Hi George: As somebody who participated in Grotowski workshops (not with G
himself), I very much appreciate what you say. The work - the exercises, the
plays with which we emerged - was the most profound exploration of the
relationship between language and physical gesture(including voice)that I
ever personally experienced. In the middle of all the rhetorics of the
Vietnam war (for and against, etc.) it was absolutely refreshing "to be" in
the way that felt absolutely real, adventuresome, alternatively 'evil' and
'angelic' (as suspect as that may sound). (In fact, My Dinner with Andrei,
is probably the most loving satire of where we were. Andrei being Don
Quixote, and Wally Shawn the suspect, hands on the coffee pot Sanchez)
However, my question. What has happened to this lineage of physical theater
- Grotowski Artaud, The Living Theater, The Dancer's Workshop of Anna
Halperin? Is it active anywhere. I have people that ask - MFA's in poetry
who - in spite of maybe wonderful poems writ - live in an anxious
disembodied state wondering how to take physical presence (poems included)
in the world.
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> I have the same concerns, Alison, though I confess I write only for the
> theater so don't have exactly the same concerns as you have. I haven't
> decided whether or not this constitutes some kind of reluctance on my
> part to enter physically more into the linguistic representation of the
> written word as opposed to that which is intended to be embodied and
> performed by yet another body. The playwright's sharing his or her own
> linguistic gestus with the spatial gestus of the performer is what has
> special interest to me; for some reason there's more of a sense of
> completeness in the finished word after I've handed it off to another
> with the physical training and physical presence to embody that gestus
> with far more skill than I could. It's just the way I think of my
> writing now, and I hadn't thought of it that way until recently, which
> makes it far more exciting to me. Whatever voice or body my own language
> suggests I pass to another who voices it, embodies it, and I suppose
> this constitutes the first communion or communication, artist to artist,
> necessary to extending this communion or communication further to an
> audience. If that makes sense. Some writers are lucky enough to be able
> to form close aesthetic partnerships (in Beckett's late career it was
> Jack MacGowran and Billie Whitelaw) with performers whose instincts mesh
> with their own. It's why I've grown so interested in Grotowski's work,
> for example. All to the best, really, as that intertwining of writer and
> performer sustains and inspires (in the ancient sense of the word) both.
> It's also that I suppose I'm too unconvinced of my own talent to do
> without these others.
>
> As you say, clear to me (how unclear to too many others, unfortunately,
> and my fault that), but I can't be much more precise than that myself.
>
> Alison Croggon wrote:
>> Hi George, Doug, all
>>
>> By no means sick of hearing from you, George - It's got me thinking, this
>> difference between play and poem, since one of my obsessions (obviously, for
>> anyone who knows me) is their deep relatedness. I suppose a huge part of the
>> poetic in plays and theatre is gesture and body (literally, I mean), which
>> is so implicated in the language, and in the structures of speaking - the
>> idea of language as action itself, the knowledge that something will be said
>> in time and so must be graspable in time - which hardly eschews complexity
>> (thinking of Heiner Muller here, say) - but does spin it in subtly different
>> directions from poetry. Whereas in poems, the language carries the whole can
>> - although of course there are many kinds of poetry, so I'm generalising
>> wildly and unwisely. I know I want to pack a density and a quality of torque
>> or spin into language in poems in ways which wouldn't necessarily work in
>> theatrical language. But of course there are no border lines - at the same
>> time, the implication of the body in poems is crucial to me. (I can really
>> here only speak of my own practice of reading and writing) and that
>> dimension of orality...the differences seem to me to be clear, but, like
>> much to do with writing, almost impossible to define in any precise way.
>>
>> All the best
>>
>> A
>>
>>
>> Alison Croggon
>>
>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>>
>>
>>
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