Let Amy know if you haven’t gotten the Chicago email!
On Nov. 9th, for the Indianapolis trip, we’ll leave by 11 and get back by 5.
Amy: Your posts were enjoyable, and the theoretical readings we’ve done are applicable to Don Giovanni.
Ellen: Cavell is a philosopher, not a theater theorist, you can see by his use of the term “transcendental”…(something about levels of intimacy)…Not sure we’ll all agree, but let’s jump off on Cavell and transport. It’s not a term he uses; how does it apply?
Derek: Not sure what he meant by “transport.”
Ellen: Do we have a consensus? Levin doesn’t bother to stop and define it…
Andrea: Feeling an emotional connection to the characters onstage, don’t want bad things to happen to them.
Jennifer: more on that on Cavell, ref. p. 153
Ellen: he rehearses the usual account, the breach performed by the “yokel,” so that he can reverse it; p. 145 like he’s trying to be irritating re: yokel jokeàreinforcing decorum. Why does Cavell think we think it is funny?
Jennifer: what about what a joke it is that we sit around in a crowd in the dark? As audience members it’s what we do. Ref. p. 147 “there’s nothing I can do”: separation between actor and character reflective of Auslander’s person/persona
Ellen: That forked moment—watching Desdemona die…from the point of view of the yokel who is unaware of the artifice of performance. Epistemological volatility there, example: theater fire. Touches upon status of artifice in theater but sets that aside somewhat in favor or a conversation about ethics…scenes of atrocity, painful, poignant: Cavell is pushing back against theoretical tradition’s anti theatrical position in philosophy (Rousseau, etc)
Amy: ref. p. 145., What about binaries: credible vs. incredible; actor playing Desdemona vs. Desdemona…“No amount of pointing at ‘that woman’ will clear up..” ..?
Whitney: can be neither one nor the other; in an emergency, character vanishes. Can’t ever be both?
Dorothy: Ref. Cavell: we can’t be in their presence, but we can be in their present…duality of performer…?
Whitney: draws that distinction between time and space, but that doesn’t work between either/or?
Ellen: Ref. dorothy’s post about mirrors in Don Giovanni….analogous to seeing ourselves in the reflection of the mirror, that we can never ‘have’ or ‘get to’; metaphor of ghosts (Derrida explores this beginning with Hamlet’s ghost); convey a sense of consequence attached to all this within the ontological state we view to be significant
Whitney: ref. p. 148, confrontation as tension in front of us or a process whereby the text comes to life
Amy: put a pin in that and we’ll get back to it
Ellen: (summary): the metaphor of ghost work is illustrative of disciplinary opposition, a tradition viewed as divergent from ‘real’ scholars as this theory goes down ‘the ghostly line’, which is seen as not substantive, not a hard and serious mode of thinking that I find very important. Now: what does Cavell want from us? To disarticulate good art from artifice, which is flagged as theatricality. How is this a rescue mission of theater for modernity and ethics?
Whitney: ref. point 3 on p. 150, “social justice argument”
Ellen: Social detachedness and apathy—he demonstrates our strongest […] inability to do something when we would like to do something, yearning to be involved, yearning for recognition of sameness, pained recognition of inability to act, the strongest impulse we have to reach out to each other: for Cavell, this is something we do every day and theater it a site in which to test its limits
Amy: Let’s use that as a segue to the opera, aslo ref. p. 150, which reiterates what Ellen said above
Dorothy: The Oscar Wilde play ‘Salome’ has me feeling for Salome every time, every time I am invested: she has a terrible life, then kills John the Baptist, her dad’s a lech, her mom doesn’t care, and I always want to go talk to her, to reach out to young women
Ellen: wish you could intervene, solve the problem. Even seeing a lackluster or bad production, you want to rescue the poor actor from their stage business, which is itself a kind of pathos, excruciating feeling. Three centuries ago you could have thrown a tomato
Amy: ming could you tell us about the line from your post: “if fiction if the playground of the word should, then Don G is the monkey bars”
Ming: I’ve been struggling, since reading him earlier, with Brecht, who calls such attention to the moral business of receiving a play, and at first I didn’t know if I agreed with that, then remembered a friend from home who loves to shout at the television during reality shows, or people who watch football: realized spectating is very much that, and Don G. was a not-nuanced study in that judgment that is the backbone of the fictive world
Ellen: Brecht actually would have been horrified at much theater that would co-opt his view (“moral theater”); he’s more speaking to critical engagement, divergent opinions…a character can be in conversation with its performance. Brecht would say moral theater is bourgeois, and that the theater he’s interested in is more one that presents a real engage-able problem to the audience so they can attack and defend
Amy: dramaturgy is about saying ‘calm down’…Mise-en-scene of opera in particular constructs a big difference between audience and actors, which dramaturgy also does
Ellen: Don Giovanni was created in 1789, literally when the first shots of war could be heard—a play about an aristocrat going to hell for being an asshole is actually pretty risky when you think about it…references the contextual info that used to come along like the program and summary, which is not something a dramaturge would get away with
Dorothy: (didn’t catch it)
Sara: I could see the silver leaf peeling at the top of the mirrors
Dorothy: the set buildings has broken parts which they could have covered up, there was a possibility of nuance that went unexplored
Ellen: the conceit of the critic is that their engagement doesn’t extend beyond that immediate bubble…
Andrea: I wanted to see this guy punished by the end of the first act—is that feeling what Cavell might intend transport to mean?
Jennifer: I think that’s equally valid; it’s an investment in what happens to a character, no?
Whitney: whereas the impulse to save someone from dying might be termed ‘useful’? (didn’t catch it)
Amy: ref. Dorothy’s post’s point about overture; why make him more sympathetic…this notion that theatricality is about identification is bankrupt--and informs Don Giovanni and other productions
(I don’t know how we got to it but Sara references “Slutty McShepherdess”)
Dorothy: was the point to perform it in ways that make it accessible?
Jennifer: I thought it was irritating, schizophrenic, frustrating, I wanted to leave and it gave me a headache.
Ellen: the songs were relentlessly upbeat; damnation of the main character was exculpated
Sara: to my students I might say this is an object lesson: why does this seem f’d up? Why are we killing a man and making him look in a mirror while we do it? There was a 7 deadly sins theme going there that was just coded enough to make you feel cool if you got it, but there was so much work involved, of the kind that you have to do if there’s a technical error but that’s not what this was, instead of letting it stand that this dude is abusing aristocracy and that’s why he’s going to hell.
Derek: so if he’d been cast as the banker who’s corrupt?
Sara: ref. Peter Sellers (didn’t catch the rest)
Dorothy: one thing about opera is how loose it is in terms of setting
Ellen: ref. Iris’s post, scene of overture, coquetry—desire was painfully mawkish in this production; no real kissing; kind of groping. We’re supposed to see through or render invisible the completion of the act. Narrative easily conveyed by singers also performing a “dumb show.”
Dorothy: but can we also give credit to the physicality of the actors? I was proud of their physicality in terms of not just standing around and singing. They can’t exactly act/do sensuality they can only do more broad things.
Courtney: The singer who played Leperello was the only one who could really act. He was good at physical humor, but was the only one in the cast with that trait. There was just this one guy who could act, and that makes acting conceivably a part of opera casting, at least in this case?
Amy: by definition conservatives are people who learned this 50 years ago and stopped learning 50 years ago. A good director has to find a way to do damage control. I mean, just sucking a finger would have done much more for me than the kind of humping that was going on on that stage. It’s a big problem to ask “how do we represent this through the actors?” as opposed to “how do we evoke this in the audience?” and that’s where good theater goes to die. Regurgitating vs inheriting.
Derek: I spoke with someone who had seen something yokel-ish actually occur in a theater during a production…ref. p. 154 paragraph 2: “I have no present apart from theirs”..trying to work out connection between Claudius and yokel running up onstage
Ellen: those two things are diametrically opposed; for Cavell the yokel is something of a straw man […] recognition of connection between stopping the play and an ethical practice of revelation, which is a great inquiry into transport as a way of engaging theater without deeply necessarily being completely lost in it.
Dorothy: what about transposing the idea of transport to other kinds of theatrical work. Largely all this ignored the musical aspect, which is a big part of operatic transport, you don’t necessarily act sad, but if you do a good Dido (?) everybody’s crying.
Amy: I agree there’s little attention paid to the systems of production, and how we’re always aware of the realness rearing up through their singing. Ref. cody’s post on ontological stupefecationà Levin, “Look, I’m about transport, but not losing direction or critical acumen”
Ellen: very much about finding pleasure in the unpleasurable object . Read Bernstein next!
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