Eli Peterson
Late PoMo Exp. Theater
Response 1
BANG!
Theater in the past has used language to build:
Artistic manifestos are odd
things. We use language not to destroy, but to undercut
pinnings of there. Why declare your exact intentions to the world before
creating a work of art? Art=make there assert self,
not turn into project that absorbs there.
It seems to me to somehow cheapen them. I sit, at sunrise,
and stare out into the trees, listening to the birds-- i.e. 100 invisible birds in counterpoint. My head,
savoring that interweaving of themes, performs in a good way-- performs in the way that heretofore I have
felt art should make it perform.
Art, one might think, should speak for itself. To read off the "said"
from the face of the thought? No-- our theatre is making harmony. Singing counterpoint in language--
swimming in language in a way appropriate to the ongoing internal (mental) activity. The proof of the
pudding, as Brecht was fond of saying, is in the eating. Evidence:
useful as example to others, of the harmony that results from an awareness and conscious employment
of our mechanism which is our "self" in its properly industrious way upon the world (that flux
of "everything that is the case"). Brecht
himself, however, was a prodigious manifesto writer. The Manifesto,
to me, seems to be most effective as a means for an artist to communicate
and crystallize his/her own ideas to and for him/herself. The new work
of art-as-evidence leaves a tracing of matter of this intersecting, and encourages a courageous
"tuning" of the old self to the new awareness.
Reading Foreman’s first Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto, I got the sense
that it probably was a useful tool for him to write out for himself, but I
don’t think it helps me understand his work much. What distorts is excellent.
The field of the play is distorted by the objects within the play, so that each object distorts each other object
and the mental pre-set is excluded.
What I understood about
Foreman’s intentions from his manifesto is he searches for a middle ground
between “logical progression” and “complete randomness." Use anything,
to mean anything: but, the system must have a rigor. His call for
“clarity” and the astonishment of the moment remind me in many ways of
Artaud’s manifestos. think of the grass
glassglassglass. He separates himself from Artaud, however, by
insisting that his theater uses language in an essentially creative, rather
than destructive manner. (Has a system begun to be created?)
Reading the Manifesto
alongside My Head Was a Sledgehammer I think I can see some of
Forman’s stated intentions and principles at work. Well, folks--
! The vibrations are in the head, of course. And they are most certainly produced by the (demonstratable)
scanning mechanism of the brain. I have a
difficulty, however, distinguishing between his ideas of “logic” and
“rigor.” suspension..............................___________ The piece feels to me like it has a logic
which it follows, not the logic of narrative progression or the logic of
illogic, but I don’t quite see the fundamental difference that he describes
between acts “leading from one another” and “radiating from a common
center.”
The play, in reading
anyway, failed to astonish me with its stasis in the way he describes in
the manifesto. The stasis of the play merely felt static. Only one theatrical problem exists now: How to create a stage
performance in which the spectator experiences the danger of art not as involvement or risk or
excitement, not as something that reaches out to vulnerable areas of his person, but rather
the danger as a possible decision he (Eli)(spectator) may make upon the occation of
confronting the work of art. I’m
sure that much of this has to do with reading rather than seeing the piece,
but I’m still not sure what exactly the dynamic elements of the play
are.
(The actual "making" of the art object then becomes essentially a matter of notation.)
All orange font channeled through alli from Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto I written in April of 1972.