this brings to mind something that Artaud wrote "il importe avant tout de rompre l'assujettissement du théâtre au texte, et de retrouver la notion d'une sorte de langage unique à mi-chemin entre la geste et la pensée" I've spent a good deal of my life living amongst insane people. Whether or not I'm insane is a matter of diagnosis. I wrote a screenplay about a young schizophrenic who becomes a an indy music star after having a psychotic episode on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Nobody was interested. I don't know why not. It was inspired in part by a neighbor I had when I lived in the Hotel Cecil. Some people in Los Angeles understand that the Hotel Cecil has great cultural importance but none of them understand how it has cultural importance. For that you have to live in the place.
Here's that Artaud quote, translated (by Google!) into English: "Above all, it is important to break the subjugation of theatre to the text, and to rediscover the notion of a sort of unique language halfway between gesture and thought."
I really love that, thank you for sharing it. A friend of mine told me about the notion of closet drama, which is a term for a play that's not intended for performance anywhere but in the mind of the reader. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closet_drama)
You said: "Nobody was interested. I don't know why not." I understand this, but I also think we never understand why anyone IS interested in our work. For me, this is one of the great failings of the way we invite engagement with theatre these days, that we never have the opportunity to know why anyone engaged with it, or what they might have taken away from it, if anything.
I've designed some evaluation processes that seek to address this, at least a little. Once I've finished posting 'four' I intend to talk about some of that here on Substack.
this brings to mind something that Artaud wrote "il importe avant tout de rompre l'assujettissement du théâtre au texte, et de retrouver la notion d'une sorte de langage unique à mi-chemin entre la geste et la pensée" I've spent a good deal of my life living amongst insane people. Whether or not I'm insane is a matter of diagnosis. I wrote a screenplay about a young schizophrenic who becomes a an indy music star after having a psychotic episode on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Nobody was interested. I don't know why not. It was inspired in part by a neighbor I had when I lived in the Hotel Cecil. Some people in Los Angeles understand that the Hotel Cecil has great cultural importance but none of them understand how it has cultural importance. For that you have to live in the place.
Here's that Artaud quote, translated (by Google!) into English: "Above all, it is important to break the subjugation of theatre to the text, and to rediscover the notion of a sort of unique language halfway between gesture and thought."
I really love that, thank you for sharing it. A friend of mine told me about the notion of closet drama, which is a term for a play that's not intended for performance anywhere but in the mind of the reader. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closet_drama)
You said: "Nobody was interested. I don't know why not." I understand this, but I also think we never understand why anyone IS interested in our work. For me, this is one of the great failings of the way we invite engagement with theatre these days, that we never have the opportunity to know why anyone engaged with it, or what they might have taken away from it, if anything.
I've designed some evaluation processes that seek to address this, at least a little. Once I've finished posting 'four' I intend to talk about some of that here on Substack.