Spring Awakening/Summer of love
is clearly a structured work and in performance the director has the power to create a montage oriented to you watching, and through this montage, to capture your attention and tell you something . . . nevertheless there are moments where this function of the director - to direct the attention of the spectator, the associative flux - is as if given up: as if abdicating from this position . . . what happens if one lets an "action" have its natural development, even in a situation that up to that moment was adhering to a theatrical logic? . . . at some moments during Spring Awakening/Summer of Love (SA/SL) this abandoning is attempted . . . as an experiment to let go and see what happens . . .

questions: . . . what happens . . .

[preamble]. . . the working premise seemed: it's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening sexuality . . . it can also be confusing, disorienting and painful . . . awakening is like the crossing of a frontier - one step and you are in another country . . . the eye of the cast of SA/SL reveals a deep fatalistic pessimism . . . isolation, self-pity, numbness . . . creative sexual energy is fast running out . . .what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction . . . SA/SL is a hybrid that combines a variety of performance conventions

[traditional response] . . .the vignettes/numbers are either mundane, elliptical or opaque . . . and though thematically related the connection is obscure . . . most involve sexual repression . . . in one or two instances, images reappear, and previous events are referred to, but for the most part the only consistent link is a dubious one: the lights come on, the curtain is pulled, the blindfold removed, the door opens, (an awakening) . . . at best there were promising theatrical devices yet each felt a little anti-climatic and what was achieved reminded me of a phrase by Kate Bligh, "What was achieved in every case was the banalisation of the dramatic, rather than the dramatisation of the banal. Perhaps this is what Jerzy Grotowski meant by 'post-theater'." . . .

[the process] . . . SA/SL is incomplete . . . now if the nature of the approach demands an ensemble and rehersals require not a preparation for the opening but are for the actor a terrain of discoveries . . . what happens . . .

[speculation] . . . SA/SL acknowledges our shadow, the personal unconscious.
"Jung called the shadow "a moral problem which challenges the whole ego personality." The complete personality is composed of light and shadow. Primitive thought defined a man that cast no shadow as a demon - and we're surrounded in every age by the rankness of the virtuous. The strain of a life spent portraying excessive goodness tends to exaggerate the darkness we all shelter and defend."(Dressing Saint Sebastian by jessica kardon)


. . . what happens . . . the work under "touristic" hands wallows . . . i can only refer to a previous statement: open lesson

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