Plays for dancers
Jan. 2nd, 2009 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI've been looking for a particular cassette, a recording of four short plays by W.B. Yeats which I must've made -- I think from an Open University production -- in the early 1980s. This tape not only has a ritualistic atmosphere -- Yeats adapted Celtic folklore to the austere forms of Japanese Noh theatre, which he'd learned about from Ezra Pound -- but has become part of my own personal ritual. Whenever I move house, I play this tape, usually in a bare white room, and often while painting it.
I haven't moved house, but the new year, and the fresh fall of snow we're experiencing here in Berlin, makes it feel like a good time to listen to this tape, which is full of a Modernist sense of "making things new". I planned to make an mp3 of the Four Plays for Dancers and put it up here. But after a good three hours of rummaging in my boxes, bringing them up one by one from the dry pine-scented cellar, through the snowy garden, I still haven't located the tape (there was a false alarm when I found another tape marked YEATS, which turned out to be me reading his poems).
What I can do in the meantime is tell you about the pieces, and show you sketches of the actors from the beta flip book of the 1921 Macmillan edition of the plays. The first play, At The Hawk's Well, is laid on a bare stage in a high, windy place set only with the emblems of a tree, a rock, and a hawk. The actors and musicians have masks painted onto their faces, and a plain bamboo flute, a harp or zither, a drum and gong stand on the stage. The action concerns the Irish legendary hero, Cuchulain, and an Old Man, who fail to drink from a holy well -- a well sporadically spurting out the water of immortality itself.
There's a line from these plays to some of Beckett's work -- the radical reductions, the strange, stilted atmosphere and the combination of Ireland and somewhere timeless and placeless. The lack of conventional dramatic action is also very Beckett, and very oriental: as Paul Claudel put it, a Western play is where something happens, a Noh play is where someone appears.
In the afterword for The Only Jealousy of Emer, Yeats talks about the importance of economy in this "small, unpopular theatre". "I have written a little play that can be played in a room for so little money that forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price," said Yeats. "There will be no scenery, for three musicians, whose seeming sunburned faces will, I hope, suggest that they have wandered from village to village in some country of our dreams..." Looking back to his days of more commercial theatre, Yeats laments "The worst of it is that I could not pay my players, or the seamstress, or the owner of the stage, unless I could draw to my plays those who prefer light amusement or have no ear for verse..." Rather than sit with bored people, Yeats cut his overheads with the new plays (started in 1916, first staged in 1917). "Intended for some fifty people in a drawing-room or a studio", these plays knew "freedom from the stupidity of an ordinary audience".
But it wasn't enough for Yeats to appeal to a small, aristocratic audience of poetry lovers. His plays -- and this may be the most important reason I like them -- call into existence a parallel world, an entirely new civilisation: "In writing these little plays I knew that I was creating something which could only fully succeed in a civilization very unlike ours. I think they should be written for some country where all classes share in a half-mythological, half-philosophical folk-belief which the writer and his small audience lift into a new subtlety. All my life I have longed for such a country, and always found it quite impossible to write without having as much belief in its real existence as a child has in that of the wooden birds, beasts, and persons of his toy Noah's Ark."
That country was based on Japan: Ezra Pound had received Noh translations from the widow of Ernest Fenollosa. He was working on these translations in 1913 and 1914, reading them aloud to Yeats, who -- says biographer Richard Ellmann -- found in Asian convention "a sense of life as ceremonial and ritual, and of drama as august, formal, traditional". Pound's poem Kakitsubata was a particular influence. When Yeats published the first draft of At the Hawk's Well in Harper's Bazaar in 1916, he dedicated it to Pound.
It's a theme we've seen before here on Click Opera: the Western new thing is the Eastern old thing, your past is our future. In this case, we catch Western literary Modernism -- at a key moment in the nineteen teens -- drawing its "shock of the new" from an ancient Japanese form of theatre. Seen from the right angle, traditional culture might be far ahead of the avant garde.
I haven't moved house, but the new year, and the fresh fall of snow we're experiencing here in Berlin, makes it feel like a good time to listen to this tape, which is full of a Modernist sense of "making things new". I planned to make an mp3 of the Four Plays for Dancers and put it up here. But after a good three hours of rummaging in my boxes, bringing them up one by one from the dry pine-scented cellar, through the snowy garden, I still haven't located the tape (there was a false alarm when I found another tape marked YEATS, which turned out to be me reading his poems).
What I can do in the meantime is tell you about the pieces, and show you sketches of the actors from the beta flip book of the 1921 Macmillan edition of the plays. The first play, At The Hawk's Well, is laid on a bare stage in a high, windy place set only with the emblems of a tree, a rock, and a hawk. The actors and musicians have masks painted onto their faces, and a plain bamboo flute, a harp or zither, a drum and gong stand on the stage. The action concerns the Irish legendary hero, Cuchulain, and an Old Man, who fail to drink from a holy well -- a well sporadically spurting out the water of immortality itself.There's a line from these plays to some of Beckett's work -- the radical reductions, the strange, stilted atmosphere and the combination of Ireland and somewhere timeless and placeless. The lack of conventional dramatic action is also very Beckett, and very oriental: as Paul Claudel put it, a Western play is where something happens, a Noh play is where someone appears.
In the afterword for The Only Jealousy of Emer, Yeats talks about the importance of economy in this "small, unpopular theatre". "I have written a little play that can be played in a room for so little money that forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price," said Yeats. "There will be no scenery, for three musicians, whose seeming sunburned faces will, I hope, suggest that they have wandered from village to village in some country of our dreams..." Looking back to his days of more commercial theatre, Yeats laments "The worst of it is that I could not pay my players, or the seamstress, or the owner of the stage, unless I could draw to my plays those who prefer light amusement or have no ear for verse..." Rather than sit with bored people, Yeats cut his overheads with the new plays (started in 1916, first staged in 1917). "Intended for some fifty people in a drawing-room or a studio", these plays knew "freedom from the stupidity of an ordinary audience".
But it wasn't enough for Yeats to appeal to a small, aristocratic audience of poetry lovers. His plays -- and this may be the most important reason I like them -- call into existence a parallel world, an entirely new civilisation: "In writing these little plays I knew that I was creating something which could only fully succeed in a civilization very unlike ours. I think they should be written for some country where all classes share in a half-mythological, half-philosophical folk-belief which the writer and his small audience lift into a new subtlety. All my life I have longed for such a country, and always found it quite impossible to write without having as much belief in its real existence as a child has in that of the wooden birds, beasts, and persons of his toy Noah's Ark."
That country was based on Japan: Ezra Pound had received Noh translations from the widow of Ernest Fenollosa. He was working on these translations in 1913 and 1914, reading them aloud to Yeats, who -- says biographer Richard Ellmann -- found in Asian convention "a sense of life as ceremonial and ritual, and of drama as august, formal, traditional". Pound's poem Kakitsubata was a particular influence. When Yeats published the first draft of At the Hawk's Well in Harper's Bazaar in 1916, he dedicated it to Pound.
It's a theme we've seen before here on Click Opera: the Western new thing is the Eastern old thing, your past is our future. In this case, we catch Western literary Modernism -- at a key moment in the nineteen teens -- drawing its "shock of the new" from an ancient Japanese form of theatre. Seen from the right angle, traditional culture might be far ahead of the avant garde.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-02 05:23 pm (UTC)I don't know why the West, even before the advent of Christianity, has always been at odds with the whole notion of satiety. It's been restless, loud and uncontemplative since the Roman Republic.
I've been reading a discussion of Chinese agricultural practices from 1911 that shows what we may be looking forward to. It's purely a Western habit of mind that suggests some high tech solutions will begin to keep us warm and fed, as opposed to a more traditional model of labor intensive/ resource efficient human and animal powered agriculture.
The unsustainable stuff is already sloughing off in the wake of the economic collapse. McMansion subdivisions are quickly becoming museum relics of Republican habitus, populated solely by skate punks.
Justice got served pretty quickly in our generation's case.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-02 05:52 pm (UTC)Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen
The conflation of formal experimentation and progressive thought seems to be a peculiarity of the latter half of the 20th century. Ask Jonathan Swift, or for that matter Old Ez, or Virginia Woolf--when you strip the form down, take it apart and make it strange, are you building the future? Or merely disassembling the present so as to better see the structures of the past that underlie it?
-Ben C.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-02 06:52 pm (UTC)Have you ever thought about writing music and libretto for a "pocket play" of that sort, Nick? A theatre company you could put into a valise? Might do it myself. Something like a stylized shadow puppet version of a terrarium or tidal pool, with nothing going on but the "plants" (perhaps abstract shapes that are vaguely biomorphic rather than representational) moving slightly in the air, perhaps a small "lizard" or "insect" now and then. Follow the sequences of sounds & events one observes in a meadow or bog, but with a musical interpretation.
(Which is to say mapping the "ceremony of the meadow" rather than using Noh.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-02 07:03 pm (UTC)Emma x
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-02 07:21 pm (UTC)music by
not the sounds you meant at all, more of an alienating circuit bent skreefest.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-03 05:09 am (UTC)thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-02 07:48 pm (UTC)I've recently written a play based on Inanna's Descent to the Underworld (http://www.piney.com/InanasDescNetherKram.html), Sumerian mythology, which I hope to do in an amateur production here in Prague. So I'm having the text translated to Czech and we begin rehearsals in a few weeks, most likely. Working in a second language presents many problems. I cant be too precious about it. And I imagine we will have to simplify and make it more of a dance/mime piece.
I like your reference to Beckett here. The stony windswept existential aspect of Ireland which blows through his work finds a parallel in Japan from centuries before. Yeats longed for a sort of tribal cultural understanding which is even less possible in today's fractured infotainment sphere, but I think the tribe of a group of actors, if successful, can transport an audience into that kind of space. If "a Noh play is where someone appears" (such a beautiful idea), the hope is that the audience can make that leap and be prepared to see.
Maybe we are ready for a return to the theater. Its so much more social and subversive than youtube and sitting at home.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-04 12:03 am (UTC)I may have misread you but there ARE tribal cultural understandings in today's fractured infotainment sphere. They just aren't very nice and at times quite savage. " We look after our own here"
I too am thinking of the troubadour and returns to theatre.
I am reminded of Joan Littlewood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Littlewood) and the Theatre Workshop. Of course Havel was a playwright.
Recently checking out Martin McDonagh who wrote In Bruges.
Good luck with the rehearsals!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-02 08:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-02 11:58 pm (UTC)just being nosey, Nick, and wondering why you made the Yeats cassette - was this a project sketch, or just for your own reference/pleasure?
DC
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-03 01:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-03 05:10 am (UTC)I hope you'll find your tapes.
Salutations!
Date: 2009-01-05 03:59 am (UTC)Re: Salutations!
Date: 2009-01-05 10:09 am (UTC)Ah oui? Quelles sont les signes, apparamment si evident?