Class Notes - Jess - 09.25.12

Class Notes

·      AMY – all your posts were enjoyable; having Don Giovanni will enable us to deploy various theoretical readings to a specific experience we all had; a lack of familiarity will make it very useful

·      ELLEN – Cavell reading is dense, and not complete; he’s a philosopher, not a theatre theorist; that move to a separate field means becoming accustomed to his language; the transcendental doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means; we may not agree with Mulhall, since he’s not looking at things as we are; let’s talk about Cavell and transport as a jumping off point; Cavell does not utilize that term, but how does that term apply?

·      DEREK – what is meant by transport?

·      ELLEN – I’m not sure we can come up with a consensus; I’m taking it from Levin

·      ANDREA – some of us talked about feeling an emotional connection to the characters onstage; sometimes you love the characters or feel what they feel, prevent bad things from happening to them, etc.; I thought Cavell used that definition in his paper;

·      JENNIFER – Cavell uses it when referencing Desdemona and our desire to save her; separateness

·      ELLEN – for him, the transport itself is the recognition of separation; it’s an ethical revelation; the way I thought transport might operate in this essay is where he’s essentially rehearsing an account of the theatre experience, describing the yokel, etc.; he set that paradigm up to undermine it; there’s this staged dialogue on 145 where there are lots of exchanges with his dashes - - almost like he’s announcing being purposefully irritable; so why does Cavell we think the yokel anecdote/joke is funny?

·      JENNIFER – I found Cavell making a joke of sitting in the crowd in the dark, though it seems really weird out of theatrical context; he takes the yokel anecdote and destroys the joke; Cavell questions our assumptions of the yokel’s ignorance; who is really onstage? is there an actor or a character onstage, and can you save either one? – this made me think of Auslander

·      ELLEN – on 146, he says that if we follow the rules of theatre, we go to see Mrs. Siddons and Desdemona die; he pushes at a kind of epistemological confusion, and beyond; we can’t fully know that Desdemona or the actor is actually in danger; when an emergency happens in the theatre, it makes terrible things possible (volatility); so, that’s one way we can chip away at our philosophical certainty of artifice in the theatre; he has a more philosophical approach to ethics; the question he’s asking is “What are we doing, when we attend the theatre, especially tragedy? What is the nature of this contract? Why do we do it? What is the good of it?”; he’s pushing back a long anti-theatrical tradition that includes Plato and Rousseau; what is the value of this experience, to him?;

·      AMY –  two binaries to set up that might be useful to track his argument is the distinction between Mrs. Siddons and Desdemona, and credible and incredible; what is he doing there, by setting up and blurring the distinction between Mrs. Siddons and Desdemona?; what is he saying on 145?

·      WHITNEY – I think he’s setting up both those binaries to emphasize the fact that in theatre, it can be neither one or the other; it always has to be both at the same time, or this in between space; the actor onstage can never be both the actor and the character; we can’t retrieve the character, post-emergency, until we re-start the theatrical experience; it can’t ever be either one;

·      DOROTHY – this relates to his idea that we can’t be in the presence of the characters, but we are in their present; if we were in her presence and were concerned for Desdemona’s safety, we would be responding, yelling to her, etc.; that related well, to me, to the credible vs. incredible binary

·      WHITNEY – he also draws that distinction between time and space, perhaps another binary we can add to?; but this binary doesn’t work with the neither/or application...

·      MING – I understood that he’s not just pointing to a binary but to a balance that’s been upset; theatre is so full of this tension because of this;

·      ELLEN – insuperable gap between ourselves and the represented character applies to our mirrored images; we can dissipate it by saying merely a system of counterfeit; Dorothy’s metaphor of ghosts or ghostliness points to a common trope in theatre, how we’ve conjured up these ghosts; Derrida has a lengthy account of this in his Spectres of Marx (?); useful language for us to keep at our beck and call;

·      WHITNEY – I was wondering if there might be something to that problem about us being unable to confront a character (as futile as confronting a fictive character) but they’re onstage in front of us; archive vs. repertoire? maybe the archive is where there ghosts are all the time, maybe the repertoire is where they take shape or form? the process whereby the text comes to life, in a way, and I’m wondering if we can use those same terms to think about Cavell...

·      AMY – put a pin in that thought ‘til we come back to that

·      ELLEN – disciplinarily speaking, performance studies or the study of performance, has this impressionistic quality which is strongly divergent from “real” scholars, who work in the archive; it’s a very powerful and entrenched sense of disciplinary opposition; theory goes down the ghostly line (ie: Derrida), so you can see this argument is not substantive; theory is hard and is a mode of thinking and isn’t dissimilar to what Cavell is doing here; what does Cavell want from us here? if you read the endnote on 155, you get a fairly illuminating subtext for this argument; this was written in the late 60’s; he’s trying to “rescue” theatre for modernity and ethical learning; how can we look at this?

·      WHITNEY – for me, it came at his “social justice” argument; he makes this plea to us to see how we do this in the real world; we effectively allow others to stage things for us, when we don’t take action or take part; he sort of finds a place for theatre in a political scene;

·      ELLEN – bottom of 149, top of 150 – this is where he’s discussing this; does this seem clear? This is a fairly important juncture in the argument; one of the innovations of this argument, for Cavell, theatricality is an apparatus of social un-engagement, social detachment/apathy, and that the theatre is a place where our inability to become involved where we would wish to be involved, the yearning for recognition/sameness; he’s speaking from a very human perspective; for him, that’s what the theatre offers to us, this pained recognition of our inability to act, and that recognition is maybe the strongest impulse we have to reach into one another, to be affectively present/compassionate to one another; it gets at Tracy Davis’s arguments as well;

·      AMY – Cavell’s argument about literal-ization onstage of conditions offstage; pg. 150; what about in To Kill A Mockingbird? Or think about that in relation to a theatrical experience you’ve had, that really worked. Deploy this notion.

·      DOROTHY – my example is the Strauss opera Salomé (text by Wilde); I always feel incredibly involved and sad; she has a crappy life, she’s very depressed and petulant, and ends up killing John the Baptist because she’s mad at her parents; makes me want to go talk to young girls! Why’s her dad making her strip?

·      ELLEN – that’s absolutely in keeping with this; we can experience Cavell’s example of Desdemona; the essay is about King Lear and unfulfilled acknowledgement at the root of King Lear; presumably we’ve all had this kind of experience before, where we wish we could intervene or solve the problem; recall Shakespeare in Love when Viola’s nurse cries out that Romeo is dead to the stage; one way we could think of this in terms of Don Giovanni, and Jenna, how you talked about wanting to rescue the actors from their staging, feeling around in the dark where there is no dark; this is an example of decorum effectively keeping you from throwing a tomato;

·      AMY – Ming, talk about your thoughts you wrote about; play out the entailments of this metaphor;

·      MING – I find this moral thing is incredibly confusing, since Brecht; this is all new to me; this dismayed me that it was so morally focused; a friend of mine loves reality TV shows, and she talks to the TV, I suppose like yelling at the TV during a football game; if that’s what we’re doing as an audience, how did that happen in Don Giovanni? There is no subtlety to that argument;

·      ELLEN – a footnote to that: Brecht is accused of painfully moralizing and didactic; perhaps how he would wish to be seen is as activating the audience into the critical engagement, within the larger world; he’s after the possibility of divergent opinion, hence the divergent split between the actor and the role; the visibility of that distinction is part and parcel with Brecht; I worry that Brecht can get caught up in the kind of theatre he’d abhor; he’d argue that moral theatre is bourgeois theatre, but we no longer recognize it as ideology; his vision of theatre is one that proposes the presented material as a problem to the audience to unpack and debate and have fisticuffs over;

·      AMY – so one possible link could be to Derek’s comments on the ethics of the dramaturgy of Don Giovanni; going back to this idea of a desire to act, a recognition of our separateness, and our unity with the audience as part of that separateness; to add to that, Derek’s argument’s about how it seems like Don Giovanni encourages inaction (God punishes, not humans); the conventions of opera certainly tell us to sit down and shut up; the conditions of the experience are extraordinarily separate from the audience to the performers; the structures are discouraging, but here, also the dramaturgy discourages it;

·      ELLEN – Derek’s post made me think of Cody and Dorothy’s critiques of Auslander last time; Don Giovanni was written in 1789, during the first shots of the French Revolution – these are not inconsequential to Mozart’s creation; a nobleman being pulled down to hell for being an asshole is a pretty radical statement; Mozart’s patrons are the aristocracy/royalty of Europe; it was important at the end of the descent to hell, to have a happy song with no trace of irony (marriage of happy/light with heavy/sad); do you even mention history, dramaturgically?

·      DOROTHY – not many musicologists would get away with that, the dramaturg getting away with that; there were a lot of things they could talk about, but they didn’t; is Don Giovanni a fallen noble? the decrepit performance of a Moorish performance?; it gave the possibility of unexplored avenues;

·      ELLEN – this goes back to Auslander and Cody’s point that the conceit as a critic, that they merely read what’s there, within the bubble of that immediate frame, no prior information brought to the conversation; we asked you to do that with Don Giovanni; it seems to be right that you bring your critical dexterity to bear with this; it’s not just an act of generosity, but of making an object of interest for us;

·      ANDREA – I was wondering about transport; it’s about identifying/loving a character, and I did not experience that with Don Giovanni – I hated the character, and I was disappointed at the end of the first act, and he wasn’t dead (partly because it was long, partly because I wanted to see this guy punished); how does this fit in with Cavell and transport? Can we apply these terms to a character we hate as opposed to love?

·      JENNIFER – to feel a deep dislike acknowledges personhood for the character

·      WHITNEY – it seems complicated to move to everyday life; useful impulses, like saving someone;

·      COURTNEY – are these “good” morals inherent in his argument, or is this just because of this specific example?

·      AMY – Dorothy’s point about the overture – what difference does it make to try to make Don Giovanni less of a serial rapist? Is that what was going on? And is that because of a desire to identify with him?; I think that this notion that theatrical enjoyment comes from identification is bankrupt and simplistic and problematic; this instinct makes Don Giovanni too sexy for his shirt and has the unintended/uncared about consequence about making - - -

·      SARA – Slutty McShepherdess

·      AMY – YES! That’s great!

·      MING – in translation, we have three kinds that we fight over; do we give a foreignizing approach or a friendly, fun approach? Were they wanting to make it a point of entrance for inexperienced audience members, this Slutty McShepherdess?

·      DOROTHY – this speaks to opera’s commercial viability; to make money, we have to make these canonical operas “accessible”; perhaps condescending to audiences; a lot of it has to do with the idea that opera is not accessible, so it has to be performed in ways that make it accessible

·      JENNIFER – I found it incredibly unaccessible; I hated it, it was schizophrenic, it gave me a headache

·      ELLEN – You’re not alone; both of your comments bring it back to Levin’s argument of unsettled opera; there’s a lot of real ire and rage on the level of story, but the songs are almost relentlessly upbeat; it seems to me that perhaps your frustration, Jennifer, comes from the interpreter to render settled the opera, to take an unsettled form/text, and try and harmonize it;

·      SARA – it takes so much more cognitive work to get to that point, why Don Giovanni is going to hell and not getting a medal; this was almost a lesson in how to find the concepts – the “effed up moment”; why are we killing a man and making him look into a bathroom mirror while it’s happening?; seven deadly sins – you can see this in the performance; if he’s then not going to hell for raping women, we have to find this other reason for his punishment, and what’s bouffe about that, is that those characters has these characteristics, so the concentration in one man is the problem;

·      ELLEN – so he’s Everyman? Bad choice!

·      DEREK – I’m not sure what I would do as a director; can you change the script?; would you re-cast Don Giovanni as an international financier, one of the 1%, could you modernize it to that extent? How to make it relevant?

·      SARA – Peter Sellars set it in Hell’s Kitchen, making it about drugs and money and sex

·      DOROTHY – you can set it anywhere; librettos are vague in between singing;

·      ELLEN – it’s also worth introducing the virtuosity of the performers in conveying the director’s take, or virtuosity in making the director’s choice legible; the coquetry was painful, for many of us; the performance of sexual desire was painfully mawkish; nobody ever kissed, just weirdly nuzzled each other; tremendous discomfort!; here you get a whole other layer – maybe we’re supposed to render this invisible and just say, well, we get it; but it does seem to me that the demands of opera come into friction that narrative can somehow save the day, and that narrative can be easily conveyed by opera singers performing a dumb show; it felt really, really long!

·      IRIS – Are they having sex, or not?!

·      DOROTHY – the physicality of opera singing is hard – I was happy to see that there was little “stand-and-sing” moments;

·      COURTNEY – the character of Leporello seemed to do pretty good physical humor; he was kind of funny; what was so strange that there was this one guy who was cast like he was acting in a play but no one thought that he should act in everyone else’s manner, and vice versa; it seemed like no one ever talked

·      DOROTHY – there might be a single class about acting for opera singers;

·      COURTNEY – at least on the director’s part, there was some value placed in acting, since this guy was placed in this role...

·      ELLEN – it’s true, opera singers are not trained to act; Levin’s example of Don Carlos as being very rigorous for them; this seems like a norm that can shift; a director will look at the stable of performers and say “Here’s how I can convey my take with these people.”

·      AMY – this is where Levin seems to be least helpful; he gets to talk about the tiny portion of operas that are different, rather than operas like IU’s Don Giovanni; theatre done here is very different than the outside world; I think a good director has to figure out a way to run damage control, and there are lots of ways that you can evoke “sex” in the audience without having an actor having to play “sexy”; you can just suck a finger, and that’s going to do a lot more than that weird humping; we tend to do weird things like miming sex acts, instead of asking what will convey “sex” to the audiences; we tend to go by virtue of representation through the actors, not what is going to evoke it in the audience;

·      ELLEN – Cavell is helpful here, with plausibility isn’t what we’re after; it’s a false set of standards; not useful way of thinking of the pleasures/aesthetics of the experiences

·      AMY – tremendously helpful; our attempt to say that “this is fiction, this is non fiction”, etc., are all useless categorizing;

·      DEREK – I want to ask about the audience member going up to rescue Desdemona; Cavell presents it as a joke, but I think I remember from a different class, someone talking about that actually happened; perhaps it wasn’t Othello, but something like that happened in the theatre; might have been, like Showboat; as a spectator you recognize that you have no present apart from theirs; I was trying to work out a connection between Claudius and having his conscience being caught, and the yokel who runs up onstage to intervene

·      ELLEN – the yoke is a kind of straw man, that’s Cavell’s position – to advocate the indistinction between spectacle and real life; I do think this is a chewy moment; my reading is that catching of conscience is sort of an afterthought here; Claudius has some kind of recognition that the stopping of the play won’t prevent the consequences of his actions, but what it can do is to bring out the power of the theatre as an ethical practice of revelation;

·      DOROTHY – for transportation and for transport and for Levin, something interesting was applying that to opera; acting based + musically based, and this is ignored here; someone might not be good at acting but if you do a good “Dido”, everyone’s crying;

·      AMY – the purity/virtuosity of that is central to the opera experience; the sound that they’re capable of making; we force ourselves to ignore virtuosity; Kelly brought up the materiality/finances of the thing and how palpable the experience was, being in the large fuzzy uterus of the MAC; this is always present in our experience; sometimes it looms large, sometimes not, but we should always attend this;

·      ELLEN – lots of people talked about theorizing transport; total forgetting; remember with Levin’s argument about how he loves being transported, but he wants to know where he’s going; there may or may not have been great moments of pleasure in Don Giovanni, but I’m encouraged by the detailed descriptions and critical upshots that you derived from them in relation to that performance; it says to me that the more alienated we are from the form/conventions of a genre, and the more unsettled the form is, the easier it is for us to do this kind of strongly engaged work; I’m eager to move those apparati onto other performance or more “conventional”, normative genres;