theatre minima

mission statement

theatre minima was founded in 2006 with the intent of stripping the theatre to its essential elements – the living body and the spoken word – in recovering the original urge of the art to describe the tragedy of bodied human experience; to suggest a redemption from suffering through heightened narrative, lyricism, and the body; to explore through scripted drama and performance the tensions between the spirit and the body, tragedy and comedy, love and violence, the noumenal and the phenomenal, Eros and Thanatos.

theatre minima is based and produces its shows in New York City.

theatre minima, however, does not seek to reinvent either the theatre or the wheel, recognizing that it can build on techniques and sensibilities of the past and extend these techniques with the precision of contemporary technology (where indicated) and theatre practice. Bertolt Brecht's use of the verfremdungseffekt to examine contemporary culture, Richard Foreman's combination of this with Gertrude Stein's project of constructing and anatomizing consciousness and the body with language, Samuel Beckett's austere aesthetics of the negative – all of these provide a foundation for the continuing exploration of spoken language, consciousness, and sensuality that the theatre as an art form uniquely provides.

The philosophical and intellectual basis of theatre minima is suggested by Arthur Schopenhauer and Theodor Adorno; its aesthetic basis by composers Morton Feldman and Tristan Murail, painters Mark Rothko and Philip Guston, sculptor Alberto Giacometti; its polemical style, Karl Kraus and Bernard Shaw. It conceives of the theatrical space as a gallery, a space for contemplation, not a circus, a slaughterhouse, a strip club, a movie theater, a television set, an iPod, or a museum.

In terms of language and lyricism, theatre minima looks for direction to Samuel Beckett's 1937 letter to Axel Kaun:

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. ... As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven's seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? ...

... At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All. (Disjecta, pp. 171-172)

This project to subvert language and the body through language and the body themselves in the phenomenal world of tragedy, as if to push against the wheel of Ixion's crushingly constant movement, was not completed by Beckett, his fifty-year career could not undo the tendency of millennia. The project remains.

Further discussion of theatre minima can be found in the texts section.