Odd, Alison, this coming the day after I read Robert Budde's novel, The
Dying Poem, about a poet who commits suicide (by hiding in a library
about to be demolished) as a work of art, or final poem, the novel
being the attempt of a film maker to do a documentary on him, etc.
Budde is himself a poet, so the fictional poet's poems are, for a
change, believable....
Much in it along these lines:
Doug
On 20-Sep-05, at 5:32 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Telefunken written and performed by Stuart Orr, directed by Barry
> Laing.
> Table 9 Productions @ the Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until September 25.
>
> "Art, like suicide," says Ralph Manheim Mann blackly during the course
> of
> this fascinating show, "is very, very personal."
>
> It's an illuminating analogy. Suicide is at once the ultimate
> assertion of
> self - the conscious decision to override even the deepest survival
> instinct, a blasphemous refusal of life - and the self's ultimate
> erasure.
> And if art, as Freud argued, is the sublimation of certain instincts
> towards
> death and sex, it is not a sublimation which yields gratification but
> is
> peculiarly circular. It is, in fact, a masochistic sublimation, erasing
> rather than aggrandising the self.
>
> Stuart Orr's one-man aria Telefunken is art of this kind. Orr's
> electrifying physical presence is at the centre of the show, but all
> our
> attention is splintered and diverted from Orr himself by his very
> expressiveness. Personal this show may be, but it is the antithesis of
> confessional.
>
> It's a bit of a challenge to describe its complexities. Telefunken
> works on
> several levels, and in reflecting on it, all of them seem to
> metastasise
> uncontrollably, creating dense clusters of allusion and metaphor which
> themselves collect more allusions, more metaphors...and it is no
> accident
> that one of the presiding gods in this piece is Loki, the trickster.
> I fear
> that one viewing is not nearly enough to absorb all of its
> implications.
>
> Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>
>
> All the best
>
> Alison
>
>
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
The temper is fragile
as apparently it wants to be,
wind on the ocean, trees
moving in wind and rain.
Robert Creeley
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