history of avant garde theatre [pt. 1] @ london_resonance

1. Antonin Artaud ["Pour en finir avec le judgement de dieu"] and Carmelo Bene ["Majakovskij"]

words _ Gian Paolo Galasi

Antonin Artaud

“Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose. Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations. From the beginning, one might say its shadows did not tolerate limitations. Our petrified idea of the theater is connected with our petrified

idea of a culture without shadows, where, no matter which way it turns, our spirit encounters only emptiness, though space is full.” 


“All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. ” (Antonin Artaud, from "The theatre and its double")

After the end of the II World War, the French radio attended to recast all the abolished voices of the native culture of that time. One of them was the surrealist poet, playwriter, actor Antonin Artaud, that between Nov. 22 and 29, 1947, recorded for the French ORTF Radio the broadcasting of "Pour en finir avec le judgement de dieu" ["To have done with the judgement of god", with the minor 'g']. 

In Artaud intentions, the broadcast would have been, finally, an attempt to fully realize what he was seeking in his quest for a theatre that, in fact, advanced every form of contemporary performance art. 'Cruel', since refusing to get to an esthetic rendition and to go beyond the 'force' of the actions, while on the scene. The recordings involved Artaud's partner Paule Thévenin, actress Maria Casarés - featured as 'the death' in Jean Cocteau's "Orphée", his close friend and actor Roger Blin, plus xylophones as an introduction to the 'Tutuguri's [mexican indians - ndr] rite of the Black Sun', the centre of the text. 

Even if the broadcast is in some way the zenith of Artaud's researches on the subjects of theatre, ritual, and the difference between reality and representation, it is in many way incomplete, putting again the stress on the meaning of the words, focusing only here and there on the sound itself and of his vibrations. Only partially this passage from words to sounds becomes clear: when Roger Blin reaches some primeval rhythms or ritual chants, or when Maria Casarés stresses the vocals, moduling the frequences and so trying to orchestrate the sound of the voice itself. 

Carmelo Bene

"Theatre is a non-place, it is under cover from every history. It is beyond the evidence. The audience is a martyr - etymologically, 'witness'. But despite every effort, audience would never been able to tell about what he listened to, what possessed it in its surrendering" Carmelo Bene (1937 - 2002) was an Italian actor, playwriter, poet, movie director. He debuted in 1959 with a Caligola that was very appreciated by Albert Camus himself. 

Close friend and also a collaborator of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - that gratified the actor with some beautiful pages from the second volume of his L'image-temps, and then wrote with him an entire book, Superpositions - and deep connoisseur of Pierre Klossowski, an intellectual at the border of official French culture but a pupil of Rainer Maria Rilke - Klossowski's mother was in a relationship with the poet - and of André Gide, Carmelo Bene was at the crossroads of the most important undercurrents of the 'alternative' culture of the 20th Century. 

Influenced by Nietzsche and structuralism, by the paintings of Francis Bacon and by James Joyce's Ulysses, in 1960 - and then again until the 5th edition in 1980 - he took the poems of Vladimir Majakovskij, the Russian revolutionary poet, as the starting point to his studies on voice, on voiding words from its meaning, and on using the voice itself as a full orchestra. 

Helped for the music initially by Sylvano Bussotti, and subsequently by his contemporary Gaetano Giani Luporini, Bene's quest for a theatre that goes beyond the meaning - representing the ego, betraying so his deep insights in Eastern traditions, but also the aesthetics in art - in 'Majakovskij' passes through the stretching of the dynamics and possibilities of the voice, emphasizing the words as a mix of gestures and phonetic elements. 

Through the years, Bene added to the 'theatre of the phoné' ideas taken from both structuralism and Nietzsche's philosophy about time. The result was a theatre in which every action were obstructed by every sort of empasse - Lorenzaccio - and in which an iconoclastic relationship with the image of the theatre itself pushed him to take some classics - Shakespear's Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III and Othello - rewriting the texts so to get rid of some elements, displacing or stretching distinguishing marks of the dramas in order to distort the original meaning, leaving only a score of gestures rhythmically conducted through a scheme reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze's in his 'Difference and repetition'. 

So in his Othello as an example, Jago is jealously in love with Othello himself - but without any reference to homosexuality, while Desdemona's handkerchief becomes bigger and bigger turning into a net preventing the assassination - suspension of the tragic; in his Hamlet, the prince of Denmark wants only to go to Paris with an actress - instead of playing with her the death of his father, transforming the famous 'to be or not to be' into 'to have or not to have', while Desdemona dresses as a lay nun just to be constantly slapped and smacked - out of eros and into the obscene; Macbeth and his lady, finally, are making their bed with bloody blankets that leave no traces on the bed himself.

"Now's the time to really start and have confidence with words. I don't mean 'the Word', as in 'the Gospel', but 'words'. Language fuck with you. It drills you. Language pierce you and you don't even notice. You spit on Einstein, on the best Freud, on the beyond of the principles of pleasure. You take up and clap the obvious, and made a prick out of it, in return of yours. [...] Art is piping, it is the will of self-espression." -- Carmelo Bene

"Being a stranger, but in your own language. Stuttering, stammering within the language itself, not only with the words. Bene would add: talking to yourself, but in the middle of the marketplace. Stuttering usually is a disorder of the language, but stuttering the language is something different. It means to impose to the language, to all the inner part of the language, phonologicals, syntacticals, semanticals, the plotting of a continuous variation [...] being a stranger in its own language ... It doesn't mean to talk as an Irish or a Rumenian talking French [...], it is dictating to the language, since we're talking plainly and soberly, the line of variation that will make out of everyone a stranger in its own language; or, out of a foreign language, our own language; or, out of our own language, a permanent bilinguism for our own extraneousness".

Discography

Antonin Artaud, Pour en finir avec le judgement de dieu [Sub Rosa, 1996]

Carmelo Bene, Il teatro laboratorio Majakovskij e Garcia Lorca [LP RCA Edizioni letterarie, 1962, out of print]

Carmelo Bene, Carmelo Bene - Majakovskij [Double LP Fonit Cetra, 1980, out of print]

Bibliography

Antonin Artaud, 'The theatre and its double' - Grove Press, 1994

Gilles Deleuze, 'Cinema 2: The Time-Image' - University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Carmelo Bene Gilles Deleuze, 'Superpositions' - Les Editions De Minuit, 1979

HAPPY NEW (Y)EAR

words: gian paolo galasi
photos and videos: the internet

... and Merry Xmas

I have to say that I never really trusted in Marc Augé and his radical-chic 'non lieux' anthropology. 

The first thing that strikes me is that at the moment science is developing very quickly and, on the other hand, the inequality between those who are close to the poles of knowledge and those who are disconnected, those who are even unable to read or write, this difference is growing more quickly than the difference between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor. If we project these changes into the future, we may fear a world in which, rather than generalised democracy, there develops an aristocracy around the poles where knowledge, money and power concentrate, and a mass of consumers, and an even larger mass of non-consumers, those who are excluded from both consumption and knowledge. In the end, it may be that this competition between cities has some connection, more or less conscious, with this hypothetical future. It is possible to imagine that the smaller cities are further ahead in this competition than the other, larger and more powerful cities. And all this, this competing between cities to carve out a niche for themselves, is made evident in architecture: there are some ten or twenty well-known architects whose buildings the cities of the world want to have, because having them, having one of their iconic works, means making a place for yourself on this international network. It seems clear that Barcelona might be one of these cities in competition.

The real problem Augé seems to avoid, is the fact that the times of the 'symbolic=connection', or the times of 'connection=symbolic', are finally over and, possibly, forever. And that this is a truth that concerns power (whatever that word means today) so much as 'the poor'. 

Augé talks about places and circulation, and about architrecture as far as rationalizing spaces and communications. Performance art dealt in the last decades so much with the virtual, the symbolic, the connection, the place, the inside, the outside. At the point that, since art is always a way to approach and reflect reality, now we know that such words are completely meaningless. 

It was different at the times of psychoanalisis, the last of the western - materialistic as far as western - religions. Sigmund Freud and his fellows - Carl G. Jung, Mélanie Klein, Wilhelm Reich - and the subsequent surrealistic movement - from André Breton and Louis Aragon to Joan Mirò, Louis Bunuel and Antonin Artaud - were all looking for a connection  almost in the same way. Possibly only Jacques Lacan was really looking far ahead - in the west. The video of the Italian actor Carmelo Bene, from his Macbeth Horror Suite, seem to be the completion of Lacan's reflections on the voice, so people interested in this blog as a vehicle for music are not far from their own commitment here - but not even compelled to. 

The really interesting thing in Jacques Lacan idea - a Freudian concept passed through Saussure's linguistic studies - of the relationship between the self and the other - the other that gives shape to the self, as in every western conception of reality, projective and divided as it is every western idea of the self - is that it is the voice to represent the symbolic liaison, the law, and to be a guarantee for the subject, for the self, that the law will be respectful of its reality, that the self will never be disrupted, distroyed.

If psychosis, schizofrenia, paranoia, is so the result of a lack of guarantee that the other - the mother, the father, society, the law, the power - is respectful of the unity of the self, every artistic representation involving such concepts in reality has gone thus far. Art in some way is kind of affected from a borderline personality disorder: is to push directly the listener, or the seer, or the reader, to elaborate questions about the law, to the order, the symbolic, the self.

That's why since almost a couple of centuries, in which the explosion of codes and rules in every art field was nothing more than a way to break through the aestetics as a matter of consoling - the refusal to be 'bourgeois' - passed through the attempt to give back - over the stage, over the frame, over the lines - to the absence of mediations. 

Do you remember the 'motto': art is antisocial? You got it. But in some way the effort of every creative urge is so totalitarian - think about the attempt of every artist to create its own personal language in order to communicate new contents through new forms and to be recognizable as such, as unique - that can also be considered violent, and so at the opposite of a revolution - at least of a democratic one. Art is fascist? Some artist was accused of that. Glenn Branca, as an example - and by the like of John Cage, nonetheless. Art deals with love, and death is part of it. Think to be able of getting rid of the contradiction? You aren't. Because you are in the middle. As art. So, you got to dance.

I know how risky is to get through similar items and so go ahead with such a discussion, but the whole point is, if big concepts are the same, and we want to avoid to talk in vain about unreal things, what's really, so to speak, real, or true? And, more, are we so sure to really been able to avoid abstraction nowadays? Are we sure that the world of the non-idiomatic is really or, at least, always the world of the essential, of the in-between? 

In a discussion with a famous avant garde trumpet player I had some months ago in Italy, we were at a certain point discussing about the idea that no one now is dealing with creating anything new for a lack of courage in going outside the mainstream. The day after - it was an intensive interview sessions - another musician, famous as such, a saxophone player, told me about his non believing in 'new forms in art'. But it is a fact that, when he started to play, what he was doing sounded really new. And it is new even today, if you approach it for the first time. 

Nine months after, and I'm sometimes so frightented about how much new stuff I'm discovering, and about how much I feel the need to have more informations and skills about even the old stuff I love and I want to write about, that I'm still grateful for not living only with my writing about music, and to have the opportunity to take my time. Possibly, the most interesting and - as far as me - truthful concept elaborated by a living artist in depicting the situation, is Anthony Braxton 'tri-centric vibrational dynamics'. 

The idea that we are dealing everyday with informations in order to manage with our own lives, that art and music is part of that and that creativity can be dangerous for every wrong circulation of informations: Braxton states that usually establishment gives informations about the 'lower partials' - e.g.: 'Charlie Parker was a genius and a drug addicted' - without any regard for the 'upper partials' - the social conditions and the artistic background of every Charlie Parker - diffusing so an idea of 'revolution' - even of 'artistic revolution' that is mutilated and an idea of artistic personality mediated through romanticism and psychologicism.

That's what probably, outside of the psychoanalitic mythology, Lacan was referring to with the term 'manque' ('lack', in English). The same Diamanda Galàs was referring to when talking about the 'plague' of the AIDS as provoked by mass media. The same Amiri Baraka was referring to when talking about the lack of a sociological study on the 'negro music' in the USA. But what about today, in 2011, in London?

Since my first three months here, it seems to me that there's no such an artistic movement or artist nowadays able to express the contradictions I'm beginning to see there. After three months living in the Zone 2, I relocated at the borders of the Zone 3, in East Ham. Not that far there is Canary Wharf, one of the most important financial districts of the city, while at the border of my block there is a building used as a mosque. 

I'm so happy, at least for the moment, to be able to pass through all those different environments, since I really fear every definite form of steadiness. As far as my own experience, when you get to a point in which you staunch it all forever, you really begin to die. And to vanish. Back to London as a topic, no. There is no artistic form that try to condensate, to express, all the complexity of what you can see. 

Improvised music, the one you can find here, is different than in the USA. Not different musically: avant-garde jazz in the US is really an interesting and almost complete expression of the American society at its best - you can check my alter blog Complete Communion for that, though I have never been personally in the USA. Here in the UK instead, improvised and avant-garde music is, in a typical English style, a 'particular' that want to avoid by definition to reach a wider landscape. 

Sabo Toyozumi and Adam Lindson at the Oto Club - my photo

It has interesting aspect reflecting totality as every particular, but in a manner not always conscious of its contradictions, sometimes even at his best, showing itself as disconnected. Skim through my past reviews and you'll see at what extent, and with what risks. 

Same is for the myriads of ethnic related and non ethnic related music: East-Europe folk, reggae, afrobeat, house, metal. The two vectors are: respect of a tradition and sometimes the direct presence of a legacy in the shape of lieutenants of the prime movers - but rarely this get to a pure and void cult of personality, usually the promises are maintained - and on the other hand every crosspollination possible - but inside the boundary of given coordinates: you can listen to Algerian afrobeat mixed with a balkan tinge played onstage by musicians coming from Italy - horns players moslty, Egypt and Nigeria together, or to an entire night of 'noise' music that is mostly mutant heavy metal, with bands composed by two drumsets, a bass and a singer, or two guitars and drums, or a sigle guitar, but you will never meet - at least, i still didn't meet - a crossover in the proper sense of the world. 

Go to the Southbank Centre, and there is a place for jazz, ethnoworld and contemporary music, but it is the same - and again, you'll hear Ornette Coleman or Toumani Diabate, but not Stephen O' Malley and Sunn O))). The effect so, is sometimes - mostly on the European side, to tell you the truth - the one of an orde of illegitimate Lovercraft sons. And that's why I completely disagree with Augé analysis of society - even if in the quote he's talking about Barcelona, and not London. Everyone of us seem to have access to communication and to express ourselves and realize ourselves (vertical relationships).

What's really missing here is the ability - for reasons still unknown to me: since my arrival here I communicated with few Italians, and mostly, and for my precise will, with English, French, Romanian, Brazilian, Bangladesi and African-American people - to build horizontal relationships. Artistically, there is not such. You know what that mean, socially speaking. That's why I was quoting Lacan: as far as it seems, we here are all (over?)protected, but not communicating between us. 

And this is the - unconsciously but precisely expressed - judgement we have on the symbolic: we all don't believe in it nor in ourselves, but we try to relate first and foremost with it and each other through it. And the art here, at least music, is a pure and clear reflection of it all. As always.