Diderot and the Lapdancer: Interlude 1, a poetic battle

Is not my body beautiful? She said, slipping from her dress.
Many things are beautiful: it’s just what we like the best.

Does not my revelation inspire you to adore me?
I honour the upright, he replied. You’re distracting, a debauchery.

Your denial of attraction suggests God just got it wrong
In creating skin so fair and my limbs so comely long.
I feel only pity for your sorry pretty vice:
You are just mistaking bad things for the nice.

Do I practice without reason, a science imperfect?
Your metaphysic’s already clear: it’s just cause and effect.

You resist this sacred moment, you cling to social codes...
A good man when unhappy still knows the happy road.

You are talking like a Stoic, but you were born an Epicure.
Attachment is no virtue, but virtue is its cure.

Be passive in your enjoyment, sit back and relax.Happiness is the final goal of every human’s acts.

Alienation: it's not just boredom, Brecht

In the Lyceum's production of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, it

takes around two and a half hours to get to the nub of the story: in an almost throwaway line, the story-teller musician explains that the land, like everything else, belongs to those who care. This simple platitude - which hardly explains the political dilemma that begins the epic adventure - seems redundant and disappointing. In the previous scenes, maternal heroism had battled with legal corruption, revolutionary promiscuity and masculine dishonesty. Brecht's pat moral seems too small, too obvious to do justify to the scope of the story.

Now, young lady. What can you bring to my part?

The two most well known facts about Brechtian theatre, after his rejection of all American values except the casting couch, are that it is supposed to be politically engaged (he said that Marx would have been his perfect audience member), and that it breaks the fourth wall (apparently, this involves shouting at the audience rather than pretending that they are not there). A more developed interpretation of these fantastic facts are that Brecht strove to show alienation in his productions, encouraging the audience to see how the apparent inevitability of situations was, actually a function of capitalist tyranny.

Disregarding the frequent assertion that Brecht failed to integrate his theories into his scripts (most contemporary productions home in on his vivid characterisation or energy, making them a romp rather than the cerebral vision he desired), the 'alienation effect' is in action at the end of the CCC. Having involved the audience in all sorts of shenanigans - mountain crossings, unhappy marriages - he abruptly halts the action with a moral that does not actually add anything - it just grinds the action to a halt. It looks like a simple finale, but leaves behind more questions than answers.

Most of all, it refuses to return to the play that begun the evening,

that play that then has the play-within-a-play. That play is an earnest discussion about the use of land following a war - exactly the kind of rhetorical bore that subsumes the theatrical for political worthiness. Whether there was a flood of relief the first time that this play gave way to the more mythical narrative is a matter of conjecture - although I have nightmares about going to see CCC only to find that the bit about the baby and the mother has been replaced by three hours of chat about the relative value of industrial and agrarian economies.

By leaving that open-ended, Brecht has given the audience something to chat about: what decision would be reached, and how does all that running about the Caucasus reflect the issue of land distribution. Admirably, Brecht develops his characters to a point of complexity (his proletarian judge, for example, is both champion of the poor and a rape apologist). There are no easy answers.

And by having a folk tale, Bertie gives his audience some fun before they get all serious. Doubtless, the bores in the bar have a fine time trying to figure it all out, but better bores with beer battling bombastically than stupid signifiers of social systems struggling on stage.

And on and on and on...

Pondering Dramaturgy: Postcards from the Fragmented Persona

Who Makes the Nazis?

new contemporary dance for autumn

I hope he'll forgive me mentioning it - but, then again, he put it on a social media site - but Jack Webb recently received a message about Inside Opulence, his entry at Arches Live! Although the sender enjoyed the choreography - the decadent world Webb has been exploring teeters on the brink of erotic ecstasy and solipsistic despair, and easily appeals to audiences beyond the contemporary dance enthusiasts - they were upset by the programme note that stated Webb's support for the YES campaign.

Then they called him a nazi.

The whole 'calling someone a nazi' thing (and this was a straight-up accusation, not a subtle hint) makes me worry about the state of British politics. It's pretty unfair on the SNP - they get this 'oh, they are nationalists and socialists' insult when I can't see that much socialism in their policies (socialism not being the same as being a bit left-wing or having policies that recognise the state's function to support the weakest). But when it comes down to comparing a bright young choreographer to Goebbels, I take a bit of a tantrum.

First of all, it is inaccurate: if Inside Opulence had had an interlude where Webb addressed the audience to remind them that the Jews were behind the failure of the YES vote to win the Referendum, I might have seen the connection. However, he was wearing a fairly slinky pair of leggings that really showed off his strong dancer's thighs and bum: this would have reduced the speech to an ironic comedy, anyway.

If an artist wants to use a bit of his programme to state his politics, that seems fair to me: Webb had just given his all and, without a post-show discussion to give the audience a chance to ask dumb questions, a little note at the bottom of the cast sheet hardly counts as a Nuremberg Rally. 

The increased politicisation of theatre, which has mostly come from writers placing their politics at the heart of their scripts, hasn't always encouraged great art - it tends to be polemical and preaching to the choir. From my play-school Brecht understanding, there is a danger that explicitly political themes are unhelpful: if Aristotle is to be believed, they purge the audience of their feelings, allowing them to pretend that they have done a spot of activism by the time they buy their tub of ice-cream at the interval. 

But Webb's work doesn't do this: as the writer says, he enjoyed the choreography and only realised that he was supporting a murderous regime of dancers in spangled tops after the show finished. I've thought over Inside Opulence and can't find anything that betrays Webb's political views... indeed, I am more interested in the sensual politics that he explores, which suggests, against Blake, that the road of excess leads to the hard shoulder of misery. 

There are a bunch of questions that I have not worked out yet about the relationship between art and politics, and art and the artist. I try hard not to equate the art with the artist - I believe that the grammar of theatre interacts with the artist's intention and the audience's experiences to create meaning. Even if...

Look, Jack Webb is not a nazi. I am not saying it again.

Even if I happened to be a nazi, or a Daily Mail reader, or a Marxist, the very act of presenting my ideas in a play to another person would distort them. I think that the artist is, generally, innocent. The meaning of their work is defined by the audience and... in the case of cat-calling YES (or NO) campaigners, it might just take one to know one, eh?

The final reason for my tantrum is that public discourse is so debased. There's another example on twitter at the moment: someone said I only got two stars at my recent parents' evening. Apart from rather liking the idea that a joke about my age could be funny, I was pleased at two stars: it's a lot better than the mark I got from the last person I had sex with: they also suggested that I work with a dramaturg in future.