U.S Theatre has a long way to go

I meant to write this so much earlier but alas, the craziness of summer has swiftly washed away to bring us into the new school year.

"How was your summer?" "How was your trip?" "Tell me all about it!"
All questions and statements of well-meaning friends and loved ones expecting me to be able to express in simple sentences how my time in Berlin changed the way I view theatre and the people/world around me. In short, I can't. Nor do I really want to. Of course I shared my favorite parts and explained a million times that after the first few shows in German you really don't need to understand the language because human emotion in universal (how deep, right?)

Not long after returning to the U.S. I was stage managing a show in NY. I went in to it with this new, positive, [dare I say] enlightened point of view, excited to share and use some of the concepts and personal ideas gained from Berlin theatre.
One week in, I was absolutely crushed.
Two weeks in, I was ready to quit. Not just the show, but stage management all together. I've never been so rattled, physically and emotionally drained, and betrayed by the career I thought I loved. overdramatic? Maybe. At the time though, I was one step from the ledge.
Two weeks and one day in, the director and producer decide they want me to go with them to the EdinburghFringe Festival in Scotland. With an all expenses paid trip to Scotland looming in my future I sucked it up. I would be an IDIOT to say no to that. I cried every night after making the decision to stick it out. Every night including the night I boarded at JFK. Is it really worth it?
Four weeks in, I'm enjoying a shared plate of haggis nachos in Europe with actors I've grown to love.
I'm rambling. Let me get to the point. The details of why I had such a negative experience are irrelevant. After coming from such a positive experience in Berlin to an astounding low I think my brain was yo-yoing into knots.
The idea of fantasy versus reality and the illusion of a created world on stage, separate of the audience is now a dark, outdated concept to me.
Long story short, I'm glad I stuck it out. I'm proud of myself. Scotland was rad and the Fringe was badass. I'm very lucky.

Christopher - lets talk about this when we find some time. I'd like to tell you the details and maybe come up with a plan before my next SM endeavor.

There is still no freedom in U.S. Theatre.

I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaimed their malefactions.

(2.2.523-52)

Hamlet is still strong. Bolder and less polished than Richard III. More deconstructed, more challenging, more revelatory of the play. There was conspicuous bleed from Richard III into Lars’ performance. Hamlet's antic disposition had more than a flavor of Richard's naked villainy. One moment from the first time I saw it that shattered the room barely registered this time. And I don’t think its because I was seeing once more. I was thinking about Diderot when I was watching. Lucky I get to do what I do.

Comment on Bourgeois Feminism, Literary Criticism, and The Magic Flute

***This was meant to be posted as a comment on the thread, "Bourgeois Feminism, Literary Criticism, and The Magic Flute," but it was too long and it wouldn't let me post it. If I was a more conscientious scholar I might spend some time here editing, but I don't want to be late for Hamlet, so I will publish my perhaps indulgently-lengthy thoughts here:


I'm grateful that our blog has evolved to a stirring dialogue, as much as I've found new appreciation for the monologue here in Germany ;)

Kim, in the spirit of dialogue, I urge you to go beyond being offended here! If Jake was wrong, HOW was he wrong? I'd rather pick apart his argument and find the weaknesses than just know that you felt he was off-base.

Christopher, I also hear your umbrage and appreciate the fact that we call each other out when we write with less detail and thought than we should. In generalizing about our program I neglected to acknowledge the thought-provoking and challenging readings and discussion your class offers us, and will continue to offer us. While I agree that my writing on this was insensitive, and more importantly, lacking in depth of discussion, I still wrestle with my question.

I appreciate the intellectual challenge I found in our theater history class in the past year, and I look forward to global. Yet I often feel that I am not going deep enough, merely because my time is spread so thin. Jake's post brought this up for me. And I do think I'm correct in saying that in the curriculum we have as actors, the large majority of our time is not devoted to reading and responding to reading. I am wrong to say that it isn't encouraged at all, but I sometimes think I should be doing more. But then I reach a dilemma, because I also feel that I should be doing more to train my voice, my body, and the acting instincts that will shape my instrument.

It is a larger question than a critique of the program we are studying within, and I would perhaps have been wiser in my previous post to lift it from our context. And perhaps because I am faced with this program in which I feel like I never have quite enough time, I am forced to engage with this question. What is it that I must focus on as an artist? What makes an artist for the theater? Someone who has impeccable strength and flexibility in the body and voice? A depth and breadth of thought that includes input from the great writers and thinkers of our cultural history? Access to deep emotional life and willingness to give of one's self on stage? I imagine there is a beautiful combination of all these qualities (and more that I am not articulating here) that may emerge from a training program such as ours.

Here in Berlin, I have been inspired by artists who embody these qualities, but if I'm honest in asking myself, I think I notice them more when they are distinct strengths. A few that come to mind:
Yael Ronen - I admire for her ability to craft a story that is at the same time politically provocative, but also theatrical and brings the audience on an intimate, emotional journey. I have no sense of whether she has spent time training her body and voice, but I am assuming she reads and really does all her homework in Christopher Cartmill's Global Theater course ;)

Lars Eidinger perhaps offers an example of the combination of skills I hope to develop. His use of his instrument on stage is absolutely captivating. He knows exactly what he's doing in every moment. In speaking with him, I also get the impression that he thinks deeply about his choices in a way that is informed by a form of scholarship, likely the type of scholarship we are working on in Global and in this past year's courses.

Other artists that stood out for me I didn't get to speak to so I don't know where they speak from and what perhaps they focused on in their training...Leander Haussmann, Antonia Bill, Claire Marshall, Simon McBurney, etc.

I'm sure this conversation will have to continue beyond the blog, and this dialogue has certainly advanced my reflection process here. I still wrestle with the role of the artist in our social-political-cultural context, as well as struggling to find my own path to artistry. Here in Berlin, outside of our Mason Gross sphere, I have had the opportunity to reflect, to question, to examine myself and my context. This is an invaluable opportunity. I seek to continue finding opportunities to question myself, my training, and the larger context we operate within, but also I hope to balance the questions with trust, and patience, and belief in the beating heart that brings us all to this work.

Thank you all for pushing me, and calling me out when I'm wrong, and inspiring me to stay curious. I'd love to continue this dialogue here even as we all depart from Berlin, and of course hope to continue the conversation via other channels as well.

from (and starring) the director of BEWARE OF PITY

Coming to NYC/Broadway this Fall, Simon McBurney's THE ENCOUNTER.

Bourgeois Feminism, Literary Criticism and The Magic Flute

Bourgeois feminism is a movement that consists of followers who are ironically unaware of the path they walk. It’s comprised of the overstuffed internet-fed, not the scholarly read. What’s troubling is not the movement itself; which is more or less centered on the position of reform within the existing social system, but it’s active participants who extend their haphazard opinions with “button” words which have serious consequences. And as Aristotle teaches us in the Ethics, Opinion is actually something quite different from Knowledge. 

When it comes to literary criticism, this nascent(internet-feminist)lens is distorted and detrimental to the future of art. The reason for its distortion is quite obvious: people like to comment on WESTERN literature without understanding its history. This means that not only are people ignorant of how it came into existence; but they’re subsequently ignorant to its components which fall directly under the study of feminism, a few of those components being gender, eroticism and politics. 

It’s impossible to have anything more than an opinion on sex and gender without an understanding of nature. To be clear, sex is subset to nature and it is the Natural in Man. Society is an artificial construction and a defense against nature. Literature is in part a creative embodiment of sexuality and eroticism, and each of these two participants make up the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Google-bred feminists grossly oversimplify the problem with sex, gender, and misogyny in literature when they reduce it to a singular matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau. 

Rousseau produced the progressivist strain in nineteenth-century culture, for which social reform was the means to achieve paradise on earth. These hopes were swiftly crushed by the catastrophes of two world wars. Rousseau’s view of man’s innate goodness, derived from Locke, is what led to social environmentalism, and is now the dominant ethic of the American humanist services, penal codes, and behaviorist therapies. It makes the assumption that aggression, violence, and crime come from social deprivation. Sade, who is still the most unread major writer of the western cannon, takes the opposite approach and is a critique on Rousseau. 

To Sade, getting back to nature would be giving free reign to violence and lust. Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. The rapist is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Certain sects of feminists, seeking to drive power out of sex, have set themselves against nature. This fact has become even more obscured thanks to the convenience of the internet, and the subsequent laziness of would-be feminist critique that its encouraged. For an area of scholarship so serious and so important, it’s disturbing to see how much posturing goes on. 

It’s important to remember that in Western Culture, there are no non-exploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Feminism has evolved like all of our liberal movements. It has now branched out from its origins of seeking political equality for women, and in some sects, has ended in rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. Something that is not contingent, is the proven fact that we are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place. In some cases, the one that takes its place is less pleasant than the first. An obvious example from history is The Reign of Terror. Hierarchies exist in nature and in society. In nature, brute force is the ruling law. In society, there are protections for the weak. 

In order to give criticism to Western literature, we must understand its origins, and this means going back to the Greeks. If we’re to examine the female or the “femaleness” in our literary tradition, we need to subsequently understand sex as an act as well as a concept. To the Greeks, sex is daemonic. Daimon(daemonic) means a spirit of lower divinity than the Olympian gods. To the Greeks, as well as our Judeo-Christian society, Eroticism inevitably became taboo. This is what caused the split between the Dionysian way of Greek life and the Apollonian way. Sex and all of its complications haunt social life as well as artwork. Obvious pieces of haunted literature are Oedipus and The Bacchae. In return, theories have been put forward as terrifying as Freud’s “family romance”, which elucidates that we each have an incestuous constellation of sexual personae that we carry from childhood to the grave and that determines whom and how we love or hate. Every encounter with friend or foe, every clash with or submission to authority bears the perverse traces of family romance. 

The importance of pointing this out is that the Western Art of antiquity has preceded even our most popular and celebrated social scientists. So to refer to any canonical work as merely a “museum piece” is an absurd judgement made generally with little to no critical thinking behind it.  Again, it is impossible to examine gender without paying close attention to eroticism. Western love is a displacement of cosmic realities. It is a defense mechanism rationalizing forces ungoverned and ungovernable. Like early religion, it is a device enabling us to control our primal fear. All of this is important to consider when examining the Western literary canon. 

Western science is the cult of the Apollonian mind, and in it our conception of Love has only been partly examined. It’s hope is that by naming and classification, it can subsequently know and control. The Dionysian mind has an antithetical goal, and I would ask everyone to keep this in mind when watching Faust. What the Apollonian mind represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which ironically means “of the earth”. Chthonian is a substitute for Dionysian, which has become obscured and contaminated with pleasantries. The Dionysian is antithetical to pleasantries. 

Chthonian nature is the West’s dirty secret and Sade is one of its few scribes. Modern humanists and subsets of liberals made the “tragic sense of life” the touch stone of mature understanding. They defined man’s mortality and the transience of time as literature’s supreme subjects. This is more or less just sentimentality. The tragic sense of life is a partial response to experience. It is in turn a reflex to the west’s resistance to and misapprehension of nature, compounded by the errors of liberalism, which in its Romantic nature-philosophy has been guided by Rousseau. 

Tragedy is the Western will, setting itself up against nature, dramatizing its own inevitable fall as a human universal, which it is not. An irony of the western literary tradition is the birth of tragedy in the cult of Dionysus. The irony being that the cult of Dionysus is a cult predominated by the female or femaleness exemplified in Western literature. It is no accident that the most celebrated tragedy in the Western literary tradition is from the Apollonian fifth century of Athens’ greatness, Aeschylus’ Orestia, which is itself a celebration of the defeat of chthonian power. 

In fact, female tragic protagonists are rare because tragedy is a male paradigm of rise and fall, a graph in which dramatic and sexual climax are in shadowy analogy. Climax is another Western invention. Western dramatic climax was produced by the avon of male will. The male will effects its escape through action to identity. Action in male will is in its essence an escape from the chthonian nature. Exemplified in Oedipus who tries to escape his mother, and runs straight into her arms. 

All of this is to assert that Tragedy’s inhospitality to woman springs from nature’s inhospitality to man. The identification of woman with nature was universal in prehistory. When societies were based on the hunting or agrarian model, femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility. As culture progressed, crafts and commerce supplied a concentration of resources freeing men from the rise of weather or the handicap of geography. Essentially, as society progressed from an agrarian model to one of commerce, femaleness receded in importance. And yet Western culture from the start has avoided femaleness. The last major western society to worship female powers was the Minoan Crete. It’s significant to note that Minoan Crete fell and did not rise again. What has been predominant in our historical tradition and understanding of organized society is barbarian or warrior culture. Which fused with Apollonian Athens, gave birth to the Greco-Roman line of western history. The Topography of Terror is essentially a museum that exemplifies this disgusting merger. 

Apollonian and Judeo-Christian traditions are attempts to transcend nature. This means that cult worship went from earth-cult to sky-cult. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and the differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness. Our language is derivative of this sacred text and if we’re unable to recognize that, then the consequent paradox of male and female relationships through the aggressive feminist lens is obscured. Ultimately, this evolution from worshipping the secular to worshipping the non-secular puts woman into the nether realm. 

Culture is not only a plot against the expansion of consciousness, but it is also man made and a defense against female nature. The invention of sky-gods was a sophisticated step in this process, for it resulted in a disenfranchisement of women. It marks a significant shift from belly-magic to head-magic. The paradox of the invention of sky-gods or head-magic is that it led to the development of male civilization, which has not only lifted men, but women too. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men. So the sexes are more or less caught in a comedy of historical indebtedness. 

Man is repelled by his debt to his mother and has created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. Woman is superior to man in many ways, but foremost in her identity, which is undoubtedly defined by nature. Nature’s cycles are woman’s cycles and this is biological fact. Woman’s centrality gives her a stable identity, and is in turn, a great obstacle to man, whose quest for identity she blocks. Man, through Apollonian creation, has attempted to transform himself into an independent being. A being free of woman. Evolutionary or apocalyptic history is a male invention as a way of evading the cyclic nature of woman. 

Many feminist theorists believing this male-bonding and patriarchy to be a response of male fear. Fear of the fact that woman, particularly during pro-creative daemonism, is ontologically complete. It’s what some would argue as the pattern of all solipsism. It’s interesting to note how often, even in female archetypes, how much woman is associated with nature or “otherness”, particularly when it comes to literature. But before making any critical judgement of the portrayal of Woman in The Magic Flute, we must understand the history and psychology behind the female archetype. 

Archetypes are another Apollonian invention, born and bred from man’s repugnance to the procreative nature. Apollonian methods of reason and logic are essentially anxiety manifested. For better or worse, the whole concept of Western identity is unfortunately Apollonian. Another unfortunate paradox often ignored is the enfranchisement that the Apollonian line of Western rationality has given us. Western science and industry have freed both women and men from certain dangers of everyday life that exist in both second and third world countries. Though in terms of archetype’s and literature, the Apollonian creation that’s most famous is the femme-fatale. Another representation of the daemonic. These representations are more or less tradition at this point, passed down from the prehistoric idols to modern movies. In fact, it’s interesting to track that the more nature is beat down by the west, the more the femme-fatale appears, as a return of the repressed. She embody’s the West’s anxiety about nature. 

Certain sects of feminism, looking to disenfranchise the femme-fatale as merely a woman who is politically unequal and forced to use her womanly wiles, are wildly underestimating the role of eroticism in our lives. Sexuality cannot always be understood by social models because it is a realm of contradictions and ambivalence. Mystification will always remain the companion of love and art, and eroticism is mystification. It simply will not adhere to moral codes from the bi-polarized system in which we live. Nature’s fascism is superior to any society. 

In mythology the femme-fatale is always dangerous to man, but rarely do we take into consideration the sexual psychology of the archetype. In certain Native American folklore, the femme-fatale is presented as a woman with teeth inside her vagina. There’s been a horrible appropriation of that myth into a subsequently horrible movie, but the erotic implications of that are again unexplored and are generally uncomfortably laughed at. In the act of sex as a natural transaction, not a social transaction, man leaves with less than what he came in with. Woman as a daemonic figure remains whole. Without this understanding of the history of eroticism or myth, it’s in fact easy to dismiss the archetype with little consideration. 

In The Magic Flute, we witnessed a piece completely steeped in this Apollonian tradition of art. The Queen of the Night and her servants are quintessentially nature embodied and they’re anything but disenfranchised. In fact, when the snake appears in the first scene, haunting the young prince(I wont even bother extrapolating the allusion of the Judeo-Christian religion), the female servants of The Queen of the Night appear and rescue him. When the aloof Papageno appears, and foolishly tells the prince that he was the one who killed the serpent, the female servants reappear to take away his power of speech. The correlation being yet again made obvious from the Greeks to Mozart, that men are fundamentally deficient and frightened when it comes to the feminine and nature, their power has no place for man. 

The Queen of the Night’s daughter is the archetype of the femme-fatale, and again here is where the portrayal of female by male writer comes under fire. Pamina represents beauty incarnate and it’s why the prince falls in love with her after only seeing her photo. She also represents man’s inherent need for control over nature, which ultimately proves more or less useless. Man’s system of control is embodied in both a religious figure, and also in the guise of Lust. It’s important to note that the guise of Lust is thwarted and that ultimately the religious figures are too. The Opera is a comedy and true love is what triumphs over the absurd archetypes, and the Apollonian factors. 

There are plenty of other things to be said about the piece regarding its display of both female-figures and eroticism, but I think it’s absolutely anti-artistic to be lazy in regards to examining a piece of art, and to write something off when the history is not acknowledged. Ultimately this Liberal Stalinist stance is grounded in ignorance and is an affront to both art and feminism itself. Part of what has made German theater so exciting to me is because they say the things that we’re told not to say in America by the faux, liberal intelligensia, and they do so with respect and reverence to the subject. With so many of our own issues still left disturbingly un-examined, it seems absurd to assume that we as American Theater Makers are incapable of what the Germans are doing.  

IF this blog post wasn’t already absurdly long, I would extrapolate more myself on both the piece and what I’ve learned from studying feminism, history and literature. Two great books that contextualize these subjects are Sexual Personae and Erotism. 

The Volks (Herd, Gang, Gathering, Mob)

The Volks