Aesthetics--Koestler

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler weaves together a bunch of different ingredients around the idea of a "bisociative process"--the knowing that the art (which is imitative) is both not real and also real.  He compares it to living in two universes at once. The power of living in two universes is that we, as primarily self-interested individuals, are able to sympathize with a character(s) and ultimately experience self-transcendence.  The self-transcendence is the emotional portion of the aesthetic experience, which Koestler later equates to the "experience of beauty" (328).  By combining that "emotional catharsis" to the intellectual one, called the "moment of truth" or "intellectual illumination", an artist and a viewer can create and participate in an aesthetic experience, which Koestler styles and "'earthing' of emotion, on the analogy of earthing (or 'grounding') an electrically charged body" (328).

I liked the particular division that Koestler works with: intellectual + emotional = aesthetic.  For myself, I find that my highest aesthetic experiences are those in which both my senses and my thoughts are interacting and catalyzing each other.  I also appreciated that he included the compounding of "calory value"; it reminded me of Goodman's assertion that good art tends to be rich in number, relation, and reflexivity of signs.  But Koestler added that the "matrices" that produce the "emotive potential" in a work of art rely "partly on individual factors, partly on the collective attitudes of different cultures, but also on objective factors" (321).  The acknowledgement that objective and subjective both influence the artist and viewer rounds out towards Goodman's question of "When is art?" (emphasis mine) in emphasizing the temporality and ultimate instability of Art as opposed to art, which, I believe like Tolstoy says, is an act of sensory communication.

Koestler skirts the issue of "taste and distaste" by pointing out, essentially a la Nixon, that “If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together".  I admit I read an abreviated section of this book for class and so he may have delved deeper into the individual, cultural, and objective matrices at some other point in the book--but personal taste was just elided into "hey, good art uses pleasing and displeasing things to make unity".  This hits my New Criticism button and makes me raise an eyebrow.  While contrast is important, I would put taste and distaste into the section in which he discusses how "emotions are complex mixtures" (305).

Other things I appreciated: Koestler writes "Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle" (328).  While, I may not agree with his word choice (side-riff below*), I agree that art is an expander of individual awareness and that it is like religion.  In describing Christianity and Theatre, Asian American artist Joanna Wan-Ying Chan says, "When the curtain goes up on opening night, it has to be a common vision that we can own while in the meantime, each individual has made a contribution.  I think that's the most Christian process" furthermore that both religion and theater hit on "the sacredness of each individual while forging a community in a common project" (qtd in Kim 109).  This is important to me because I decided several years ago that theatre, art essentially, is for me an act of worship and of faith.  More on that in my manifesto.

I didn't agree with everything from Koestler, but there are several tools that struck a chord with me and called up particular beliefs and assumptions of mine.  Here are a couple quick quips/quotes:

"The two together--intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis--are the essence of the aesthetic experience." (328)
*"When it comes to putting aesthetical experiences into words, nothing short of a caesarian will help.  The surgical tool that I proposed was 'bisociation'; and the operation consisted in disentangling the various bisociative, or bifocal, processes which combine in the experience" (383) "the 'earthing' of emotion . . . an electrically charged body, so that its tensions are drained by the immense current-absorbing capacity of 'mother earth'." (328)  He hints around the feminine birth creation but can't quite bring himself to be so feminist.  So I laugh.
"The imbalance of the part is redeemed by the balance of the whole, by the triangle which lends unity to diversity" (386)
"Neither the artist, nor the beholder of his [or her] work, can slice his mind into sections, separate sensation from perception, perception from meaning, sign from symbol" (391)
"the intrinsic value of illusion itself.  It derives from the transfer of attention form the 'Now and Here' to the "Then and There'" (303)--the value of illusion is our ability to experience and sympathize with the "Other" essentially--what is not us becomes familiar and we sympathize, empathize with it.  This is fabulously valuable.

trans-inter-liminal-cultural

"Is this kind of interculturalism a sophisticated disguise for another installment of Orientalism or worse, of cultural rape?" Una Chaudhuri (qtd in Kim 102) re: Western directors appropriating and incorporating Asian and Asian-American non-realistic theatrical devices.

"I am a white girl."  Those words are difficult to write to see.  The first time I wrote the sentence it looked like this: "I am a middle-class white girl in the United States."  The sentence made me uncomfortable and so I stripped it down to the part that seems most alien to me: "white" 

My skin is very, very pale--but it's undertones are olive, not pink, suggesting my eastern European, Ukrainian ethnic heritage.  Of course, I am only a quarter Ukrainian, the rest is German, Polish, Scandanavian, English, Danish, Irish.  When I was a child, my doctors discovered that I had a blood disorder called Thalassemia Minor.  They were very confused and ended up testing my entire family.  The disorder is mild and requires no treatment, but it is usually found in people of Middle Eastern, Asian, and African decent.  My family jokes about the ancestor I have.  I grew up with adopted Hawaiian relatives, Fillipino friends, Korean, Japanese, and Kenyan friends.  On class heritage day in Fifth grade, I made perogies and pretended to go through Ellis Island as a Slavic ancestor.  I speak intermediate Spanish, broken but working French and Italian (I can find a bathroom), and niceties (hello, thank you, please, you're welcome) in Korean and Arabic.  I have traveled to many countries.  I attended East West Players and the Stanislavski summer school for my actor training.  I love theatre and I love how it makes cultural interactions and traditions and changes tangible.  My favorite plays are transcultural plays that show the interactions and blendings and liminal spaces where people live that feel part of and not a part of so many things.

I identify with Diana Taylor when she writes: "I overflowed with identifications, white and brown, English- and Spanish-speaking, Anglican and Catholic, us and them.  Mine felt like an entangled surplus subjectivity, full of tugs, pressures, and pleasures.  I continue to embody these tugs through a series of conflicting practices and tensions" (xv).  I'm with Ping Chong when he says "I began to think of the entire world as my culture.  I've developed a commitment to the sense that we are all together on this one little planet.  It's more and more important for us not to feel so foreign with one another" (qtd Kim 114). 

But when I say this, if I tried to run a multicultural play, I am afraid I will be judged by my skin color: "white girl."  I am afraid people will believe that I am appropriating with an underlying, unconscious agenda.  One that I cannot get away from because I am part of the privileged, dominant hegemony. But I do not identify completely with that title, it is only a part of who I am and far from definitive.

I find hope and and exciting possibilities for work in the chapter on Diversification of Asian American Theatre in Esther Lee Kim's A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 2006.).  I am relieved to find that I am not the only one who feels a part of many cultures.  I am relieved that others are blending and showing how the different groups interact and inform and relate and become and differentiate and grow one another.

I hope to join their ranks as I continue to produce, direct, act, and work in the art of Theatre.

An Act of Embodied Hope

“Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated . . . behavior” (Taylor 2-3)  “I believe it is imperative to keep reexamining the relationships between embodied performance and the production of knowledge” (Taylor xviii-xix) “What I am proposing is an active engagement and dialogue, however complicated” (Taylor 12).

Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (London: Duke UP, 2003).

I am still unsure what to write in response to this book.  I have written all over it.  I feel I want to perform something in response; to somehow reify the knowledge and expansion through which my brain has wandered by embodying it. 

I have many new words in my vocabulary—or signifiers whose pool of signifieds have productively expanded: scenarios, hauntology, indecipherability.  Even the episodic and tragic structures now have new meaning—a limit event or one that is related to others. 

The new knowledge at times exploded my ideas—which had to be reigned back in for focus (save if for another time).  For example, I need to go back to my paper about the roles performed by Princess Lissla Lissar in Robin McKinley’s retold fairy tale.  My initial paper permutations did not have the words to describe what I was talking about—the scenarios played with and changed by the author.  The embodied psyche performed by Lissar’s dog.  In point of fact, rape as an archival act of writing versus the embodied experience which cannot be accurately archived, only understood through embodied performance.  Trauma.  Another example, Faith as performative.  In church, the mantra “faith without works is dead” is used is so many ways.  But to write about it and understand it as a performed activity that reifies and embodies the archival knowledge of church doctrine.  The archive and the repertoire of spirituality work together.  Moving beyond Christianity, how does this understanding of religious action as performance and reinforcement of spiritual identity help us to have conversations and gain knowledge from the religious Other?  Again, Distracted, I was ready to recognize and discover the examples (contemporary and past) of the hegemony creating Aristotelian stories/tragedies and compare/contrast them to the multiple episodic narratives surrounding them.  Where is this happening? What effect is it having?

There was so much in this book that was generative for me.  It is difficult to pick any one thing.  But I will say this.  The book is about understanding performance in a world where cultures are colliding.  Some goals that stood out to me were: to be aware of the scenarios that reappear and (one might say) act as mini/maxi behavioral vortices, to understand the Americas as being united and full of commingled cultures—rather than falling prey to misleading endings implicated by scenarios, to understand the power and proliferatory facets of surrogation (I might say in the biophysical sense: the surrogate of children does not replace the mother but multiplies the position, and often, since the fertilization is achieved by artificial insemination, a surrogate will have twins or triplets—multiplying the family rather than replacing pieces of it), to remind us that beginning from a place of ignorance “we don’t know”—but we can learn—often leads us to richer more expansive discoveries and productive transculturation, and to know that thinking in terms of limit events cuts out experiences that we need to internalize and perform in conjunction with other events, performances and people—an active witness can make connections and meaning, while a spectator is dismissed as non-participatory. 

I still struggle to understand at times—meaning not that I don’t understand at all, but that I recognize that I am only on the surface of understanding many of these things.  I am sure that with more experience, more learning, more encounters (intense ones for all the Rollo May scholars in the house), I will understand more. 

Taylor’s discussion of the episodic, Denise Stoklos’ intense effort to communicate, and the repeated act called to mind “Einstein on the Beach,” but not analogously.  I’m not sure.  This thought did not quite finish.

Overall, there was a freedom and a joy to the knowledge and language I received from “This book . . . destined for the archive” (52).  Taylor’s celebration of the multiplicity and her faith that despite the terrible things “The peasants die, but not before they have found the seeds of life.” (190)  There are multiple seeds of life and the possibilities continue to expand and recreate/rebirth.  People create and perform new memes and meanings, new endings for the scenarios that haunt our transcultural performances.  It’s not the end.  I find tremendous hope and courage in this book.  The archival language that is articulated breaks down limits that keep the dialogue from moving toward healthy permutations of performance.  It’s something that I am passionate about and only now am seeing the words, the language to describe what I could sense but not see. 

Why Theatre?

“The “secret” of theatre’s power is dependent upon the “truth” of the illusion.  Enfolded within fiction, theatre seeks to display the line between visible and invisible power” –Peggy Phelan, Unmarked qtd in Shimakawa 57

Why theatre?  “The spontaneous and confrontational aspects of live theatre presented themselves as an antidote to the forced invisibility of Asian Americanness produced through abjection, counter it with not mere inclusion of Asian Americanness in the spectrum of the visible but with a spotlit focus on it. Additionally, traditional Western theatre’s presentational layering of body/actor/character lends itself to a political agenda of Asian American theatre artists like Gotanda”—Karen Shimakawa 67 (National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage.  Duke UP: London, 2002. Print)

Karen Shimakawa spends a good amount of time explaining why theatre is a particularly apt social space to examine, expose, counter, and critically mime the national abjection that characterizes the anti-Asian Americanc racism that has been prevalent in White American culture.  The answer is important to me.  To say that the purpose of theater is merely to entertain or instruct oversimplifies what happens through the process of study, rehearsal, and performance.  The variety and amount of people involved in and necessary to the process—each one and group bringing something to the cauldron. 

I had the privilege of studying with East West Players in the summer of 2006; right after seeing the first production of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face—a play about the Miss Saigon scandal and specifically Hwang’s part in it, but he issue at stake was the question of being Asian American and what that means in the social and theatrical realms.  At the time, I knew little more about the Miss Saigon incident than what I learned in the play, but I had grown up with a lot of Asian American students.  In my school, white was the minority.  When I studied at East West, I was the only student without at least one Asian-American parent—I was the only white girl.  While I was conscious of my race at the beginning, my classmates adopted me. I was already familiar with Asian and Asian-American culture, topics, cuisine, as well as the general American background we shared as a core group (5 of us in every class).  In one of our acting classes (with other students), once or twice a week there was about an hour of time spent on what I came to see as Asian-American Theatre therapy.  Theatre was not a popular or accepted choice for many of the students, and their communities and families often provided pressure.  As an Asian-American theatre company, this was an issue that was important for the teachers to address.  I found myself trying to assimilate and listening a lot.

I remember one exercise that two of my classmates worked on in a scene in which two sisters were fighting: they were both Korean American and so were the characters.  The actress playing the older sister in the scene was asked if she spoke Korean—she did.  Our instructor asked her to say her lines in Korean in the scene.  The actress playing the younger sister did not speak Korean as fluently, but she understood it—her lines remained in English.  The scene exploded.  Using the other language deeply connected both actresses to what was happening.  It was one of many times that I wished I had been part of a more multicultural family—though I have learned since that I am multicultural, if not in a visible way. 

Up until my experience there, I had been very nervous about theatre as a career choice; the general view of actors and theatre practitioners is not a particularly positive one where I grew up.  Learning and working at East West players was the first place that I felt the answer to “Why Theatre,” beyond knowing that I loved it.  The company treated theater as not only an entertaining performance, but also a way to understand, explore, challenge, and correct different baggage that those involved had as individuals and as a community.  The immediacy and tangibility of theater was actively engaged to understand not just characters but actors, directors, audience, and others.  American society/People society is full of problems (I use the word broadly, deliberately), and theatre is able to both instruct and entertain while going deeper than that.  Shimakawa mentioned different ways to use theater to counter abjection, including: presenting more realistic characters and critical mimesis.  What other methods exist?  How else do we use theatre’s fiction to tell the Truth? How do different plays and performances, styles and groups use the medium to explore, contradict, grow, change? 

It’s a puzzle that I enjoy being a part of, in any way I can.

And the Parade Rumbles On =)

I have just read/encountered a brilliant, brain stretcher of a book.  Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Roach uses the metaphor of a parade as a way into understanding the forward progression and backward study of cultural memory and identification through performances in liminal spaces—specifically the circum-Atlantic trade triangle of the early modern period.  He specifically is interested in kinesthetic imagination (cultural memory through physical performance), behavioral vortices (locations that exist on the interactive borders of several cultures, thereby drawing the performances in), and displaced transmission (practices of cultural memory and identity that are transplanted, adapted and adopted).  His method is to compare historical texts (of all sorts) with contemporary texts (of all sorts) in order to see how that parade—in which surrogates must arise to take the place of the things that pass away (thereby remembering and reinventing identity)—restores behaviors from their “scripted records” (11).  Roach’s work reads like a parade itself, wandering down the street of the pages as people, themes, and events weave in and out in the interactions. 

I found this book particularly interesting because it is a period that I have studied in terms of literature, criticism, historical research, and dramatic literature—it is the research topic of my favorite Professor from my masters.  It was a challenging read in the best possible way, and I responded to it on many different topics.  As a result, I’m going to go in a couple different directions with this, so bear with me.

1.) Theater & Performance as a Creation of Cultural Memory

As both a performer and a director—as well as someone who is often painfully aware of perceived authenticity or inauthenticity of social performance, Roach struck me with his observations of performers both as caretakers/makers of memory and as effigies/mediums of that cultural definer (77-78).  The majority of theater companies and productions that I have worked with/on resurrected plays from the past because there was something within the play that they wanted to remember or recreate in the memory of society/community.  It might have just been the “greatness” of that play or a respect for Shakespeare (but then what is that greatness but cultural performance that for one reason or another deserves to be remembered as part of a cultural identity) or perhaps it was the perspective the play could shed on current events (and then it is both a restored and surrogated script).    Still, theater is being used to transmit cultural memories and ideas.  For example, The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh just closed at the Hilberry (our Wayne State graduate theater) this weekend.  It is a play about an Irish community on an Irish Island.  While the play is considered a “comic masterpiece” (http://www.druid.ie/productions/the-cripple-of-inishmaan-2011) by the Druid Theatre in Ireland, one of the important professional theater companies in Ireland, the Hilberry production played up the magical and heartrending elements of the story in an Americanized view of the magic of Ireland and a young man’s struggle for life (more than in Ireland), liberty (from his communal place as cripple), and the pursuit of happiness (the girl).  While these elements are to some degree present, the Hilberry production highlighted them, bringing a unique performance of American memory and culture out of the Irish play. 

2.) Celebrity as effigy (76)

Theater and Movies (a new permutation) still formalize the structural performances and signs of society.  While our theater actors rarely find such celebrity as Thomas Betterton, our movie actors occupy roles of celebrity as effigy.  They occupy that liminal space where they are of us but not of us—we speak of them in conversation by their first names and gossip about the intimate details of their lives, but are just as willing to enact performances of waste on them in the form of verbal and textual violence.  Newsweek magazine published an article in 2010 redefining celebrity as the 21^st century art form—life as story.  Life as performance art. 

3.)  Internet Ghost Dancing

The internet multiplies points of contact and intersection between cultures and ideas—the ludic spaces, the behavioral vortices. And everyday performances are filmed and uploaded at a blistering degree, while the cultural process of remembering/forgetting rapidly pushes forward.  Myspace (which has given way to facebook) has a fascinating permutation in the webspace selvage between life and death—it’s called mydeathspace. Mydeathspace is an archive of those pages including a short obituary stating how and when the user died and a link to the deceased’s myspace page.  Reading the pages is a fascinating connection point between the living and the dead, who seem to live on in cyberspace. When a myspace user dies, their profile page remains in place; their friends and relatives continue to post periodically on the page like a ritual—like a cyber ghost dance.  Like the Native American religious ritual that Roach describes, the interactions function as “a rite of memory” between the living and the dead (208). 

4.) Community and Displaced Transmission

When discussing groups, Roach observes that as communities create/recreate/remember/forget their identities, they do not function like bodies—which need all their different pieces to survive—rather they function like a quilt which can patch together and lose lots of things, the goal being a cohesive quilt instead of a functioning organism (191).  In my mind this observation is in conversation with Miranda Joseph’s book.  Both Joseph and Roach agree that the idea of community is one that reifies identities based on exclusion and inclusion—which can (a la Mardi-gras and the non-profit), in the guise of challenging the oppressive system, actually support/supplement/reinforce that very system.  Roach also seems to be pointing out the problem that while “community resides in shared conceptions of legitimate performances . . . these conceptions are not fixed and immutable; they are subject to fluctuations and negotiations” (86).  The fluctuation and negotiation are precisely where Roach situations his research and ideas, which are at once fascinating, disturbing, and generative.  

Well, in place of a conclusion, I will say that the parade goes on.  My brain continues to percolate and my homework continues to pile up.  Until next time, I heartily recommend the book.