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Theatre & Feeling

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Feeling & Society

• How do we understand phenomena that we witness in our society?

• Why might feeling be the sole raison d’être of theatre?

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Today we examine a dichotomy:

Language

Intellect vs. FeelingInstruct vs. Entertain

To profit (intellect), (instruction)

To please(body) (feel), (entertainment)

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Howard BarkerArguments for a Theatre

1989, Manchester University Press

... explores the relationship ( the ‘collision’) between intellect and art.

“The artist does not instruct’ (Barker:9).

“Do we have the theatre we want? Do we have the audience we want? (Barker : 223).

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Humanist theatre vs. Catastrophe TheatreFrom Arguments For a Theatre

(Howard Barker, 1989 Manchester University Press: Manchester, p71)

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THEATRE AND FEELING, Erin Hurley: Palgrave, 2010

Q. What role does feeling play with respect to the purpose of theatre?

Hurley: “Feeling furnishes theatre with its sole purpose”. (p58)Feeling as the raison d’être of theatre.

***What is a vicarious experience?

As experienced through another by imagining

Something experienced through somebody else rather than at first hand, by using sympathy or the power of the imagination

***Theatre needs (at the very basic level) Action and receiving / Actor and audience / Body and body

“the bodied space of theatre”.

Theatre directly addresses feelings [emotion, mood, sensation]; draws out an effective response

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HOWARD BARKER: ARGUMENTS FOR A THEATRE Meaning, Clarity and Reason

“Behind the notions of ‘clarity’ and ‘meaning’ lies a contempt for the audience and for the powers of imagination ... a dog on a lead”.

“Weakness of contemporary theatre is its fear of the audience ... The horror that ‘they’ may not ‘understand’ the scene, that ‘they’ may lose the thread of the narrative, or that ‘we’ shall be accused of elitism if ‘meaning’ becomes obscure”.

“A theatre that honours its audience will not [be a slave to, or seek] clarity…”

This does not mean his plays are simplified.

“My plays are indigestible” (p 79)

And yet, they possess the classic dramatic structure: character, plot, story, time, place. So then, why indigestible? What does HB do, or not do to reduce a ‘clarity of meaning’ in his plays?

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Poetry “Emphasis on clarity and realism has effectively abolished poetry from the stage” (How does poetry work?)

The FamiliarIn theatre of the catastrophe, there is no familiar: instead there is an unfamiliar language,

rhythm, sound, and syntax not common to everyday speech. For Barker, character and truth on stage is unstable and there is no one clear meaning or

idea expressed. It is this textured view of life: the instability - that he wishes to explore and express.

The Actor “a theatre of Anti –parable; the moral is made by the audience and not by the actor.” The audience will interpret what they have seen as opposed to taking a message home as

provided by the actor.

The Theatrical The audience of catastrophe theatre is in awe of the actor because he does not pretend to

be the audience but instead asserts his difference – i.e. the actor is on the stage: a Theatrical Space. Style. (p70)

The Imagination“The Theatre of the Catastrophe addresses itself to those who suffer the maiming of the

imagination”. (p69)

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Truth / Perception “The [liberal] theatre wants to give messages ... audience treated

like a child, led to meaning, as if truth were a lunch. The theatre is not a disseminator of truth, but a provider of versions.”

Hurley, pp 26- 27 Theatre exists to be perceived The audience has a capacity for perception. The performer is there to be perceived. “…at its most fundamental, the act of theatre requires two

sentient bodies: one to act, another to apprehend [one body acts while another watches].

“…..both these bodes – actor and spectator – are objects of perception and perceiving.

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… Back to Howard Barker

Debate, problem exposed (public vs. private) An audience will be divided. Argument. Debate.“An honoured audience will quarrel with what its

seen ..and if it disapproves this is because it has been taken where it does not want to go”.

“A new theatre will concede nothing to its audience

and the new audience will demand that nothing is conceded to it …it will demand expression of complexity and that the problem to exposed but not solved.”

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Howard Barker The Fence (2005)

(staged reading)

What is this about?

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FEELING AND SOCIETY

Q. How can a textual analysis/ a discussion of Howard Barker help us to understand the society in which we live?

Q. Why should we attempt to understand theatre through the context of feeling?

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IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUMHEADLINES (note the language)

How do we deal with ‘the other’? The European court of justice must decide whether an Afghan asylum

seeker's case should be dealt with in Greece or the UK

Be proud ; the UK is a haven for the ‘dispossessed’Our immigrants are a cultural and economic boon and should be treasured.

London 'being turned into apartheid-era Johannesburg'Children are being taught in “ghettos” as inner-city schools are increasingly

divided along racial lines, a leading headmaster has warned, insisting that Britain was becoming a “silo society” as many young people never leave their own housing estate or mix with children from different racial and religious backgrounds.

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Human Rights Act

• Teresa May: The human rights act in no uncertain terms, "needs to go".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15170770

• Teresa May: “It has allowed foreign criminals to avoid deportation from the uk on a number of spurious grounds - one at least, she tells the audience, was allowed to stay here because he had a pet cat.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15164652

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How can we understand this phenomena?

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We have a social phenomena: immigrants, settlers, them, us, melting pot, ‘good for the economy’, ‘ taking our jobs’.

We experience this situation – ‘it’ is not just a cerebral object.

Immigration involves people. We /They feel the effects of this.

A phenomena.

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Conservative ConferenceThemes: immigration, the other, the stranger, good vs. evil

Dichotomy: us/ them

Barker is interested in the metaphor for this divide

“How do I as a playwright, an artist, see my world?”

“It [was] believed that a writer who wrote for himself would end up speaking to himself. It was believed a writer should write for other others … but the writer who truly invents for himself will acquire the audience who hungers for his invention”.

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The ‘collision’ between intellect and art

• Plato: We won’t hurt you, but we don’t need you.

• We are examining a distinction between• ‘Reason’ and ‘Feeling’ • the ‘Literal’ and the ‘Imaginative’ • a dichotomy: the Prosaic destroys feelings

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Howard Barker The Fence (2005)

• Described as ‘a tragedy of identity’.

• ‘The idea of the frontier, both actually and metaphorically’

• ‘A state attempts to define its character by erecting a fence against outsiders, but it is violated by strangers and by the transgressive appetite of the ruling class…’

• Barker as a dramatist: ‘ To expose the public crisis through the personal agony of individuals’

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Howard Barker The Fence (2005)

http://www.youtube.com/user/thewrestlingschool?blend=21&ob=5

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Next week BARKER vs. DAVID HARE

• Barker wants to throw the audience (and performers) sense of experience into flux.

• He refuses to cater to what is expected • He seeks to transform an experience - this is how he

understands the term dramatic; a bewildered audience - dislocated

• Leading to possibilities as their expectations are ‘rinsed out of them”.

• In this instance, in theatre, the audience is relieved of the burden of being brought to the author’s point of view - who cares? - we ask him to be imaginative.

• And here , with this last quote Hare and Barker meet. • And yet their plays are so very different in form