Sorry, Alison--what's the "this" to which you're referring? (Did I miss a
post or something?) Thanks--Candice
on 4/9/02 7:38 PM, Alison Croggon at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Just got this, and reading it in emphatically no order, tho no doubt
> I'll be a good girl at some point and sit down and read it from the
> beginning. But fascinating and stimulating to have all these
> speculations here to ruminate over and argue with.
>
> One thing which puzzles and intrigues me is the almost wholly
> negative place theatre holds in considerations of poetry performance
> - not so much it seems in the American contributors, but certainly
> among the UK writers. (In the introduction it's said to be Dylan
> Thomas' fault...) Theatricality is, apparently, devoutly to be
> avoided, and performance is referenced rather to the visual arts and
> to a lesser extend music than to theatre. Nathaniel Mackay defines
> theatricality as "a recourse to dramatic, declamatory and other
> tactics aimed at propping up words or helping them out - words
> regarded, either way, as needing help, support, embellishment,
> deficient or decrepit or even dead left on their own". Other writers
> use theatricality as a perjorative word, meaning inauthentic, over
> rhetorical, artificial, &c&c.
>
> I can understand this suspicion, but I also think it's strange and
> inaccurate. I can think of plenty of theatre experiences I've had
> which do fit this to me very 19C model of theatre, but I can also
> think of many instances where theatre, as a place where text and
> performance meet, offers many ways of thinking through some
> puzzlements, and plenty of theatre writers for whom the word is not
> in the least insufficient, but for whom writing for performance
> indicates a less stable relationship to language, a recognition of
> the spoken word's potency and fragility, its existence as a temporal
> phenomenon. Performative histories in theatre go back a very long
> way and there are so many interesting writers who have thought deeply
> about the relationships between performance and text (thinking of
> Artaud, Margeurite Duras, Howard Barker, Beckett, just for starters,
> but also people like Grotowski and so on). Am I simply naive in
> thinking that this negation of theatre as an area of interest is an
> impoverishment?
>
> Interested to know what others think -
>
> Best
>
> Alison
> --
>
> "The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
> Albert Camus
>
> Alison Croggon
> Home page
> http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
>
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