theatreminima journal

Organum

"Be liked and you'll never want." Last night at Le Poisson Rouge, the JACK Quartet performed the complete string quartets of Iannis Xenakis quite brilliantly and authoritatively. The earlier quartets, ST/4 and Tetras, uncompromising examples of what Xenakis called stochastic music, were particularly energetic and convincingly conceived, for want of a better phrase. A short excerpt of the Quartet's performance of Tetras can be heard here.

Le Poisson Rouge itself is not a traditional concert hall, but instead more of a cabaret-cum-cafe, serving food and drink. Much has been said about the need to desanctify the experience of new and classical music; hence the casual, stripped-down atmosphere, with background music played before the concert and during the intermission, waiters and waitresses taking and serving drink orders before and during the performance. The performers themselves, in streetclothes and casually addressing the audience during the show, are loose and relaxed.

And while all this is greeted with considerable approval, judging from the size and response of the audience for the Xenakis quartets last night, something rankles. For all the imagination and enthusiasm that venues like this exhibit in their advocacy for getting difficult work to audiences, something may be lost, and this something may be the challenge of the work itself. Listening to ST/4 and Tetras particularly, I was caught once in a while by the sounds of glasses clinking and whispered bar orders; the casual, friendly remarks from the stage seemed to undermine the work's challenging and difficult intent. Certainly the music could speak for itself, and though the remarks were not apologetic for the strangeness of the music, they seemed unnecessary. The music did indeed speak for itself, as the audience sat rapt. Why, then, the necessity for that aggressive informality of the moment, as self-conscious and deliberate as any solemn formality?

Speaking to Sarah Benson, the director of Soho Rep's production of Blasted (which has just been extended through 21 December), I asked her some months back about the difficulty of casting American actors in such emotionally and physically strenuous work as Sarah Kane's plays. "American actors often like to be liked," she told me. "It's important to me to work with actors who are not afraid to be disliked." While it's simplistic to reduce Xenakis' music and Kane's plays to some kind of "in-yer-face" aggressive status, it's also true that this work shuns the casual, the informal stance. In stripping the presentation of this work of the solemnity too often condemned as an elitist practice, a disservice may be done to the work itself (all apologies to Herr Brecht, who thought differently on the matter).

It's all very well to want to be well-liked, and many American theatre workers in this collectivist era (so many of them Willy Lomans already, regardless of their age) seem to have no further goal than to be thought likeable, to make new friends. Xenakis did not write his music, and Kane did not write her plays, to make friends, to become well-liked. They wrote specifically to be heard; "friendly" is among the last words to come to mind in describing this theatre and music. The laughing, smiling noise of conviviality surrounding its presentation may soften the sharper edges of the work, which no longer cuts, then, but runs the dangerous risk of dully passing over the surface of the flesh and the consciousness, leaving no mark.

Organum

Maskwork. Faces becoming the reflections of screens: Digital and neon light reflected off the flesh, drawing off the blood. Following on the masks of Greek theatre, the contemporary theatrical face itself reflects another manufactured persona already, imposed by video, film, the Internet. A form of cold death, imitation of imitation and Baudrillard's hyperreality. Theatre now abjures the mask; the human face itself reflecting the sun's light or the dark of the night is a mask sufficient.

Organum

Body of words, body of text. The dramatist writes with regard to his words as fleshed in space, not inked on paper, which opens the play of physical signifiers and signifieds in language and in the performing body. He speaks tyrant and victim, beggar and emperor, woman and man, which he finds within himself. He unleashes the possibilities of flesh and its representations, all of its organs and sensations free for the exchange with those of an auditor in the dark. Flesh, blood, hand, eye, phallus, womb: the physical evidences of gender and engendering themselves freed for imagination. They are traded and exchanged through the writing body, the speaking body, the hearing and watching body, representations caught, caressed and tossed back again. Symbology made flesh. Words that penetrate, and welcome penetration, and exchange visions, world constructs, perceiving selves and ecstasy. (This is far beyond youth, chronological and psychological, especially beyond the blind adolescent self-love of most contemporary theatre and those who populate its arenas: sexualities become more textured with age, as the body matures and changes, possibility broadens, closer towards the end of its days.) Closing distances, to inhere in a new self, composed of dramatist, performer, auditor together. New bodies born ...

The highest artifice, the disciplined theatre. Torturous distance separating physical selves. But not for that reason any the less real, indeed far from surreal (especially the closed surreality of the deadly, final interpretation of a dream, which the art of theatre most assuredly rejects), perhaps more real for their attempted expression ...