I use the term "circle" to stand-in for an abstract theatre, a piece
of ground on which people perform texts. I thought I was trying to
describe the transformation of text into theatre. Of course what
happens in the process of text-production is pretty much up to the
author, whether they want to cross-pollinate with art-forms etc etc.
It's Artaud who says a play requires a theatre; of course you may well
say that's prescriptive but a play without players? Players without a
theatre? I couldn't see the body in any of this conversation.
OTOH, if it's the dead-hand of Shakespeare you're after getting, don't
let me stop you.
It helped clear my thoughts - your mileage has obviously varied.
Roger
On 12/12/05, George Hunka <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Roger,
>
> I find this distinction between theater and poetry isn't a very helpful
> or useful distinction, any more than those of mind and body, emotion and
> intellect. Expression finds and makes its own aesthetic, and we'd be
> limiting ourselves if we thought that there were such things as circles
> of form into which we could pour other disciplines. Certainly our
> definitions of these forms should be broad enough to inform our own
> work, whether poetry informs drama and theater or vice versa.
>
> I've got a small bust of Shakespeare staring at me as I write this,
> castigating me for not trying hard enough; I turn to Shakespeare almost
> daily, not only to the plays but to the poetry as well. So I suppose
> that, like Alison, I like Shakespeare too.
>
> Best,
> George
>
> Roger Day wrote:
> > I didn't mean to impugn your work - how could I, I've never seen or. I
> > apologise if that seems the case. It's just me trying to work through
> > what was being said, what was in my mind. Along the way overstatements
> > get made, false steps taken. I get carried away.
> >
> > When I woke this morning, things were clearer. The notion that you can
> > put any text in that magic circle, stir it with action and it becomes
> > theatre, is certainly a novel realisation to me. I'm still not
> > convinced that poetry "profoundly illumines the theatre". Does this
> > mean that because you're a poet you write better plays? I guess
> > there's a reason that playwrights stopped using poetic meter as a way
> > of delivering dialogue, I don't know enough to go there. Then again, I
> > don't like Shakespeare.
> >
> > As I now realiase, how successful that text works in the circle
> > depends on it's adapttion to the demands of the circle. W00t!
> >
> > Roger
> >
> > On 12/11/05, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Roger, all
> >>
> >> Thanks for the fascinating posts. My contention wasn't that poetry and plays
> >> are the same (although of course, anciently speaking, they grew from the
> >> same root, drama evolving from the rhapsodists who performed the Homeric
> >> hymns). More that each can be profoundly illuminated by the other,
> >> although, materially speaking, and the material is crucial in art, they are
> >> different artforms.
> >>
> >> Artaud was not refusing language in demanding an attention to carnality:
> >> what he wanted was, in fact, a _poetic_ theatre, by which he meant embodied
> >> language. And Bernstein, for my money, doesn't seem to understand much at
> >> all about theatre; certainly his comments on his opera with Ferneyhough in
> >> an interview I read somewhere struck me as hopelessly naïve. (And what I
> >> heard of the opera libretto, when I attended a very disappointing reading in
> >> Cork, was ghastly doggerel). Bernstein's mistake is precisely an inability
> >> to imagine carnality into language, in all its many dimensions; what Brecht
> >> calls the gestic quality. (Brecht, it must be remembered, was a poet
> >> _first_, of no mean abilities.)
> >>
> >>
> >>> The notion that plays should be good literature sounds European to me.
> >>> Are film-scripts good literature? In Artaud's world, the script is just
> >>> a set of directions on which the actors and directors play around.
> >>> When I've read drama reviews, I usually mark the ones which insist on
> >>> the text being paramount as hatchet jobs. You can treat drama as
> >>> literatures, but it seems to me to drawing yourself into the same
> >>> minimalist trap as poetry. As poets we tend to treat the text as
> >>> paramount - it's our vocation after all - our calling - words are
> >>> first, last and second to us. That's why we're poets. Artaud chafes
> >>> against this notion. All because drama involves mere words, does not
> >>> make it readily amenable to us, and even the best poet can make the
> >>> mistake of thinking themselves a dramatist. Eliots plays are rubbish
> >>> as plays, hence their continual revival. I wonder if anyone has sat
> >>> down to write a poem but ended up with a play? I bet Alison has...
> >>>
> >> Um. Roger, I find these comments a little strange. I don't understand what
> >> you mean. If you've read Bergman's scripts, you will know that film scripts
> >> can indeed be good literature. And Artaud's theatre strikes me as not quite
> >> the improvisational thing you describe - what inspired him was, for example,
> >> the extremely disciplined dance theatre of South East Asia - and didn't he
> >> say the perfect theatre was a theatre without actors? (he liked puppets
> >> better, perhaps because they would do what he said). Of course drama is
> >> literature, the best of it great literature: one might as well say that the
> >> fact that most poems aren't very good means that poetry is not literature.
> >> Martin's already pointed out the performability of Seneca (if he was not
> >> performed it was, in any case, for political rather than artistic reasons);
> >> I have seen a brilliant production of Peer Gynt myself, and can vouch for
> >> the fact that it can work on stage; and I was lucky enough to catch Peter
> >> Stein's Faust on television - how I wish I could have seen it in the
> >> theatre! Heiner Muller stuck most of his plays in a drawer; a lot of
> >> Bulgakov's works were not performed in his lifetime, and so on. They are no
> >> less plays, or literature, for that. If language is the passion of poets,
> >> why not of playwrights? Why else would they write? If they're serious about
> >> writing, I mean...
> >>
> >> I don't get what you mean by "minimalist trap" - language, and literature,
> >> is after all literally what we make it.
> >>
> >> My dear, you seem to be suggesting, ever so gently, that my plays are
> >> rubbish, but I'll pass over that...it may indeed be the case, but I do know
> >> that, if they are the plays of a poet, they are not poems masquerading as
> >> plays. No, I've never written a play by mistake, thinking that it was a
> >> poem; the writing of these things seem to me to be a different process
> >> altogether, with very different demands. Partly perhaps because I have
> >> almost always written texts for theatre when I've been asked to, and so am
> >> imagining into a specific context of performance; on only one occasion have
> >> I written a play as I would a poem, ie, being seized by the idea and rhythm
> >> of it.
> >>
> >> George, absolutely: that is very much how I think about these things (and
> >> you do say them clearly). But it's true that my ideas have been absolutely
> >> inflected by my involvement in theatre; indeed, I first started thinking
> >> about art in a critical way through watching plays, when I was a theatre
> >> critic in the early 90s.
> >>
> >> All the best
> >>
> >> A
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Alison Croggon
> >>
> >> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> >> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> >> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > http://www.badstep.net/
> > http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
> >
> >
> >
>
> --
>
> George Hunka
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.ghunka.com
>
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