Meta-dramatic Irony and Patrick Stewart

In our discussion today on child actors and the ways in which they change our view of Handke's Offending the Audience, one of the key issues is the child as a meta-dramatic statement. Having children insult the audience and perform a manifesto aimed at adult theatre-goers creates an ironic distance between the child player and the character they are playing. This often results in comedy.

In that context, I think it is interesting to consider these two clips. A similar kind of meta-dramatic irony is operating here, and the result is comedic, but instead of a child, the subject is a celebrity.

Our perception of irony and a double awareness of the illusion and reality of theatre is heightened in the Handke clip because of our assumptions about the nature of children. How is that perception altered when the illusion/reality awareness revolves around a celebrity instead? Also, these clips are pretty funny.

Youtube- Life's Too Short

Youtube - Extras 

Witmore, Choose Your Own Adventure, and Mass Effect 3

 

Just in Case you were wondering

"Three boys appear before the third trumpet sounds to debate who will speak the prologue . . . There is also a Stoppardian twist, since the boys decide initially to settle the dispute by drawing straws--what exactly is a chance event on stage?"

 Mass Effect 3 Wikia

One of the blog recommendations we received today was to break articles apart and pull out quotes or single ideas to help digest and integrate them into our own process. This idea is quite a large leap from a small quote in the Witmore article.

Witmore brings up the possibility of a random event onstage that would dramatically effect the outcome of the stage, just as the presence of child actors does in a less localized way. This made me think of a series of gimmicky, ridiculous books that I enjoyed very much in elementary school called Choose Your Own Adventure. Maybe some of you encountered these literary gems at some point in your life as well. Each book presents a basic scenario in which the hero is the reader, addressed in the second person. You are the inventor of a supercomputer, you are making first contact with an alien race, you are the recipient of a magically fast bicycle. At the end of each scene, you are presented with a choice, and you flip to the page number where the story of your choice continues.

This kind of device is employed in a more sophisticated way in games like Mass Effect, where the player as protagonist makes choices that determine the outcome of the game. The choices presented in games like these are increasingly becoming difficult, gray-area problems rather than simple good-and-evil options.

All this makes me wonder if a device like this could be employed on a stage. Introducing a truly random event at key moments in the play could result in infinite versions of the same scenario, and it would highlight the fact that each performance is unique and unrepeatable, dependent on the actors, crew, audience, and whims of nature and technology. It would require a flexibility on the part of the performers that goes beyond script and would become a kind of semi-scripted improv. Bring the audience in on the decisions or random events that affect the play and they become active participants in the drama.

I don't know if it would be possible to create a play like this, or if the resulting creation could even be called a play, but it might be a fruitful experiment in chance events on stage. At the very least, it would bring back memories of those Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Artaud, Brecht, and the Creation of Myth

http://www.patheos.com/blogs

http://www.gandalf.org/

http://suite101.com/article/introduction-to-norse-mythology-ragnarok-a112486

http://www.logoi.com/pastimages/king_arthur.html

http://ashtheviking.blogspot.com

Reading Artaud's "No More Masterpieces," I found his vision of the theater both compelling and offensive. It was compelling because of his honesty in seeking to create something that is most difficult and cruel for himself, and yet capable of powerfully affecting anyone. But maybe because I am personally and professionally rooted in text, and very old text, I had instinctive misgivings about his blanket statement that words are dead after they have been uttered: "the masterpieces of the past are good for the past; they are not good for us."

But even as a person devoted to very old things, I like Artaud's insistence on creating art that is alive, breathing and beating and sweeping people up, and I recognize that Old English manuscripts don't ordinarily do that anymore. Still, I think there is a way to make living art without dispensing with form and structure and past in the way he suggests.

Artaud talks about theater as a reflection of magic and rites, which put people in touch with a more profound state of perception. When he uses the word 'actively' he glosses it as "magically, in real terms." Maybe what he is seeking as a way to vivify performance and make it truly performative and effective and transformative is the power of myth, which is what animated the original texts and what continues to animate and move us today.

The myths of the past still retain something of their power for those who can enter into them imaginatively and historically, but the myths of the present are exponentially more powerful. They are the narratives that form our identity both consciously and unconsciously, and they tap into the primal, ritual part of ourselves that Artaud seeks to awake. They are the vibrations through the snake's belly.

To see the dead myths of the past living again, you only need to look at the way the old symbols and images and stories are reused, modified, and retold in art, literature, drama, politics, religion, and everyday life. Words are dead when they have lost their connection with living myth, but like a spirit leaving a body, the myth is endlessly reincarnated and born again. It is not the theater that Artaud imagines or describes in this article, but possibly it is a theater that would satisfy his desire for magic, ritual, and an understanding of ourselves that is profound and transformative.

Books I Love, Part 2

In this addition to my private bibliography, I give you the books that have made me a medievalist. I look forward to exploring these works,authors, and themes in greater detail over the next several years.

The Eddas- When I first started looking at medieval literature, I was immediately attracted to this simple, powerful poetry and vigorous prose. It has a quality of strangeness and mystery that drew me, and the gods and heroes of the poems are complex and intriguing. As much as I love the poems themselves, I also love the suggestions of other stories beneath them, the glimpses at the depths of history and myth, and the tantalizing quality of its lost allusions.

 

The Sagas- Reading the Eddas eventually brought me to the Old Norse sagas, of which I have still only read a handful. There is so much in them to study and discover and translate, and it is a shame that they are so little known. They have some of the strangeness of the Eddas, and they also share their simplicity and terseness. Dialogue plays an important role and provides some of the best lines of the sagas: In one saga, a man who has just been run through with a spear looks down at the weapon and before he dies tells the killer that his blade is indeed quite sharp. They are full of powerful and flawed characters, and they have flashes of humor and moments of great tragedy. My favorites so far are Laxdaela saga, Gisla saga Surssonar, and Egils saga.

Beowulf- An Old English tutor helped me to see the complexity and pathos of this poem in a new way, and it changed my perspective on medieval literature as a whole. Like many of the Icelandic sagas, Beowulf is a Christian work written about pagans, and the poet reveals the contradictions and ambiguities in Beowulf’s existence in a way that is subtle and disquieting. He compounds the human tragedy of Beowulf’s death with a spiritual tragedy that is more difficult to accept.

C.S. Lewis- I grew up with Narnia, and I liked the books just fine as a child. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to appreciate them in different ways. I like the way Lewis uses myth and legend in his stories, and the way he thinks about the relationship of paganism to Christianity. It was also through Lewis that I first read about the Norse myths. My favorite books of his are Surprised by Joy, Perelandra, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and The Magician’s Nephew.

J.R.R. Tolkien- No other book has had as profound and extensive an influence on my life as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I first read it in high school, and I thought it was a very good book. Then I read it again the next year and found it was even better. I’ve read the trilogy several times now, and each time it gives me something new. His thought is as challenging as Le Guin’s, and his world even more fully realized. His work is more complete and ordered than Lewis’, stronger because it is more autonomous. It offers the allusive glimpses into a wider world of myth that the Eddas have, and it owes much to the style and language of the Old Norse sagas. I also admire Tolkien’s scholarly work and the principles by which he lived. His essay “The Monsters and the Critics” is the turning point in Beowulf scholarship, from which all modern scholars now proceed, and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien reveals something of his personality and beliefs. My favorite works of his besides The Lord of the Rings are The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Children of Hurin, the translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the essay “On Fairy Stories.”

Books I Love, Part 1

Everyone has a kind of personal bibliography, either internal or in a file somewhere, a list of books that have shaped our interests and helped make us who we are. I would like to share my own list with you.  These authors come from my much longer list of favorite books called The Dictator’s Book Club—if I ever happen to become a dictator or a tenured professor, these books will be required reading for my subjects.

                This list of influences is still very fluid, and if I return to it in ten or five years it may look very different. At this moment, though, these are the authors who have shaped my academic interests and my taste in books. The best of them have changed the way I look at the world and at myself. I’m sure you will already be familiar with many of them, but if any are new to you, I hope you will someday look them up and tell me what you think.

Thomas Hardy- I have Dr. Scott Borders to thank for acquainting me with Hardy. He frequently assigns his novels in a few different classes (I’ve read Jude the Obscure for him twice), and I got to take a Special Topics class that focused solely on his novels and poetry. No other novelist of the prolific 19^th century can match Hardy’s ability to combine suspenseful plots with a bold examination of social issues. My favorite Hardy novels are Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Return of the Native.

Soren Kierkegaard- I hesitated to include Kierkegaard because I’ve only started reading his work and because literature is, of course, superior to philosophy. However, even this brief introduction has changed the way I think about faith and daily existence, and I see myself applying his thought to literature and to my life. The most influential works here are Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Sickness unto Death.

Jane Austen- I’ve loved Austen for a long time, and my appreciation of her work grows every time I return to it. She is one of the masters of the craft—her novels are clean and precise, without a sentence or scene more or less than is needed, and her characters are lively and true. She had a keen eye for observation and human nature, and her novels can still make us laugh all these years later. Her best novels are Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

Mark Twain- When I read Austen I remember Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, but when I read Twain I remember Twain. His personality is stamped on all of his works, and the treat of reading him is hearing his wit and humor. But his humor also has a bite. He was a fearless writer and fierce critic of his own era, and his writing is still challenging for our own.  Huckleberry Finn is some of his best work, of course, and also Pudd’nhead Wilson and Letters from the Earth.

Isabel Allende- The House of the Spirits introduced me to magical realism, a technique/genre that I have found fascinating ever since. Allende’s work has an emphasis on story and memorable characters that I’ve always preferred over the better-known magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In addition to House of the Spirits, I recommend Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna.

Isaac Asimov- When I first picked up a book of his short stories, I looked through the first couple pages and immediately abandoned the other book I had been reading. I find his writing and ideas fascinating. He is a very pure science fiction writer and his work revolves around technology and new ideas, but he always considers carefully the personal and social influence of the technology he imagines. It’s amazing how often he has been right. His stories “The Last Question,” “The Bicentennial Man,” and “Evidence” are among the best.

Ursula K. Le Guin- I first picked up a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea in a used book store sometime early in college. Since then, Le Guin has risen to a secure second-place spot in my book club. She differs from many of my other favorite authors by being American and alive. A prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, she writes with a more anthropological focus than Asimov. Her strength is vividly imagining alien worlds as complex and real as our own and using them to examine social issues and universal humanity. Her books more than any others have made me rethink my ideas about race and gender, what is truly human and what is socially constructed, and what is beautiful and fearful about each. My favorites are the Earthsea cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories.