So, I originally got interested in the idea of the play as a construct reading Brecht, but that's what it was to me--an idea. Stephen Colbert made me understand what it meant for comedy (which I analyzed academically here, if you don't mind mixing academia and comedy), and I came across it extremely effectively in an admittedly really lousy student production of The Crooked Cross, a play which I extremely dislike, but had one choice that worked really well: namely, the girl who is murdered at the end of the play stays dead, lying there face down as the curtain call happens. And everyone files out, leaving the poor actress lying there face down.
Suddenly, it becomes about more than the play. The audience is literally laughing about the actress being left behind. It also feels like a hokey choice--it doesn't strike me as being inspired, or anything. But there's an awkwardness as people consider, "Do we leave yet? If we stay, will she stay face down?"
At any rate, I walked out feeling as though it was a silly choice rather like the rest of the really bad, really silly choices in that piece. But it stayed with me. There was something emotionally jarring about her staying dead--even though I knew it was a hokey choice. It had blurred the end of the play for me, and in some strange subconscious part of my mind I wasn't allowed to end the play.
For me, there became two tools used in opposition: one is the use of the play as a construct, and the other as being blurring the lines between reality and the play.
On the one hand (as my teacher Laura Levine would tell me to start this essay), you cannot ignore the fact that you are putting on a show, because people are sitting in a theater facing actors, having just paid money for the privilege. In a way, any lack of acknowledgment of that is an insult and a failure.
On the other hand, the audience's ability to compartmentalize theater as something separate from real life allows them to dull its impact--to dull its realism (see previous post). If I had to point to the one chief advantage that theater has over film is that in film, there is very little way for the film (using current technology, I should probably qualify) to avoid that compartmentalization. The film is a physical artifact, and no matter how well constructed it is, it ends rather abruptly--it is playing, and then it is not. The end.
Theater, on the other hand, could be constructed in such a way that people are not quite sure where it starts or end. If you try to create theater that is absolutely invisible, that's one thing--much like "theater" in which nobody knows theater is happening. This is the sort of performance art that groups do outside of a theater, in "the real world" (i.e. in a place where naturalistic conventions are the norm), where nobody knows they're participating at all. That, perhaps, doesn't interest me so much.
But if you are in the place where non-naturalistic conventions are the norm; i.e. in a theater, where no matter how much "naturalism" we try to put in place, we still have plenty of things that get in the way of absolute 100% naturalism?
My approach to this has been to try and create a production wherein the play starts naturalistically in real life--the actors are themselves, they enter into the space along with the audience in some way. The audience knows that they are there for a production, but don't know how exactly it will begin or take place (this is why this method demands a black-box theater, rather than a proscenium). They sit, the actors appear to be preparing, and then something happens that starts to tell the story--transitioning in a way which is not so seamless as to be hidden to view, but in such a way that it seems to progress naturally and consciously from real life. Then the story continues, with the performer remaining the same performer who is present out of the performance, until the performance comes to some sort of an end--but not a clean end, an end that dribbles out into the real world.
In the tradition of Brecht, I'll do the self-serving thing and give an example from my own work (although not in the tradition of Brecht, I'll plug that it's available here for $10 / $2 download). The production Orchestration took place in a black-box theater, but it sort-of began a little beforehand, where the man orchestrating the production (It's important to me that the central protagonist of these pieces appear to orchestrate the entire evening, so that he is in control of all of the elements of the story he is trying to tell; this is the orchestrator) is mingling with the audience, greeting them as they enter.
As the audience files in, the orchestrator ushers the ensemble into the space, including a technical person (who was played by me, the writer-director) who would appear to run the entire show's technical aspects from on-stage, at the direction of the orchestrator.
At the direction of the orchestrator, the story begins--by this point, the audience is absolutely clear that the production has begun. The production tells its tale--at this point, it's mostly a classical production, with a few moments of self-awareness. As the story progresses, the ensemble characters become slowly more and more self-aware of the story, and finally the narrative collapses on the orchestrator, who has no more control over the narrative. Everything is in silence until this point; he breaks his own convention to try and bully through shouting the other characters into obeying him. He kills characters, they resurrect themselves. And now (spoiler alert! actually, I don't care about that sort of thing), he reaches the end of his rope--he can't make them obey his conception of the story: he kicks them out, he kicks out the technical person (me, the writer-director), and sulks.
Then he starts yelling at the audience to get out--they're just as much a part of his failure as anything else. And the doors open, and the characters (who are humming a funeral song from earlier in the production) stand in rows to guide them out. Framed in the doorway is myself, the writer-director, only now I really am actually just myself, and as the audience comes out, still (hopefully) reeling from the abrupt collapse of the play, I thank them for coming with a smile.
My hope is that the beginning and end are blurred in such a way that the performance becomes more real to them, more difficult to compartmentalize as just something that happened in a theater space--even though obviously this is all still just a planned artifact. This is the aesthetic you get in The Office--note the big deal people make about the fact that when they're not filming, the actors are pretending to do the office thing, and yet at the same time they film The Office in such a way that they both are aware and not aware that this is being filmed for someone else's benefit--as though they are aware of producing a construct, but not being aware that the construct they think they're making is the construct they are making. That's the appeal of reality shows: the participants think they're playing a certain role in the drama, but really they're probably playing a completely different role. They may think the competition is about their talent, and they may think that they are the hero in the story, but they are not.
That's what I feel about realism today, and how it relates to the play (or TV series or film) as a construct, and how you go about treating it as a construct. For Brecht, it was as simple as occasionally stepping outside of the construct once or twice (like Jim's sidelong looks at the camera in The Office), but if we leverage the fact of real, three-dimensional, unquestionable human beings in the space of theater, we can do more: we can force the construct we make into the real world.
(By the way, this aesthetic is the result of returning to a single hunch over and over again: I've always hated curtain calls more than anything, except when I'm participating in them, and I haven't known why... it's possible to read this as an analysis of why they ring so false for me).
Showing posts with label brecht. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brecht. Show all posts
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Pragmatic Theater: Realism and The Play As A Construct I
Unlike many of my classmates, I spent the spring of my freshman year reading the entire book of translated Brecht essays, rather than the ones that were assigned ("The Modern Theater Is The Epic Theater" and "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting"). Now, I know why those two essays are assigned--in terms of the larger history of theater, those are the two that mark the clearest antithesis to Aristotle's Poetics, but in terms of understanding Brecht (and Brecht is a personal hero for me, the man who forms the very core of my artistic sensibility), I think that those essays are poor representatives.
Brecht was a person who loved to contradict himself. He gets the impression of being a radical, especially because the first of the two essays is quite a radical tract. Actually, he turns out to be quite the moderate, pragmatic thinker. He's not interested in things that don't work. That's why when you read Mother Courage and All Her Children, he's not actually driving out all the emotion--he understands that Mother Courage has to be a pathetic character on some level to be compelling. He pushes the form as far as will work (and, admittedly, sometimes too far).
Late in his life, he began outlining a shift in thinking, creating a theory called the Dialectical Theater that would encapsulate both his Epic Theater and the Aristotilian theater he sought to get away from. That dialectical theater is what I really fell in love with, despite the fact that he never got to really articulate it. But I think it was always present in the contradictions within his work.
At any rate, the one thing that gets said most about Brecht is that he's an anti-realist. Brecht himself noticed that, and he wrote one of my favorite essays by him called "The Popular And The Realistic." In it, he puts forward that his theater isn't anti-realistic. Now, he admits freely that it isn't naturalistic, but in terms of realism, he says:
That's the Pragmatist, moderate Brecht (I have already dubbed my theater aesthetic the Pragmatic Theater, after the pragmatist philosopher William James). What he's saying is that "realism" isn't a certain style of theater (and he's talking about living-room, fly-on-a-wall Ibsen naturalism), it's the accuracy of the play to reality, and in that pursuit we are allowed to use any aesthetic tools necessary.
The reason I use the capital P Pragmatist to describe this Brecht is because this dovetails beautifully into James' model of how we learn knowledge (I've lent someone that book, so I can't quote directly from it, which is tragic). James describes our system of worldview as being the accumulation of rules-of-thumb that we've tested against reality, and we don't change our worldview until something we test it against makes it fail, and then we make the shortest change possible to keep our worldview. That's why when something minor unexpected happens you don't tear your entire worldview down, and you don't often just suddenly change your worldview unprompted.
That's how our audience views our play: they have their worldview, and they test what we put on the stage against it, and if what we're representing matches the world as they understand it, it feels True to them. That's "Realism."
Should we challenge their worldview? Yes. But that doesn't mean negating it (as much of the combatitive, negativistic art of the 1970s and 1980s did), it means finding a way to make their worldview incompatable with itself. If you can make your audience aware of a sudden, deep contradiction, they'll do the questioning of their own worldview. That's what "subversive" really means; it means that the audience follows the logic every step of the way, until they suddenly find that things don't add up. Stephen Colbert does this very well (I could talk for hours about how Colbert is the third big Pragmatist after Brecht and James).
Now, the one thing that Brecht gave to this "realism," and which he is rightfully remembered for, is the idea that acknowledging the play as a construct can be part of realism. We didn't think it was realism, of course, so we put it in its own category, but that doesn't make it untrue. He tried to lay guidelines for how you can incorporate the play into realism, and not have to pretend (which is the true opposite of realism; pretending and lying).
I was going to get to my own view on the Play as a Construct, but I think that's going to be my next post. Too many words makes the baby go blind.
Brecht was a person who loved to contradict himself. He gets the impression of being a radical, especially because the first of the two essays is quite a radical tract. Actually, he turns out to be quite the moderate, pragmatic thinker. He's not interested in things that don't work. That's why when you read Mother Courage and All Her Children, he's not actually driving out all the emotion--he understands that Mother Courage has to be a pathetic character on some level to be compelling. He pushes the form as far as will work (and, admittedly, sometimes too far).
Late in his life, he began outlining a shift in thinking, creating a theory called the Dialectical Theater that would encapsulate both his Epic Theater and the Aristotilian theater he sought to get away from. That dialectical theater is what I really fell in love with, despite the fact that he never got to really articulate it. But I think it was always present in the contradictions within his work.
At any rate, the one thing that gets said most about Brecht is that he's an anti-realist. Brecht himself noticed that, and he wrote one of my favorite essays by him called "The Popular And The Realistic." In it, he puts forward that his theater isn't anti-realistic. Now, he admits freely that it isn't naturalistic, but in terms of realism, he says:
We must not abstract the one and only realism from certain given works, but shall make a lively use of all means, old and new, tried and untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put living reality in the hands of living people in such a way that it can be mastered.Later on, he says more succinctly:
Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent and convention. Realist means laying bare society's causal network...He goes on, listing other benchmarks for the term "realist" all of which come from his own socialist interpretation, and which isn't so applicable to day. But you could reword that last sentence to be "Realist means revealing something about the world today."
That's the Pragmatist, moderate Brecht (I have already dubbed my theater aesthetic the Pragmatic Theater, after the pragmatist philosopher William James). What he's saying is that "realism" isn't a certain style of theater (and he's talking about living-room, fly-on-a-wall Ibsen naturalism), it's the accuracy of the play to reality, and in that pursuit we are allowed to use any aesthetic tools necessary.
The reason I use the capital P Pragmatist to describe this Brecht is because this dovetails beautifully into James' model of how we learn knowledge (I've lent someone that book, so I can't quote directly from it, which is tragic). James describes our system of worldview as being the accumulation of rules-of-thumb that we've tested against reality, and we don't change our worldview until something we test it against makes it fail, and then we make the shortest change possible to keep our worldview. That's why when something minor unexpected happens you don't tear your entire worldview down, and you don't often just suddenly change your worldview unprompted.
That's how our audience views our play: they have their worldview, and they test what we put on the stage against it, and if what we're representing matches the world as they understand it, it feels True to them. That's "Realism."
Should we challenge their worldview? Yes. But that doesn't mean negating it (as much of the combatitive, negativistic art of the 1970s and 1980s did), it means finding a way to make their worldview incompatable with itself. If you can make your audience aware of a sudden, deep contradiction, they'll do the questioning of their own worldview. That's what "subversive" really means; it means that the audience follows the logic every step of the way, until they suddenly find that things don't add up. Stephen Colbert does this very well (I could talk for hours about how Colbert is the third big Pragmatist after Brecht and James).
Now, the one thing that Brecht gave to this "realism," and which he is rightfully remembered for, is the idea that acknowledging the play as a construct can be part of realism. We didn't think it was realism, of course, so we put it in its own category, but that doesn't make it untrue. He tried to lay guidelines for how you can incorporate the play into realism, and not have to pretend (which is the true opposite of realism; pretending and lying).
I was going to get to my own view on the Play as a Construct, but I think that's going to be my next post. Too many words makes the baby go blind.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Words, Words, Words, Words, Words
Language is very important to me. I'm a deep believer in the idea that language itself is the way that our brain is tied together; its the rules and the logic which gives it form. Nietzche once said "I fear we still believe in God because we still believe in Grammar." It seems to me to be strangely apt, despite the fact that I can't unravel the relationship. If I were any sort of a religion, it would be the blind-watchmaker vision of God (perhaps--it's hard to talk about a hypothetical version of me). The formulae and the logic that exists is existence, is the reason and the end, and therefore, would havve to be God.
There's a Czech saying:"Kolik řečí znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem" which translates into "You are as many times a human as languages you know." I agree. Today, I was walking to my apartment through Prague, and I heard a German, an Englishman, and an American outside of a bar, talking in English. And I heard a Frenchman and a Czech person also debating in English. How much more they must learn about each other and the world, being able to communicate like that?
I've had a very positive experience with language in Prague. People have told me that they find Czechs rude. I've heard the same about the French. I found neither to be the case, either here or in Provence. The reason is because I always try very gamely and very positively to speak their language. My French is passable if fairly vocabulary-dry, but my Czech is only marginally better than a phrase book.
Don't ask them, "Do you speak English?" Ask them, "Parlez-vous francais" or "hablas ingles?" or "mluvim anglicky." It puts it on their turf, and it allows them choice. Several times now, I've had conversations with Czech people who don't know English. I barely know Czech. But using the few words I know, and the few words they know, and tracking intonation and gestures, I've managed to get by. And just the effort of communication has been greeted with smiles and indulgence for me.
Perhaps this is not everyone's experience. I tend to smile a lot and say "prosim" and "dekuju" a lot, just to make sure I'm in people's good graces.
Also: translation is an exceptionally fun way of learning meaning. I'm right now translating Artaud's journals when he was in a mental asylum in 1948. It's very, very simple French (which is good because I'm fairly lame at it), but it's fascinating. The tiniest of adjustments creates a totally different sense of what's going on. George Carlin once said that thoughts are airy and undefined, and then it gets attached to a word, and then you're stuck with that word for that thought. Translation defies that. You really have to know the person's mind to know what they were saying, and you have to know what they were saying to know their mind. It's rather like sculpting away at rock until you see the statue that was hidden beneath.
This is why I have a great respect for Eric Bentley, who most theater people in America do not pay proper homage to. Bertold Brecht is considered one of the top ten theater aestheticians of all time. He is often put in opposition to Aristotle in the very most basic theater classes, as a way of framing all of theater. Alienation, and empathy. But Brecht wouldn't have that privileged place in society if it wasn't for the tireless translation and promotion of Eric Bentley. Brecht would still be a small event in German history (and a freak Broadway success) if Bentley hadn't really placed Brecht on the map.
Words. They're the most important thing we have. I get very distressed when we damage words' meanings. The Bush administration has signalled the most vicious attack on the concept of language since Ernest Hemingway made the American dialect so word-impovershed. I can't list it all now, but concepts like "torture" or "time table" or "victory" have been so damaged, so needlessly... it signals terrible times for us. When your language unlinks from reality, you have lost your way: Vaclav Havel has written impressive things on that score.
This thought is short, because I'm still pretty chill from the Jazz Club I went to (music being the language we all speak and most of us can't read), and I have a less defined point than usual.
There's a Czech saying:"Kolik řečí znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem" which translates into "You are as many times a human as languages you know." I agree. Today, I was walking to my apartment through Prague, and I heard a German, an Englishman, and an American outside of a bar, talking in English. And I heard a Frenchman and a Czech person also debating in English. How much more they must learn about each other and the world, being able to communicate like that?
I've had a very positive experience with language in Prague. People have told me that they find Czechs rude. I've heard the same about the French. I found neither to be the case, either here or in Provence. The reason is because I always try very gamely and very positively to speak their language. My French is passable if fairly vocabulary-dry, but my Czech is only marginally better than a phrase book.
Don't ask them, "Do you speak English?" Ask them, "Parlez-vous francais" or "hablas ingles?" or "mluvim anglicky." It puts it on their turf, and it allows them choice. Several times now, I've had conversations with Czech people who don't know English. I barely know Czech. But using the few words I know, and the few words they know, and tracking intonation and gestures, I've managed to get by. And just the effort of communication has been greeted with smiles and indulgence for me.
Perhaps this is not everyone's experience. I tend to smile a lot and say "prosim" and "dekuju" a lot, just to make sure I'm in people's good graces.
Also: translation is an exceptionally fun way of learning meaning. I'm right now translating Artaud's journals when he was in a mental asylum in 1948. It's very, very simple French (which is good because I'm fairly lame at it), but it's fascinating. The tiniest of adjustments creates a totally different sense of what's going on. George Carlin once said that thoughts are airy and undefined, and then it gets attached to a word, and then you're stuck with that word for that thought. Translation defies that. You really have to know the person's mind to know what they were saying, and you have to know what they were saying to know their mind. It's rather like sculpting away at rock until you see the statue that was hidden beneath.
This is why I have a great respect for Eric Bentley, who most theater people in America do not pay proper homage to. Bertold Brecht is considered one of the top ten theater aestheticians of all time. He is often put in opposition to Aristotle in the very most basic theater classes, as a way of framing all of theater. Alienation, and empathy. But Brecht wouldn't have that privileged place in society if it wasn't for the tireless translation and promotion of Eric Bentley. Brecht would still be a small event in German history (and a freak Broadway success) if Bentley hadn't really placed Brecht on the map.
Words. They're the most important thing we have. I get very distressed when we damage words' meanings. The Bush administration has signalled the most vicious attack on the concept of language since Ernest Hemingway made the American dialect so word-impovershed. I can't list it all now, but concepts like "torture" or "time table" or "victory" have been so damaged, so needlessly... it signals terrible times for us. When your language unlinks from reality, you have lost your way: Vaclav Havel has written impressive things on that score.
This thought is short, because I'm still pretty chill from the Jazz Club I went to (music being the language we all speak and most of us can't read), and I have a less defined point than usual.
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