What Needs to Happen to Theater

 

Resistance

 "Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit."

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Charm and Charisma

 I found this article by Ian Leslie on his Substack site "The Ruffian" interesting in how it made me start considering my teaching style and writing style. Leslie writes:

In a new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, the sociologist Julia Sonnevend argues that charm has superseded charisma to become the dominant political style of the twenty-first century. Charm thrives on proximity; on a sense that the politician would be at ease with the voter in person. Bill Clinton, who felt your pain and played the sax, had bags of charm. Charisma depends on distance - on the leader being ‘up there’, gazing down at us. De Gaulle was the archetypal charismatic leader. He believed that a leader must never be ordinary, but wreathed in mystique and larger than life.

The comedian Jimmy Carr has also given this question some thought (standup is as much about developing an onstage persona as it is about jokes), and he offers a succinct definition of the difference. Charm is I come to you; charisma is You come to me. Jennifer Aniston is charming; Angelina Jolie is charismatic. Charismatic people don’t care what you have to say; charming people really do. The essential thing, Carr says, is to know which type you are and inhabit it. (He defines his own persona as charismatic, on the basis that nobody could find him charming.)

My sense is that I lean more in the direction of charisma rather than charm, although my students might offer "none of the above" as a viable alternative. I suspect this is why blogging is better for me than, say, hosting a podcast, or if I did host a podcast it would likely have a format that was just me talking about something rather than an interview show. (I've sometimes thought I'd like to do a podcast that is just me talking about a play or book for 30 minutes, which really is a lecture, isn't it?) 

Maybe I'm an Idiot

"Idiot took on its current, mentally handicapped designation only after we forgot what the Greeks used it for: an idiotes was an individualist who had no use for society."

Jay Heinrichs -- Aristotle's Guide to Soul Bending ("Five Lost Words") 

There Is Still Much That Is Fair

 “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."

 J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Fellowship of the Ring”

[Received via Philosophy Quotes on Substack]

Does Literature Help Us Live?

 Tim Parks's essay in the New York Review of Books, "Does Literature Help Us Live?," rang true for me and made me cry...until the last two paragraphs, when Parks seems to take a cynical turn that is the complete opposite of what he'd written. Nevertheless, well worth the read, particularly in his references to Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. 

Sample:

"at the core of the literary experience, as it is generally construed and promoted, is the pathos of this unequal battle and of a self inevitably saddened—though perhaps galvanized, too, or, in any event, tempered and hardened—by the systematic betrayal of youth’s great expectations. Life promises so much, but then slips through one’s fingers."

WHY Theater?

I wonder whether my work to discover HOW to make theater more sustainable, more fulfilling, more rooted ignores an earlier question about why theater at all? 

In some ways, the 20th century, and now 21st century, theater has done the same thing I have done, focusing on "how" instead of "why." 

In 1936, Walter Benjamin addressed the central question in "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction." My memory is that his answer centered on the concept of an original work's "aura" -- that it carries with it the singularity of its original creator. I must revisit this essay, along with Simon Sinek's Start With Why. 

After which my question is: HOW can art be separated, as much as possible, from commerce without becoming reliant on charity from the rich? Which is rooted in my lifelong moral objection to the very idea of rich people at all, and my sense that anyone who made a lot of money likely did so by exploiting others.