Heart Play

"Nigel Jamieson: I think Kabuki actually isn't distancing at all, I think it's incredibly emotive theatre. I saw this woman who has to murder her son and she lays out all of the gestures, these incredibly slow gestures of all the tools she's going to have to do it by, and it's incredibly powerful. And I think the same with Mnouchkine's work. When a moment of intense emotion has these actors who have got these puppet operators behind them you know in the way their bodies just soar up - when you have these incredible élan or lift, and I feel my heart and emotions kind of soaring with that, I think that is exquisite art, it's no different from a great painting."

"What we're looking for is a heightening of life; we have the everyday life around us, and all art needs to heighten that so we experience things for this brief period of time more strongly, and I think that's what Mnouchkine's about, that's what Asian theatre and certainly circus and Commedia dell'Arte and melodrama and all those western forms are also incredibly rich."

"Adrian Kiernander: Mnouchkine sums it up for me when she talks about western theatre, the naturalistic kind of western theatre as being about actors hiding their emotions, concealing them, and it's all terribly subtle, and she talks about real theatre, the kind of theatre where she uses forms based in Asia as a way of exposing what's happening, the emotions, the states, rather than trying to conceal them."(ABC Arts online | Performance/Features | Theatre du Soleil : The Flood Drummers)

:: note :: . . . Leaving Bacchae I question artifice & theater of magic & the spectacle of visual image & the possession of a wide vision of theatrical mediums . . . nothing of the Euripides greek tragedy . . . thesaurus of artifice = intrigue, machination, manoeuvre, stratagem, tactic, feint, ruse, trick, wile, deceit, duplicity, guile, trickery . . . maybe exploring artifice does direct attention to the play of Euripides . . . still uneasy I apply what Brook describes as the "acid test" for theater -

"When a performance is over what remains? Fun can be forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears and good arguments lose their thread. When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself - then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell - a picture. It is the play's central image that remains, its silhouette, and if the elements are highly blended this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say."(Brook. The Empty Space 152)

. . . (silence) . . . still doubting I exercise & reflect on the epic story as metaphor . . . Dionysus&Pentheus / order&chaos / arrogance&passion . . . (silence) . . . finding myself silent I accept with deep resignation the Bacchae as is . . .