"What has happened to this lineage of physical theater?"

*sigh*

And that's a sigh of sadness. Among the various liberations of the 
1960s, at least in this country, was the theater from the drama, or at 
least the written word. It's odd, since the New Theater movement here 
(Off-Off-Broadway theater, whatever you want to call it) had part of its 
start in the Poets Theaters here in New York and in Boston, John 
Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara among the participants. Composers 
Morton Feldman and John Cage, choreographers Merce Cunningham and James 
Waring, painter Mark Rothko were also all participating to one extent or 
another, and it was very exciting. But not as exciting as another strand 
of New Theater that was more interested in deconstructing popular 
culture. At the same time actors and directors chafed, and quite rightly 
so in many cases, against the authority of the playwright. A 
baby-with-the-bathwater situation, I think; I've written more 
extensively about the history of this divorce here:

http://www.ghunka.com/index.cgi/Theater/Essays/the_big_idea.html

There are still companies doing this, but much of the work is based in 
reconceptions of classic plays or in collaborative "company-created" 
texts--that is, texts without "poets" or "playwrights." But most theater 
in New York now, even most of the so-called experimental theater, is so 
driven by box-office considerations that more abstract conceptions, like 
drawing language and physical gestus closer together, are less than ever 
likely to be presented. That's the way I see it, anyway.

Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Hi George:  As somebody who participated in Grotowski workshops (not with G
> himself), I very much appreciate what you say. The work - the exercises, the
> plays with which we emerged - was the most profound exploration of the
> relationship between language and physical gesture(including voice)that I
> ever personally experienced.  In the middle of all the rhetorics of the
> Vietnam war (for and against, etc.) it was absolutely refreshing "to be" in
> the way that felt absolutely real, adventuresome, alternatively 'evil' and
> 'angelic'  (as suspect as that may sound). (In fact, My Dinner with Andrei,
> is probably the most loving satire of where we were. Andrei being Don
> Quixote, and Wally Shawn the suspect, hands on the coffee pot Sanchez)
>
> However, my question. What has happened to this lineage of physical theater
> - Grotowski  Artaud, The Living Theater, The Dancer's Workshop of Anna
> Halperin?  Is it active anywhere. I have people that ask - MFA's in poetry
> who - in spite of maybe wonderful poems writ - live in an anxious
> disembodied state wondering how to take physical presence  (poems  included)
> in the world.
>
> Stephen V
> Blog: http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>
>
>
>
>
>   
>> I have the same concerns, Alison, though I confess I write only for the
>> theater so don't have exactly the same concerns as you have. I haven't
>> decided whether or not this constitutes some kind of reluctance on my
>> part to enter physically more into the linguistic representation of the
>> written word as opposed to that which is intended to be embodied and
>> performed by yet another body. The playwright's sharing his or her own
>> linguistic gestus with the spatial gestus of the performer is what has
>> special interest to me; for some reason there's more of a sense of
>> completeness in the finished word after I've handed it off to another
>> with the physical training and physical presence to embody that gestus
>> with far more skill than I could. It's just the way I think of my
>> writing now, and I hadn't thought of it that way until recently, which
>> makes it far more exciting to me. Whatever voice or body my own language
>> suggests I pass to another who voices it, embodies it, and I suppose
>> this constitutes the first communion or communication, artist to artist,
>> necessary to extending this communion or communication further to an
>> audience. If that makes sense. Some writers are lucky enough to be able
>> to form close aesthetic partnerships (in Beckett's late career it was
>> Jack MacGowran and Billie Whitelaw) with performers whose instincts mesh
>> with their own. It's why I've grown so interested in Grotowski's work,
>> for example. All to the best, really, as that intertwining of writer and
>> performer sustains and inspires (in the ancient sense of the word) both.
>> It's also that I suppose I'm too unconvinced of my own talent to do
>> without these others.
>>
>> As you say, clear to me (how unclear to too many others, unfortunately,
>> and my fault that), but I can't be much more precise than that myself.
>>
>> Alison Croggon wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi George, Doug, all
>>>
>>> By no means sick of hearing from you, George - It's got me thinking, this
>>> difference between play and poem, since one of my obsessions (obviously, for
>>> anyone who knows me) is their deep relatedness. I suppose a huge part of the
>>> poetic in plays and theatre is gesture and body (literally, I mean), which
>>> is so implicated in the language, and in the structures of speaking - the
>>> idea of language as action itself, the knowledge that something will be said
>>> in time and so must be graspable in time - which hardly eschews complexity
>>> (thinking of Heiner Muller here, say) - but does spin it in subtly different
>>> directions from poetry. Whereas in poems, the language carries the whole can
>>> - although of course there are many kinds of poetry, so I'm generalising
>>> wildly and unwisely. I know I want to pack a density and a quality of torque
>>> or spin into language in poems in ways which wouldn't necessarily work in
>>> theatrical language. But of course there are no border lines - at the same
>>> time, the implication of the body in poems is crucial to me. (I can really
>>> here only speak of my own practice of reading and writing) and that
>>> dimension of orality...the differences seem to me to be clear, but, like
>>> much to do with writing, almost impossible to define in any precise way.
>>>
>>> All the best
>>>
>>> A
>>>
>>>
>>> Alison Croggon
>>>
>>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>>> Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
>>> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
>
>
>   

-- 

George Hunka
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