and that beyond a localised constituency what may happen is that an audience admires and delights in the shapes and sounds of a work but not is content. <BR/><BR/>And that gets close to the quote of Michael Billington's about the likes of <I>...Red Death</I> that's getting so many hackles up, to the effect that it's no substitute for the real thing.<BR/><BR/>And so in this respect I find myself a cultural conservative.<BR/><BR/>You can, if you like, filter it through the current buzz-concept of liveness. It seems to me that communality is a crucial component of liveness - that in order to gauge something as live we require a referent outside ourselves as individuals, otherwise it's a solipsistic experience. And as I've said on Chris's blog, that element of the experience (the <I>gesamt</I>-experience, if you like, God help us) applies even in a context such as the Punchdrunk work where the momentary encounter may be entirely one-to-one.<BR/><BR/>So (desperate attempt to draw these threads together, and disentangle them, burning the metaphor at both ends): it seems to me that the "not enough right-wing plays" barkers and, potentially, the enthusiasts for new performance modes and territories are - as you say, Andrew - manifesting dissatisfaction with the same thing: a consensual centre, be it of form or content. And it seems to me that such a centre is something that doesn't need to be apologised for - more, that needs to be championed because in its absence the whole fucking structure will implode.<BR/><BR/>I think. Maybe.<BR/><BR/>Did any of that work?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com