Bonnie Marranca: The Performance Marvelous
(p. 3)
11. Critics and artists are beginning
to talk about religious and spiritual elements of art and art practice.
There is a growing desire for the freedom to value a work of art for
its own rather than sociological qualities. Unsurprisingly, this shift
has brought about a return to discussions of "beauty," particularly
in the art world, which has a long history of involvement with this
term, in contrast to theatre. Given the spiritual dimension of modernism
and the artistic traditions of the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance
worlds, we are long past due for a progressive discussion of religion
and art to counter the extremes of reactionary cultural discourse.
12. Contemporary music had moved in
the direction of creating spiritually expressive composition more than
two decades ago. Whether in search of the sublime or in reaction to
serial music, many composers working today in the Western tradition
(often under the influence of Eastern art or philosophy) have turned
toward new forms of sacred music. Among them are: Henryk Gorecki, Arvo
PŠrt, Sofia Gubaidulina, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, Wynton
Marsalis, John Zorn, Jan Garbarek. Similarly, in this decade theatre
directors such as Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson have staged chamber
operas around the lives of saints. In the world of drama as well, many
playwrights, including Maria Irene Fornes, Erik Ehn, Adrienne Kennedy,
Tony Kushner, Richard Foreman, and The Wooster Group have shown an interest
in religious subject matter and iconography. Many of their plays are
rich in figures of God, Jesus, saints, and angels, and in scenes of
heaven and hell. Instead of the sermonizing of much contemporary American
drama, liturgical and scriptural styles of speech and prayer, biblical
and saint's writings, characterize these plays, which tend toward allegory,
epic, and parable. I gathered together a number of them in an anthology
entitled Plays for the End of the Century.
13. Now we can see a tendency in drama
towards intimacy, privacy, and the mind. Thus, even as contemporary
life is lived more and more publicly, and with a diminished sense of
the private, individuals have also turned inward. Perhaps the dramatic
form, which lags behind in its rhythms and has so much competition with
other increasingly spectacle-oriented experience, can reinvent itself
as an exceptional cultural space. Here one might find subtleties of
human acts and concentrated speaking and listening, even the long sentences
of complex thought, now disappearing from the public realm.
14. But, even as anonymous "characters"
interface on the net in transcontinental messaging, the drama is, still,
an alternative to the chatrooms of cyberspace. Drama has to do with
knowledge, not information; it is built on dialogue, not chatter. Theatre,
derived from the Greek word, "theatron" -- the root of "theory" -- is
a place for seeing, in the sense of illumination, enlightenment. To
browse is not to see. I must admit to being very skeptical of what is
called "interactive" or "performative" in this digital age. Are computers
really theatre? The performance vocabulary is extended into more and
more concepts, like "liveness" and "live presence" and "mediated presence."
Borders between sectors of human enterprise and habitation are increasingly
blurring which poses a great challenge in understanding the differences
between varieties of perceptual experience. The new narratives of language
and image and media are scattering about the globe in a rhizomatic frenzy.
15. Often overlooked in the contemporary
culture of speed and noise and exhibition is the role of art as a spiritual
discipline, a force of inner necessity that compels the artist to search
for an authenticity founded in emotional need. There is a fundamental
duality of purpose and expectation in the public perception of art.
Viewers are less willing to settle for the contemplative experience
and would prefer to accept the artist as an organizer of social reality.
But, artists are also interested in privacy, solitude, stillness, process,
even as they engage in the symbolization of experience. Some acts are
a matter of contingency, intuition, and technical problem-solving. And
let's not forget the sheer attachment of artists to the object and
materiality of their creations. What can this work be? How shall I make
it? Where will it take me? The Cagean idea of "self-alteration" through
the creation of artworks still continues to influence new generations
of artists. These may sound like simple questions, but they are bound
to the profound quest that moves the will towards genuine artistic life.
And, what cannot be overstated is the very real conflict between the
desire of artists to make work that reflects their attachment to the
world, even to making visionary works, at the same time that many of
them have abandoned the moral imperative of previous art-making. In
our time, aesthetic, formal, religious, social, and moral values are
fiercely undermined. But, what do we value in art any longer? For some,
the answer is to consider all life as art, while others speak of the
irrelevance of art. Which is it that we want more of: life or art? Finally,
are the real and virtual simply other names for the same longing?
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Bonnie Marranca is co-editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance
and Art and the author of several books, including Ecologies
of Theatre and Theatrewritings. She is Creative Director
of Performance Projects at Location One where her net-based program
"Locution" features
conversations with artists.
"The Performance Marvelous" is a revised extract
taken from a longer lecture given at the Portland Museum of Art (Maine)
in August 2000.
