Peter Brook's comment on Seneca
Seneca's play has no external action whatsoever ... It takes place nowhere, the people are not people, and the vivid action, as it moves through the verbal images, leaps forward and back with the technique of cinema and with a freedom beyond film. So this is theatre liberated from scenery, liberated from costume, liberated from stage moves, gestures and business.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
On the Sublime
Sublimity is a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse. It is not an essential property of language but rather makes itself known by the effect it produces, and that effect is one of ravishment.
Whatever knocks the reader out is sublime.
Sublime language disrupts everyday consciousness.
It is great writing that takes the readers out of himself. It tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator's whole power at a single blow.
The sublime produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer. This combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. Persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer.
"Hypsous" is the state of transport and exaltation. The moment of hypsous becomes a struggle for dominance between opposing forces. The sublime not only produces an identification between speaker and audience but entails a modification in relations of power between the parties involved, and the diversity of ways in which such modifications may be conceptualized is at the heart of critical debates regarding the sublime.
Discourse in the Peri Hypsous (on Great Writing) is a power struggle.
The Longinian sublime appears in a climate of antagonism, as rivalry between authors.
For Longinus, who believes that "sublimity will be achieved if we consistently select the most important of those inherent features and learn to organize them as a unity by combining one with another, the ability "to select and organize material" is one of the factors that "can make our writing sublime".
Whatever knocks the reader out is sublime.
Sublime language disrupts everyday consciousness.
It is great writing that takes the readers out of himself. It tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator's whole power at a single blow.
The sublime produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer. This combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. Persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer.
"Hypsous" is the state of transport and exaltation. The moment of hypsous becomes a struggle for dominance between opposing forces. The sublime not only produces an identification between speaker and audience but entails a modification in relations of power between the parties involved, and the diversity of ways in which such modifications may be conceptualized is at the heart of critical debates regarding the sublime.
Discourse in the Peri Hypsous (on Great Writing) is a power struggle.
The Longinian sublime appears in a climate of antagonism, as rivalry between authors.
For Longinus, who believes that "sublimity will be achieved if we consistently select the most important of those inherent features and learn to organize them as a unity by combining one with another, the ability "to select and organize material" is one of the factors that "can make our writing sublime".
Monday, February 11, 2013
Cloud Nine
"The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama" by W.B. Worthen
Onstage, the most exciting and interesting device in Cloud Nine is its use of cross-dressing and role-doubling. In the first act, for instance, Betty must be played by a man, Joshua by a white man, and Edward by a woman. By "alienating" actors from the characters they play, Churchill clearly intends to raise the questions of gender, sexual orientation, and race as ideological issues, for in each of these cases the difference between the performer and the role marks what Clive wants to see as real. Betty is played by a man because Clive - and his patriarchal society - cannot envision women's identity; women are constructed on the model of male attitudes. Joshua is played by a white man because imperial and racist culture reduces African identity to the construction of white, European attitudes. Edward is played by a woman to express the impossibility of Edward's conforming to Clive's heterosexual standards.
In all three cases, the "identity" of the character is compromised or even erased, to be filled in and embodied by the attitudes that Clive and his society want them to hold. This performative dimension of the play's politics is echoed by the play's doubling of parts - each of the actors in act 1 takes a part in act 2, inviting the audience to draw comparisons between the two characters. Although other doubling patterns are possible, Churchill has suggested doubling Harry Bagley, the explorer, with Martin, the superficially liberated man; Clive, the father, with Cathy, the child ; Betty with Edward; and so on. Doubling and cross-dressing are familiar conventions in the theatre, but in Cloud Nine they have a specific dramatic purpose in developing the themes of the play. By denaturalizing the categories of gender, race and sexuality, Cloud Nine undertakes a typically postmodern inquiry into the construction of social reality, asking what meanings are created by these categories, and how they work to structure the relationship between self and society.
Onstage, the most exciting and interesting device in Cloud Nine is its use of cross-dressing and role-doubling. In the first act, for instance, Betty must be played by a man, Joshua by a white man, and Edward by a woman. By "alienating" actors from the characters they play, Churchill clearly intends to raise the questions of gender, sexual orientation, and race as ideological issues, for in each of these cases the difference between the performer and the role marks what Clive wants to see as real. Betty is played by a man because Clive - and his patriarchal society - cannot envision women's identity; women are constructed on the model of male attitudes. Joshua is played by a white man because imperial and racist culture reduces African identity to the construction of white, European attitudes. Edward is played by a woman to express the impossibility of Edward's conforming to Clive's heterosexual standards.
In all three cases, the "identity" of the character is compromised or even erased, to be filled in and embodied by the attitudes that Clive and his society want them to hold. This performative dimension of the play's politics is echoed by the play's doubling of parts - each of the actors in act 1 takes a part in act 2, inviting the audience to draw comparisons between the two characters. Although other doubling patterns are possible, Churchill has suggested doubling Harry Bagley, the explorer, with Martin, the superficially liberated man; Clive, the father, with Cathy, the child ; Betty with Edward; and so on. Doubling and cross-dressing are familiar conventions in the theatre, but in Cloud Nine they have a specific dramatic purpose in developing the themes of the play. By denaturalizing the categories of gender, race and sexuality, Cloud Nine undertakes a typically postmodern inquiry into the construction of social reality, asking what meanings are created by these categories, and how they work to structure the relationship between self and society.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)