On 12/12/05, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 13/12/05 1:52 AM, "Roger Day" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Hi Roger
>
> The body is there as soon as you talk about players, the implications of
> utterance. Of course you can have players without theatre - I've seen a
> couple of extraordinary street performances in my time, or you can think of
> Brook's peregrinations through Africa. Of course you can have a play
> without players - the puppet theatre that Kleist and Kafka and Artaud and
> others spoke about, though personally the most powerful puppet theatre I've
> seen is the bun raku, "white" theatre in which the manipulators are visible.
> Of course you can have theatre without words (Butoh say or other theatres of
> image and movement). And you can even have a play without "drama" - didn't
> Tynan call Waiting for Godot a play where nothing happens, twice?
Isn't the space for street theatre the, uh, street? A makeshift space
that can move, but still a defined space within which the performance
moves.
Ah yes, I'd forgotten Punch And Judy. The body is still there though,
moving in space, even though it's wire and paper machier. Who said my
players had to be human? The point still remains that is it isn't all
language, particularly in the no-language theatre o'wise known as
mime.
> Curious how the "dead hand" of Shakespeare has continued to inspire so much
> radical theatre, from Buchner to Pinter to Muller (and poetry - Ron Silliman
> not so long ago traced a genealogy in American poetry, from Shakespeare to
> Melville to Olson and on...) Of course WS can be killed dead by museum
> productions and the barnacles of cultural piety. So can anyone.
Yeah, radical dude. As for genealogy, we usual celebrate our forebears
on their death, bury them then proceed to forget them unless it's in
tree-diagrams. Oh look, Uncle Albert married that woman from
wosserplace. We're not resurrecting them every five minutes and bowing
ourselves before their "genius". We've had this conversation before
and we'll continue to disagree.
Toodle-pip
R
> Cheers
>
> 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/
|