Hi Roger, all
> Yet it
> seems even now that drama and poetry performance are 2 separate
> identities, that the Play, even in it's form as a monologue, attaches
> itself to a wider context than the poem, which seems to force it's own
> shape onto the performance partially because the poetry isn't normally
> written as drama, with the dynamic of the stage in mind (which is
> where Alison & George come in). Maybe drama is written as a set of
> clothes waiting to be inhabited by a person and can't be an object
> unless the words are inhabited, whilst poetry is it's own object.
I suppose I have always thought of texts for performance as unstable and
incomplete texts, and it is certainly true that the completion of the art
doesn't begin to happen until that first communication, which is, as George
says, the reading and response of actors, prior to other readings and
interpretations - directors, designers, musicians perhaps, and of course
audiences... And this seems to imply that, in contrast, a poem or, perhaps,
a work of fiction, is a stable and complete text. But the longer I have
written and read in both forms, the more these possible distinctions seem to
have broken down. How is it possible to say, reading something as
exquisitely achieved, for example, as Not I or Footfalls, that the text is
not "its own object"? And are poems or fictional texts really as stable as
they appear to be, or is that some kind of illusion? They too require the
"completion" of a reader, of someone who brings their imaginative and
emotional resources to their understanding and interpretation of the writing
- and this too occurs in time, and is contingent and fragile. Even
something like the fantasy novels - straightforward, even 19C narrative
prose - which I had thought was about as stable as text could be, has turned
out to be far less stable than I had realised; and the books themselves are
a collaborative exercise, meeting, rather than actors, directors and so on,
a process which involves editors, copy editors, designers, and so on before
they reach their readers, who then fill them out with their own imaginative
lives.
If I sound like I'm contradicting myself, well, then, I contradict myself...
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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