Archives for posts with tag: essay

The Comic Plague: Essay

May 30, 11 //  

There are three kinds of plague: bubonic, pneumonic and comic. The latter, obscure but no less lethal than the other two, descends each year with the mephitic vapours of autumn, just in time to infect crowds at the Comedy Festival, ensuring maximum carnage. For years we’ve been warned the world is one gene-switch away from a global pandemic, and this year’s strain – Yersinia comedifestivalensis – seems to have mutated into some kind of Vancomycin-resistant superbug.

If you think this is going to be a whimsical whinge from a sick critic, wherein I describe chain-sucking Anticols through interminable stand-up and theatre of dubious merit, you’re right. It so is. But it’s also a chance to reflect on the ironies of bodily betrayal in the theatre – an artform that’s, after all, written in the language of the body; that demands physical presence, often in closer proximity to complete strangers than any sane person would otherwise dare.

My own lurgy worsened from mild head cold to galloping bronchitis at the opening night of Opera Australia’s La Boheme. Mimi eat your heart out. Physical discomfort didn’t detract from the pleasures of the best Boheme since Baz Luhrmann invoked the ghost of Jimmy Dean in the early 90s.

A scene from the latest Opera Australia production of La Boheme.

Relocating the action to the Weimar republic, Gale Edwards’ ravishing spectacle reached decadent heights in the Papignol scene: a riotous spiegeltent, where bare-breasted prostitutes and cabaret stars brush shoulders with clamorous urchins and the odd Nazi. But it was Christian Badea’s tornadic conducting, and the voices and chemistry of the romantic leads – Ji-Min Park and Takasha Meshé Kizart – that drew out the full dramatic power of Puccini’s music.

I briefly envied Mimi her ability to wheeze out an aria with a terminal lung haemorrhage, before being whisked back into the annual danse macabre of Comedy Festival reviewing.

Comedians and critics have an awkward relationship. Hardly a year goes by without controversy. This year it was some sexist reviewer at the Herald-Sun opining that women can’t be funny.

There’s no better proof to the contrary than Geraldine Quinn, winner of the Golden Gibbo for her rock-cabaret You’re The Voice. Predictably enough, it was a voice poor Quinn had lost by festival’s end. She had to cancel her last show, and was apparently reduced to communicating by iPhone at the awards ceremony.

Stewing in your own mucus tends to make you hyper-conscious of bodies in the theatre. Audience participation is a nightmare at the best of times, without, say, trying to avoid snotting on toddlers at an interactive kids’ show.

Bodily misadventure can strike anytime, though, and it’s especially funny when it happens to critics. Take my colleague John Bailey, who recently copped a piece of flying cutlery in the ’nads at a Dance Massive event titled – ahem – The Weight Of The Thing Left Its Mark.

It reminds me of the time I got sconed in the face with a mandarin at a performance of Black Lung’s Rubeville. The punk theatre outfit always claimed it was an accident. That would have been easier to believe if I hadn’t been the only person in the audience. Apparently the thrower, Thomas M. Wright, was aiming for another actor. Not, I might add, without cause.

Still, the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. Wright is currently starring as a bad-boy rock-poet in Simon Stone’s Baal. Theatre that makes you reflect on the vulnerability of the human body, it contains extensive nudity. Plus half the show is performed in driving stage rain. Wright informed me on opening night, with a look of glazed wonder, that the water’s unheated, and will stay that way for over 60 performances. Pneumonia seems inevitable.

Nor does the audience remain unmoved. In one story doing foyer rounds, a patron at Baal had her wig blown off by a particularly gusty scene change. Perhaps they should add “coup de theatre” to the show’s already substantial list of warnings.

And in the theatre next door, the set of Vanessa Bates’ astringent comedy Porn.Cake presented a different physical challenge. The woman sitting next to me seemed taken with the spectacle of 54 cakes onstage. Her peals of intestinal thunder were so loud they drowned out some of the early dialogue. It’s a tasty new play – just make sure you eat before you go.

Theatre is never separate from the great stage of life, of course, and offstage dramas are integral to the theatrical experience. It’s fitting that perhaps the greatest comic incongruity in theatre history belongs to one of its greatest practitioners. Moliere, recently performed with élan by Melbourne French Theatre, died on the job. The comedian succumbed to tuberculosis shortly after starring in his last play. You guessed it. It was called The Hypochondriac.

[An edited version of this article was published in The Age.]

Conundrums of Charisma: Essay

December 4, 10 //  

Theatre that pays homage to charismatic celebrities is wildly popular. Performers impersonate stars, resurrect them, or at least borrow their glamour, usually through cabaret or musical theatre. Why? And what is charisma, anyway?

Weirdly, the mundane sense of the word – personal charm – is barely half a century old. To the Greeks, charisma was a “gift” from the divine. It struck like lightning, mysterious and elusive. This view remains common, and might explain why charisma is so valued. It’s one of the few things you can’t buy.

And yet it can be practised. Charm school is real. Castiglione’s Renaissance handbook on etiquette advocated sprezzatura, or nonchalance. Cultivate effortlessness, he advised. Centuries later, Emerson elaborated in his essay on manners. To be “fit to stand the gaze of millions”, you must carry the holiday in your eye and “exhilarate the fancy by flinging wide the door of new modes of existence”.

Emerson was right. Charisma isn’t simply about being liked. It’s about new kinds of being. Most descriptions involve an oxymoron: “practiced effortlessness”, “acting natural”, “public intimacy”. I’d suggest that the key to charisma’s mystery lies precisely in its unusual ability to embody paradox – to give valency to, and hold in flux, various contradictions of human character: power and vulnerability, virtue and vice, the exemplary and the ordinary.

So the world’s greatest stars tend to suffer tragedies commensurate to their talent. And, if we’re honest, there’s resentment behind the worship, a desire to make them pay for their gifts in blood. If celebrity culture is a kind of secular religion, it’s one that demands sacrifice. In the surveillance age, we consume and scrutinize the famous with no less savagery than the Aztecs, who ripped out the still-beating hearts of their enemies to keep the sun aloft.

Our ambivalence to human gods is dramatised in shows like Boulevard Delirium and Songs for Nobodies. In the former, Paul Capsis channelled the transgressive souls of tortured stars – his Judy Garland was at once pathetic and sublime, with tottering, drug-affected antics yielding to a soaring voice.

Songs For Nobodies, currently playing at the MTC, is animated by Bernadette Robinson’s gifted impersonations, from Edith Piaf to Patsy Cline. But it’s Joanna Murray-Smith’s compellingly crafted stories of ordinary women that provide a subtle dramatic counterpoint, exploring the ironies of fame:

“We can praise those who escape,” says one, reflecting on Billie Holiday, “We can stand on the sidelines, write our feature articles and buy the records as if we honour them, but underneath it all, we don’t like those who refuse to be earthbound. They frighten us. Their freedom reminds us of our own little prisons. And in the end, people like that… they have nowhere to go but trouble, ‘cos trouble is the only place that welcomes them.”

Fortunately, theatre permits miraculous resurrection.

In Dean Bryant’s Britney Spears the Cabaret, Christie Whelan showed it could be done while the star is still alive. Spears has been synthesised, mediated and demonised beyond belief. The cabaret is ingenious remedial satire, using theatrical language – real body, real voice – to salvage dignity from the degradation.

Even nostalgic entertainment like Jersey Boys remains faithful to charisma’s ambiguity. Bobby Fox’s simulacrum of Frankie Valli’s voice – its bright machismo filtering into vulnerable falsetto – has the same extraordinary range.

And it’s no coincidence that our last great political cabaret – Keating: The Musical – saw Mike McLeish channel a man who embraced extremes of vitriolic arrogance and aesthetic sensitivity. Keating was also the last PM to go to a main-stage theatre show. If you want to know why our politicians lack charisma, look no further.

Irony is crucial to charisma. I don’t mean the modish, ubiquitous irony that indicates you’re sophisticated and jaded and just way too cool to actually mean anything you say. I mean irony as a scalpel, not a butterknife; the kind that splits the surfaces of things and probes the tissue underneath.

Great performers know this instinctively. They play chords of emotion upon their faces, can summon grief and determination in an eyebrow, or capture innocence and experience in one note. It isn’t easy. Embodying contradiction is something our minds rebel against. Try thinking “I’m a good person” and “I’m a bad person” at the same time.

Consider the original victim of the virgin/whore trap, Helen of Troy, perhaps the most charismatic woman of all time. Legend has it she struck blind the Greek poet Stesichoros for writing a scurrilous verse about her. Unlike Homer, he wrote a palinode, or counter-song:

No it is not the true story.

No you never went on the benched ships.

No you never came to the towers of Troy.

His sight was magically restored; the price was only this – an acknowledgement that stars are nobodies, too.

That’s all you need to know about charisma, right there. It demands that we straddle contradiction. It shows us things about life that aren’t obvious. It inspires song and counter-song.

(This essay appeared in The Age 4/12/10.)

On Technology and Theatre

November 13, 10 //  

In an age where technology speaks in tongues through a culture of unceasing and increasingly rapid change, its dialogue with theatre has never been so complex. Our relationship to technology is perverse. It’s a source of agency and disempowerment. Too often, we ignore the latter.

There is such a premium on innovation in theatre, and across culture generally, that it risks becoming a value in itself. We need to acknowledge the darkness in this devotion to novelty – to know that whatever we worship will betray us. If we worship the radical above all things, we will become conservative, rigid, closed to other ways of seeing. If we worship change, we court repetition, obsession and addiction. And if we worship novelty, we’ll lose sight of the traditions that make it new.

How we should deploy technology in theatre has always aroused argument. Aristotle and Horace spoke against plots being resolved through a deus ex machina. They knew that, used this way, tech could reduce the human dimension of narrative. It’s something Robert LePage forgot in Blue Dragon – all the digital animation, mechanical magic, and optical illusion were, at best, distractions from a mediocre story.

The LePage bears comparison to 1927’s The Animals and Children Took To The Streets – a fairytale enriched by ingenious animation, also informed by the graphic novel. It is infinitely superior to the LePage, not least because it’s an entertaining story with moral resonance. But animated screens create one problem for the production it shares with Blue Dragon. If the stage is itself a metaphor, why use only two metres of its depth? This spatial shallowness hobbles one of the crucial freedoms theatre has over cinema.

A deep understanding of theatre’s traditional strengths must underpin its use of technology: the liveness of performance, its irreproducibility, its three-dimensional space, the communion between performers and audience, theatre’s necessary imperfections. One of the things we forget about theatre is that it is always new. Every night is different. Our craving for novelty can be satisfied simply by the oldest technology in the book – acting.

Performers compel us to reimagine ourselves, make us hallucinate truths we cannot know any other way. They can resurrect the dead, as Jane Griffiths did in Sappho, as Hannah Norris does in My Name Is Rachel Corrie. They can move us to pity and awe, as in Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, or make us laugh at the struggle to articulate the self, as Conor Lovett showed in The Beckett Trilogy.

What these performances have in common, though, is that they never condescend to the audience’s imagination. They make it work, meet it halfway. One of my favourite moments in theatre over the last few years was at Miriam Margolyes’ Dickens’ Women – through a trick of the light, but also a trick of the voice – she transformed from a portly, spry middle-aged actress into Miss Wade from Little Dorrit, a slender and sad woman in her thirties.

Audiences are not stupid. They will imagine what needs to be imagined, if performance and technology work in synergy. This has critical implications for contemporary issues in Australian theatre, like cross-racial and gender-blind casting, for instance. But it also needs to be calculated into technical decisions: where tech undermines or limits the actor’s power, audiences’ imaginations may suffer.

I’m no puritan on this issue. Who could deny, after seeing Heiner Goebbels’ Stifter’s Dinge, that technology alone can create a microclimate of the imagination, without any actors at all?

Nor is entertainment a crime. Any discussion of technology in theatre must take into account its magic lanterns. The high-tech marvels of Mary Poppins flying through air on her umbrella, or the hyper-real daydreams in Hairspray, light the eyes of parents and their kids, and provide an escape from reality, for a while.

But let us remember, too, that the pleasures technology affords us can be deadly. It’s through technology we know that rats will mindlessly stimulate the pleasure centres of their brains, ignoring food and water, until they die of exhaustion. Yet technology also shows how imagination and agency are more closely related than we think – the same parts of the brain light up when we imagine doing something, as when we actually do it.

The latest research into neuroplasticity indicates that for good or ill, technology changes our minds, literally, depending on how we use it. It has made us shallower watchers and readers. It has made us more impulsive, less critical, better at multitasking. It has bolstered our short-term memory at the expense of the longer view.

Theatre needs to know all this to avoid being complicit in it though ignorance, or worse – helping to create audiences who are lazy and complacent, stupid and unimaginative. It must recognise that – like the brain itself – technology is a useful servant and a terrible master.

The Difficult Pleasures of Festival Time: Canvas

October 25, 10 //  

The Melbourne International Arts Festival is over. It was a gruelling but rewarding journey. Here’s a short essay on art, pain and time perception I wrote, coming out of my Festival experience. Actually, Cameron Woodhouse wrote it – but as long as he doesn’t get paid instead of me, I’m not too fussed.

* * *

Art does not have your best interests at heart. Antonin Artaud, founder of the Theatre of Cruelty, considered audience suicide to be the ultimate compliment to his work. On a less deranged note, Edward Albee, who gave the MTC’s Sumner lecture last week, claims: “Any play that doesn’t hurt you in some way has something wrong with it.”

It’s a hostility that percolates down to the most overused clichés of arts criticism. We talk of great art as “compelling”, “mesmerising” and “breathtaking”, as if it might steal our will or the very air from our lungs. If ever there was a time for our critics to start demanding danger money, it’s during the aesthetic boot camp that is the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

Seeing seventeen shows in as many days, I half expected to come down with the most documented example of art-induced trauma – Stendhal syndrome, or hyperkulturemia. After exposure to art in high concentration, victims get dizzy or faint; suffer anxiety, rapid heartbeat, even hallucinations. It was named after the French writer who first described the experience on visiting Florence:

“As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of the nerves) … I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.”

I’m still standing, but the festival’s compression of so much art into such a short time has aesthetic implications.

First, it’s unlikely anyone could consume the quantity of highbrow art on offer at the Festival, night after night, spontaneously. The reason comes down to what economists call “hyperbolic discounting”. A good illustration is an experiment run by George Loewenstein, where subjects were asked to choose a movie to watch now and another at a future time. Most chose Legally Blonde 2 now and saved the complete works of Cassavetes for later.

This isn’t proof that we’re all trashmeisters deep down. Rather, it’s a salutary insight into how our aesthetic preferences are influenced by time perception. We want masterpieces, but as the appointed time approaches, we quail at the heavy demands such art makes.

Yet it’s in difficult pleasures that we can release ourselves from the contemporary experience of time, sped up to unbearable velocity through a technology-driven, 24/7 culture. Ingmar Bergman said that if life was going too fast, he’d go to the theatre. He knew how art can disrupt the anxiety-producing, mechanical lapse of time – hours, minutes, seconds, nanoseconds – and mould it into moments. It’s these impressions – memories unbound, for a while, from time’s embrace – that make the ordeal worthwhile.

Time yo-yoed through this year’s rich and diverse Festival program, with many irreducible ‘moments’ arriving through the beguiling duet between art and science. Short shows could pass slowly, like Hiroaki Umeda’s Adapting for Distortion, a sinuous, minimalist dance where the human body vanishes into electronic matrices of light and sound. Long ones, like Toeneelgroup Amsterdam’s production of Opening Night, whizzed by – the intricate intensity of the acting filmed and projected live.

The steampunk aesthetic animated some works, including the curiously uplifting Stifter’s Dinge. An automaton featuring five electronically programmed pianos, humans were almost entirely absent in the performance. After the machine ‘took a bow’, it left a heaving, bubbling sea of smoke in its wake, as if terraforming a new world.

Technology and art sometimes made uneasy bedfellows: LePage’s Blue Dragon lacked a human story worthy of such lavish attentions; Hotel Pro Forma’s Tomorrow, In A Year offered a static, kitsch sci-fi that couldn’t rise to meet The Knife’s music; the audio-visual installation epi-thet required the viewer to crouch over a microscope – it was a long fifteen minutes.

However plastic time might be in the confines of a theatre, it’s relentlessly rapid as your deadline nears.

Temporal pressure influences arts criticism, never more so than at festivals. For a critic, the desire to faint comes not from the art itself, but from the vain desire to do justice to it in words. Time constraint is where Robert Brustein’s “Himalayan criticism” comes from. We tend to emphasise how much we loved or hated a work of art, rather than why – the why always takes longer; and the love or hate pulls us toward extremity, the product of a hypersensitivity that attends a surfeit of aesthetic experience.

Milan Kundera linked slowness to intense memory, and speed to intense forgetting. If life races by, it’s because we must forget so much more than previous generations to stay sane, day to day. It’s a coping tactic critics use, too. Every time I go to the theatre, I like to forget, or pretend to forget, that I’ve ever seen a play in my life. It helps concentrate the mind, so I don’t pass out at the next piece of forever lying behind the curtain.

(A version of this essay appeared in The Age, 25/10/010.)

Another Essay On Criticism, Editor Unknown

September 30, 10 //  

?!

Silence, mostly …

Authority? Don’t get me started …

There is a constant tussle between all the possibilities of human thought and between all the possibilities of a human mind’s sensitivity and between all the possibilities of a human character. – Thomas Bernhard, Walking – trans. Kenneth Northcott.

… “He said he had a voice once, a privileged one is what he said. He seemed anxious. I guess he was trying to work out which came first, the privilege or the voi…”

“… watched the blogosphere develop, lurking.  She claimed what she read on there, arts-wise, had inspired in her a profound sense of nausea. She didn’t look like she was kidding around either. She got this wild look in her eye, then grimaced and stared at me with a hatred so singular I had to look at my shoes …”

All is infected that the infected spy,
As all seems  yellow to the jaundiced eye.

Alexander Pope – An Essay On Criticism.

… all writing is like vomiting, really. Your mind’s muscle clenches, the words come out in a hot, desperate splurge, and you either feel better or worse afterwards (usually worse); sometimes, if you don’t feel better, you clench again, you have to barf again, and again - dare I say ad nauseam - until you’ve ralphed everywhere, blowing ideas in half-digested chunks all over your own personal ivory tower.

My tower, safe to say, is in dire need of a clean-up … seismic shifts in squalor; caught between tectonic plates: – trash, steaming piles of publicity material and books – many, many books - with titles like (glancing around) Works of Rabelais, Oblivion and The Hidden Journey: Melanoma Up Close And Personal …

* * *

Woman on the Tightrope

In her centre I could suspend my world, if I were not corrupted by academic learning. I could have used, misused her for my theories, taken her all the way, even before she became a possibility. For which both she and I lack the intelligence …

Thomas Bernhard, Amras – trans. Peter Jansen.

*  * *

… the problem is – the only way to clean your tower up is by hurling in a slightly different pattern, with bile fluid and distressing gobbets of regurgitate all cloying together in a manner that suggests slightly different stuff … I don’t know about you, but watching someone heaving their guts out makes me want to puke too …

It’s always like this. Even the best, spangled-with-eloquence, most maddeningly well-considered writing is this way …

***

What, in your view, is a conversation?

I don’t usually have them. To me people who want to have a conversation are suspect, because that raises particular expectations they’re unable to satisfy. Simple people are very good to talk with. When talking is supposed to become conversation, that’s when things get gruesome! That fine expression “everything under the sun.” It all gets thrown in together and then one person stirs this way, the other stirs that, and an unbearable stinking turd comes out the bottom. No matter who it is …

- from an Interview with Thomas Bernhard, 1986.

***

… Dialectic you say? Well, two’s company, but I rather think you knew what you were looking for in advance …

“A just decision is always required immediately, “right away”. It cannot furnish itself with infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. And even if it did have all that at its disposal, even if it did give itself the time, all the time and all the necessary facts about the matter, the moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical knowledge, of this reflection or this deliberation … that must precede it.”

– Jacques Derrida, The Force of Law.

… language is chunderous. Criticism? Art? They both depend on (a) what kind of violence you’re willing to inflict … (xxy) what you had for breakfast … Deadline? Such a misleading word – what a deadline really is is a kind of wound, self-inflicted or forced upon us …

If you’re still reading this, you might have a distinct urge to spew. Or perhaps you’re just a bit squeamish about when the next ellipsis is going to arrive … So, what did you have for breakfast? … Hnnnnnnhhhhhhh. I’m speculating …

… even though you’re dead to me, I admire your fortitude. Especially those last two pars: self-indulgent, completely vile … gross generalisation and annoying, circular facete; imagining (and speaking for) other people in front of them, etc … your gag reflex has become inverted, i.e. you can’t stop the technicoloured yawn without conscious thought …

***

… also this weird notion that you couldn’t actually show anyone anything in critical mode, you had to tell them. That’s mimesis bad, diegesis good, for you pointy-headed types. A repellent idea. It was partly why most criticism that came out of universities at the time was so apocalyptically stupid and boring no one wanted to read it

… ities were where art went to die; critics were undertakers. It was important to arrange the body with meticulous …

… You’ve never heard of Godel? Well that’s that about that … even mathematics has a burning fleck at the back of its throat … He killed himself, you know, starved himself to death more or less. Walled himself in his study … ties in with what I was saying before, about immurement as capital punishment … What’s a professor when she’s at home? …

***

If we hear something, says Oehler, on Wednesday we check what we have heard and we check what we have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. Thus throughout our lives we never escape from what is horrible and what is untrue, the lie, says Oehler. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous, what we are doing is something terribly hopeless and that what we are doing is in the nature of things obviously false. Thus every day becomes hell for us whether we like it or not, and what we think will, if we think about it, if we have the requisite coolness of intellect and acuity of intellect, always become something nasty, something low and superfluous which will depress us in the most shattering manner for the whole of our lives …

If our intellect is keen, if our thinking is the most ruthless and the most lucid, says Oehler, we are bound after the shortest space of time to say of everything that it is unbearable and horrible. There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible …

The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult. To exist against the facts means existing against what is unbearable and horrible, says Oehler. If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible space of time.

- Thomas Bernhard, Walking – trans. Kenneth Northcott.

1.d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5 4. Bg2 dxc4 5. Nf3 Be7 … Aha! A Catalan.

Auto-save? Jesus …

Criticism as Hand-maiden to Art? No no no. Pope is cute, but we’re not in Kansas anymore. People with jaundice don’t see yellow, by the way, they just appear yellow to others … yes, terribly self-conscious … Criticism? Art? Dance partners, maybe, cannibals at the same feast …

… an asymptotic relationship …

… complete the following sequence:   … >.>   … <.<  … >.< …