Day Four:
We are already in week six. I keep being astonished by this information, for some reason. The semester has seemed both endless and extraordinarily short. Students have mostly stopped coming to class early: it is
I have things to do again with you today before you go and work. I also have important things to say to you – now becoming more important. We also need to be checking in and seeing where we are. Today we have guests. This may be prompting you to be thinking about how far into the process we are – costume designers designing costumes for a place you don’t yet have. Emma, Dorothy, and Julia and Colleen are here to introduce themselves. 2nd year graduate students here to observe and this process is different and organic and ever-changing. They will come in from time to time to observe the work and have an idea about what direction it’s taking – different from mainstage, etc. You are all developing your own version so it’s much different – it’s a nice organic thing for the students here to work with this type of theatrical experience.
EMMA: designed Godot and assisting on Hamlet; don’t know much about class or what is required, but I guess that’s why we’re here.
DOT: designed TVH, don’t know what’s going on.
JULIA: designing RENT, and I echo what they say, waiting to learn what’s going to happen.
KS: You should email me your names and info, you can be added to Blackboard, we are accumulating material as we go – articles, blurbs, blog – a place where our thoughts are happening. It’s a working situation. We also don’t know what’s going on – part of the process, we are subjecting ourselves to this, attacking and replying to the texts in each performance. Through our experience, we are integrating the world. We assume there is no theatre – we have to build it from scratch in order for it to be truthful and have meaning. Be part of a company of people who are creating the set of performances. Didn’t see last year – you will see it this year.
E-mail exchange about responses. This is not a play analysis class – what you write is a place in which writing itself becomes the site of your initial discovery – becomes your way in, a window into the work itself. Don’t write as a director – you have those people who will be looking in that way. What you are trying to do is find a way that in your writing, you are personal and thinking about how the writing is serving you. Discover a genre of writing that is helpful for you. Journal didn’t produce what I wanted – your writing, even minimal, is short and creative and something that is going to help you open up your acting process. Emails from me were trying to engage with you on some level. Quotes: sometimes it is one sentence, I found them to be a place where your work can potentially start, and we will do it in a performative way. This is going to be a very staccato and weird compilation.
Frankenstein:
One minute the waves can be crashing on me, hurting me, to the point where all I want to do is escape, but the next minute they recede, and I find peace and happiness. He mentions that he as a disabled man has the ability and flexibility now to teeter on both edges. Which is so true of myself and for so many people including Victor and also his creation. Notice, I will not call him creature or monster anymore because that is not what he is. He is a postmodern text, he is a body, he is pieces of life stitched together but he is NOT a monster. I read that postmodernism is the attempt at describing a state of being and a condition. The body as a postmodern text? A description of my condition, of the creations condition, of a disabled persons’ condition and state of being. (…) I will take my experiences of “disability” and the word disability and put them into this story and the telling of this story.
I have hormones I gather fat
I HAVE FAT
I have a tummy and breasts and thick muscular thighs that burst with energy out of the two-dimensional plane I see in the mirror they
BURST
I see something thick and strong and supple
The body that SHOULD be
I see something that contains so much passion I see a body that holds desire
I HAVE DESIRE
damn it I feel
I feel everything in this body in the mirror under this Victor’s mask
This is the vessel of my experience and I won’t exchange or change it
I WANT TO FEEL
I WON’T EXCHANGE MYSELF
I want to be free I want to be my body naked and full with everything soft and rounded and forceful and unbound
My body is nature’s monster which is super-hu-MAN
POWERFUL
Victor, can the ligaments in your hips be activated by hormones to loosen and cause your pelvis to expand to allow a human baby to pass through? Does your body do that? Does your body enact that miracle?
MINE DOES.
And my body
This lovely full monster
wants to be free to roam and find other bodies like it
it wants to run
and be nourished
and make love
like the “monster” it is
I long for the freedom of an ee cummings poem
“Muscles better and nerves more”
I want to free other bodies too
Theirs and mine
Look in the mirror and tell Victor
FUCK OFF
I focus on the swells of my tummy and hips
“I like your body. I like its hows. I like to feel the spine of your body and its bones and the trembling firm-smooth-ness which I will again and again and again
kiss” – Quote from e.e. cummings poem “I like my body when it is with your”
This country that’s so focused on such idiotic pursuit of normalcy. This world that’s so focused on such idiotic pursuit of normalcy. It’s 2010 and the only difference now is that Frankenstein’s monster might have the chance to become a celebrity. Like Mossman said in an article written 9 years ago.
12. He’d still be a freak.
13. People would still reject him. The masses do not want their comfortable patriarchal and homophobic society disrupted. Creature comforts. A pun wrapped inside an oxymoron, as it were. Clever wordplay and literature. Mary Shelley. It all boils down to masking the evil and insanity within everyone.
14. Maybe it’s because I’m only 19. Maybe it’s because my difference, my ‘disability,’ is a cerebral one that isn’t immediately noticeable. Like the kids my mom taught. Maybe that’s why this article makes me feel so wretched to call myself a human being. Postmodernism be damned. The world is still an awful place and I feel like shit because I can’t change it.
We all have our own disabilities, weight, height, learning disability etc., but now we have to be inspired by a disability that can spur murder. How can I possibly attempt to “validate the experience of people with disabilities and counter stereotypical (mis)representation” in performance truthfully?
The truth is, I can say to a group of people 'the past is haunting me; the secrets fill up my chest like lead balloons and I wonder if my ribs will splinter from the pressure,' and every person will think they know how I feel. Everyone has these secrets. We are all crippled inside of us.
I used to cloister myself away from people, much like Frankenstein's creation. For years, while I had healthy friendships with beautiful, wonderful people, I would still spend the majority of my time by myself, safely tucked away from the possibility of hurt in the outside world.
Some days I want to scream "Why can't I be what I am? Why do I have to justify who I am? Why do I have to FIGHT to be what I am?!" EVERYONE is a capable of being a monster if you give them no other option.
The Bacchae:
I feel more confused now that ever. I have so many questions, and yet no real answer. How can I use all of this during rehearsal and on stage? (…) None-the-less our work can be like a religious ritual experience.
humanity has a titanic nature in them, that their souls are trapped in their body. Often I have felt restless in my own skin, a strong desire to turn wild and wreck things, to dance recklessly. This is the Dionysian substance within us all. And it’s not hard to see the suppressed and straight-laced populace of Thebes as alien. We are willing to join the Bacchae up in the mountain.
This is a terrible act. The ripping to shreds of a human being by his own mother, but it was this act of profanation that was needed for the rightful god to take his place. Cadmos made Thebes reborn from the Earth and now with the death of Pentheus, Thebes is thrice born.
I go crazy, I run out of my house and go somewhere new, I turn into a bacchant, something in me gets torn apart, I feast on the remains, something in me is exiled or reconciled, and I return to myself with this new knowledge of myself. That is The Bacchae and it happens in everyone, especially me, and I love that, but I hate I have to “become” something to learn that. I am who I am!!!!
I think Dionysus is a sick fuck. He murders Pentheus indirectly with a smile on his face and basically tells all of the Thebans that he told them so. I love him, but he is more disturbing to me now than he was before.
Pentheus is a stranger to his mother. She sees him as a lion and nothing he can do will convince her otherwise. I’ve gone home before and my parents have expected me to be the same girl I was when I left them 3 ½ years ago…I’m not.
Dionysus Pentheus
I am god I am man
I am myth I am King
I am lion, bull, snake I am power, leader, head
I am son I am grandson
I am forgotten I am worshipped
I am returning I am confronted
I am man-woman I am intrigued
I am masked I am transformed
I am Stranger I am led
I am disturber I am hunted
I am guide I am prey
I am leader I am Stranger
I am controller, manipulator, freed I am captured, torn, scattered
I am fox I am lion
I am reborn I am rebuilt
I am alive I am son
I am indestructible I am sacrificed
I am eternal I am corpse
Kott talks about the parallels between Pentheus and Dionysus. He goes on for pages about the multiple parallels in the play. This is great, but what do I do with this?! What does this mean if they are paralleled?
Titus Andronicus:
I do not know what draws me to actively be a witness to violence. Something draws me in. I have to watch. (…) I see that I could easily be killed by anyone. Death is never far away.
I think Titus needs to live somewhere in-between.
Truthfully, more often than not, I’m the one who incites an attack before I’ve time to process the consequences of my actions.
When we see one or two killings in a play or a film, it’s a tragic moment. Macbeth.
Romeo & Juliet. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Amadeus. We get it. They’re tragic. But why? Why do we not feel this same sort of tear-jerking reaction when we see Kill Bill or Titus Andronicus? Because. They. Are. Supposed. To. Be. Funny. ....Period.
Pain is so completely intimate to each of us, and yet is a completely universal feeling that we all share.
Maybe you adapt. Maybe life gets easier. Hell you might even be able to do the tasks you could before just in a different way. But longing for what you had before is a heavy burden. For a piece of you died the day you were disfigured.
Titus is fucking hurting and instead of sitting down and writing a poem about it he’s taking action, that’s the only way he knows how to cope. An eye for an eye.
[These children are so brilliantly talented. Their writing moves and inspires me. How unbelievably open and honest they are.] See how personal it becomes, concrete, personal, example of where I come from, there is an engagement that is possible to keep coming.
You see where I’m getting – no comments, you hear what I’m interested in. These quotations respond inside of you as a performer. “It’s not how you read these texts, it’s about how this text reads you. That’s how you respond.” These three projects are in a way similarly violent and disturbing. In a way, somehow, we picked these very cruel pieces of theatre to work with: it’s significant on so many levels. One level which is the most significant is that you are already working with what Artaud was trying to conceive as a new way of theatre: theatre of cruelty. Cruelty and theatre go together; Artaud picks it up and says we should not forget it. The way cruelty and violence speak to us in theatre. Quotes from Artaud. Out of Artaud, I pulled out the essential – shows the work on the same way. Listen, this is also on Blackboard, the fragment you are receiving right now is going to be the basis of your response for next time. This time it is not an email essay form, it’s going to be a poem – must start from the word “I.” You will respond again as a double take – hear it here, read the quotes, respond to your work in your play, as a performer in your play searching for the site of your work in yourself. Showing places where it works for you. Mostly from Theatre and Its Double.
Quotes from Artaud:
We have lost a certain idea of theatre. (…) [T]he elite have turned away from it, (…) [and] the masses go to the cinema, music-hall and circus to find violent gratification whose intention does not disappoint them.
Our sensibility has reached the point where we surely need Theatre that wakes up heart and nerves.
The damage wrought by psychological theatre has rendered us unaccustomed to the direct, violent action theatre must have.
(…)
Everything that acts is cruelty. Theatre must rebuild itself on a concept of this drastic action pushed to the limit.
Infused with the idea that the masses think with their senses first and foremost and that it is ridiculous to appeal primarily to our understanding as we do in everyday psychological theatre, the Theatre of Cruelty proposes to resort to mass theatre, thereby rediscovering a little of the poetry in the ferment of great, agitated crowds hurled against one another, sensations only too rare nowadays, when masses of holiday crowds throng the streets.
If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness.
(…)
One cannot separate body and mind, nor the senses from the intellect, particularly in the field where the unendingly repeated jading of our organs calls for sudden shocks to revive our understanding.
(…)
Like the plague, theatre is a crisis resolved either by death or cure. (…)As beneficial as the plague, [theatre] impel[s] us to see ourselves as we are, making the masks fall and divulging our world’s lies, aimlessness, meanness, and even to-facedness.
(…)
Theatre is first ritualistic and magical.
(…)
I will devote myself from now on
exclusively to the theatre of blood
a theatre which at each performance will stir
something
in the body
of the performer as well as the spectator of the play.
Theatre of senses – theatre of shocked senses, magic, ritual, perception as a whole being, not just through your brain, but through your entire body and your whole being as a human being. We are here at an institution of higher learning training our brains, but we remember other parts of our bodies – we are restoring the body to the world and acknowledging it as a particular way of doing, knowing through sensing and being and living. I try to take you away from taking the play apart – trying to take you into the world in which the blood is in your veins. You hear the song within you that vibrates you in some way – you have an impulse to dance or move or scream, and that is where theatre of cruelty is coming in to tell us that we need to restart.
What he’s saying is that in order for people to have a visceral reaction to a play it is through violence? Not really – it is that theatre is a violent awakening. Organs are cheaters – they cheat you from having an experience directly. They separate you from experience yourself. Take in love not with your heart, but with your “I.” I don’t make love with my organ, I make love with my whole self. That is already cruel right there. It is a metaphor for an awakening into a full being. In theatre, yes, restoring and replaying death is one thing that theatre has done. You look at the death from the point of view of the one who is not dying. We have one shot. In that way, it’s violent. But it can be violent in just the request, invitation, into a work that’s full, dare to work as a full human being – it takes you out of hiding and asks you to expose yourself in some way. What happens when the plague comes in, everyone is hit equally – nature has no mercy, that’s democracy – in a way, it’s reordering the world in a very cruel way and restores the idea of death in a real way, and theatre could do the same. Attacking your body – theatre being an impulse, your mind can’t tell your body what to do or feel, theatre as plague controls your spectator and your actor. It’s really important to say that. Disturbed and brilliant – Artaud. Some people just have to be disturbed in order to say what you would never say. I invite you to read more Artaud.
One more thing before we split – Joel is going to give us a next take on his fable, so we don’t have too much time – just Joel this week.
JOEL: I must fight on. I must protect. Titus. Titus. Titus. I do not protest. Blinding pain. I am gone. Titus butchers. Lavinia hewed. Lavinia is addicted to life. Lavinia continues to die. She finds comfort in my darkness. [How brutal and wonderful and…]
Focused on Lavinia and Tamora’s son. I like how it focused on two characters that a lot of times get drowned out by everything else, especially how aggressive Tamora is, it sort of puts out that first sacrifice, and then Lavinia is sort of like a prop more or less, and this focuses and put it on a new perspective, seeing their lives in a different way that the play doesn’t offer. I really like “Lavinia is addicted to life” coming from someone already dead, and then she dies and he comforts her with his darkness. I responded to that – when we are alive, we are addicted to living, never thought about that – perspective of dead person. Even though she’s hewed, she finds comfort in the shared experience of sacrifice. That was really neat. I really liked the line “I will not be spared” because goes back to earlier, natural course, doesn’t matter who you are, if shit goes down, doesn’t matter who you are, if you have to die for something, you are going to - doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re supposed to do. I loved the detachment of the acceptance of the role. I also really loved that with the detachment, death is the release from the unwarranted brutality and violence of life. Rape and sex can be the same physically, but the difference is emotionally, thought about giving birth – what a violent action that is, from violence we are born. Sex is violence accepted, it is the fine line, same act mimicked, but it could be worse than some rapes physically, but sex is violence is accepted- to have sex you have both accepted it. For me, I liked it more than the other fables, stream-of-consciousness, flashes of a life, that was really cool, bare bones, that’s what it meant to me. I also like the focus on the children of the adults who are choosing to be violent against each other, helpless in this action, suffering for their parents’ wrongdoing. The notion of Aaron’s son in the end then suffering. I liked “Titus. Titus. Titus.” I don’t know why I liked it, but I did. You feel through it your own emotion through the play. Like you were in a coliseum, painted such a picture – so cool to hear a ton of people chant a name. It’s from the inside of an experience, not from the outside. Not logic on the act, but showing the act, very interesting. Keep working as we go.
General warning: think of anything you do as, not an exercise – it is not an exercise for its own sake; rather it is already aiming as a way to connect the work to itself. Something already building your world of performance tools. Even simple things like standing together and clapping around, which might be an exercise in coordination, could be used already by you, in you in the work itself. What does it tell you about rhythms and the way the room moves and how you can use it in your work? This week, I hope, brings you to embody something from you more. Put you away from your thinking and into your whole person’s active knowing and doing and finding out and being curious.
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