my grateful thanks, MJ (sorry, don't know your first name). i'll die, surely, of profound ignorance and semi-tolerance, but somewhere within's a glimmer that Truth'll be made known to me, and that i'll recognize it. you've awakened that glimmer and awareness, thanks be to God.
judy
> From: MJ Walker <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2005/12/11 Sun AM 08:50:09 EST
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Poem/Play (was Re: Pinter on Blair et al.)
>
> There is a longstanding debate about Seneca's practice & intentions with
> his plays. I believe more advanced theories support full-scale
> theatrical production during Nero's reign. Certainly the "progeny" of
> his drama, meaning Elizabethan tragedy, was generally meant for
> performance. The renewal of Senecan tragedy in English in the last
> century began with the very successful Peter Brook/Ted Hughes production
> with Gielgud & Worth - a great loss that it was never filmed. If Peer
> Gynt was only meant for reading, why did Ibsen then bother to get Grieg
> to compose the music for theatrical production? He understood that
> poetry and music go together well in the theatre - and reading can never
> supply that frisson. Flecker's The Golden Road to Samarkand, to cite a
> similar example, perhaps Britain's reply to the Theatre of Cruelty avant
> la lettre, had a very successful production in 1923 with the
> unforgettable music of Delius. As for Faust, it was, has been and is
> performed quite regularly in German-speaking countries (as is Madach's
> Tragedy of Man in Hungary & elsewhere). Try to see Peter Stein's amazing
> production (there must be a video, I taped it off the TV) with Bruno
> Ganz et al (two Fausts, two Mephistos).
> mj
>
> Knut Mork Skagen wrote:
>
> >> There is a dimension of the theatrical performance of a text, though,
> >> that creates a third consciousness (that is, one besides the
> >> audience-as-audience and the performer-as-performer), even in fairly
> >> traditional dramatic texts like my own, which are constructed with
> >> plot and character and all that stuff we've come to expect from a
> >> night out at the local playhouse. If I can be permitted an example
> >> from my recent play "In Public": a character in the second scene is
> >> sitting at a bar, flirting casually with a colleague, when she comes
> >> up with this monologue:
> >>
> >
> > I immediately think of two things when I read your examples and your
> > explanation of this extra dimension. The one of them you describe with
> > "spoken by the same actress within a 15 or 20 minute period" --
> > stating the obvious, drama, unlike poetry, is a time-based artform.
> > Lyric poetry is perhaps the least time-based form of literature, which
> > strengthens its role as object-on-the-page. It exists, in a sense,
> > without a proper beginning, end, or sense of time having passed.
> >
> > I also think of how a dramatic text is meant to be inhabited and
> > embodied by a performer -- mentioned earlier in this thread -- and it
> > seems to me critical to that the performer is not performing his or
> > her own words but those of a "character." (Character, of course, in
> > the broadest possible sense, given that less traditional drama won't
> > have such precise divisions). But still, the performative context of
> > a text is automatically a fictitious context. Even in performance art
> > where the performer is the writer is the character, the act of staging
> > produces an artificiality which enhances the impact of portions of the
> > text while reducing others.
> >
> > Contemporary lyric poetry isn't anywhere close to being staged, on the
> > contrary, it's often passed off as the opposite, some kind of "direct
> > communication." This may well be illusory, but is often an underlying
> > assumption on the part of the reader.
> >
> > There is a crossing somewhere. As drama approaches the purely literary
> > is enters the unperformable realm. Norway's own "national play" Peer
> > Gynt is meant to be read rather than staged; Goethe's Faustus;
> > Seneca's plays. And on the poetry end of things there is the point
> > where lyric crosses over into epic.
> >
> > --Knut
> >
>
> --
> M.J.Walker - no blog - no webpage - no idea
>
> Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. - Montaigne
>
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