The whole play minus the plot equals the whole play

[imomus]

There's a neon sign by the artist Martin Creed I've always found both minimal and profound. Its illuminated letters spell out a simple yet suggestive formula: "The whole world plus the work equals the whole world". To me, the formula means that when we add a work of art to the world it doesn't change the world, but it does become part of the world, and that's a plus. On the one hand, the formula is an image of the futility of art. We work on art, but our work doesn't change the world. On the other hand, it's an image of how our work integrates us into the world, gives us our place in it. Instead of changing the world, we belong to it, and our products have the ultimate honour of becoming part of the world's furnishings. There's something about this minimalist, futile and yet heartening phrase I think Samuel Beckett would have liked.



I know Beckett was influenced by kabuki and noh theatre, as Yeats was before him and as David Bowie would soon be. I often think of Beckett's late television plays when watching kabuki. The costumes and gestures in both are so mannerist yet so dignified, so stiff and strange and unworldly, so reduced and yet so magnified, so ancient and yet so sci-fi. Entire parallel worlds can be evoked by a single movement, a slowly rising yelp greeted by unexpected applause. Entire generations of hack directors and hack actors fall by the wayside as you silently reproach them in your mind: "Would you ever have dared to dream up something as wildly strange, graceful and beautiful as this?"



I was thinking about Creed's formula today as I sat through four hours of a kabuki play called Kyoto Snow. I was wondering how I could draw so much pleasure from this performance -- and from Japan itself -- when I don't speak the language and therefore can't follow the plot. My first thought was, I've always hated plot. I've always focused on other things, even when I do speak the language. Plot is for people who like crossword puzzles, detective stories and soap operas. It's for people who demand that art keep their left brain keep busy filing, typing notes, tying up loose ends, worrying over details, trying to make sense of chaos. I've always wanted more chaos, more strangeness in my art. Instead of complaining "That doesn't make sense!" I've wanted to scream at the proscenium arch "Stop making sense!" Plot, for me, is mostly justified as a pretext, should one be needed, for the real adventures of art -- a text which leads to texture, a piece of logic which leads where logic could never go, a bridge to somewhere interesting. The important "content" of art, for me, is what people often call "form": fantastic atmosphere, wonderful colour, graceful poise, rich fantasy and strangeness, music, and a lot of empty space I can insert my own personal dreams into. This is why I prefer contemporary dance to theatre, and why I love kabuki even when the plot means nothing to me. It's also why I feel I'm not actually missing much when I look at a piece of Asian theatre without simultaneous translation cluttering up my head. To misquote Creed, "The whole play minus the plot equals the whole play".



Below I'm linking to a Quicktime movie I made of some scenes and details in Kyoto Snow. Like Andy Warhol watching TV movies "for the shoe styles", you can tell that I'm watching stuff I "shouldn't be": the ghostly, self-effacing way the black-clad stagehands creep on and off, in full view, their posture saying "I'm not really here!" The man who sits at the front of the stage and clacks bits of wood on the floor for emphasis and punctuation. The hairstyles (I'm dreaming about how they might be copied, today, in a city like Berlin). The beautiful, spooky kabuki child in her fabulous orange cloak. The op-art flicker rhythm of bendy stripes on a purple robe, which, worn with a bold lilac obi, reminds me that clothes can be wonderful, even though they so often aren't. The cut of the pants. The way the musicians are also poetic narrators, and the way their voices overlap with the actors'. The dry wandering lines the shamisen chops out. The rich strangeness of the speech intonations. The way one of the actors draws death out of an inner pocket in the form of a knife wrapped in a red cloth, and the way the audience applauds his rolling-eyed yowl as he confronts it. The way Brecht would have adored that. The delicate paper snow that flutters from the roof and drapes the painted bamboo. And, of course, the vocal delight of the audience itself, of whom we could also say "The whole play plus the audience equals the whole play".

Hakodate Kabuki (Quicktime movie, 6 mins 45 secs, 11.1MB)

Comments

[wrighter.livejournal.com]

Of Waiting for Godot, Beckett said, "There is no plot. There is no meaning." The theater was pivotal in experimenting with the cardinal elements of storytelling. The very nature of theater allows for this, and its audiences have come to expect it. Beckett placed conventions of characterization, denouement, and plot aside, instead relying on stark visual imagery, a vocabulary as much his own as it was borrowed. This came about for several reasons. Beckett was writing in detest of limits, attempting to drudge up what is essentially human, what is real...That sounds trite, as if i'm deeming him an existentialist, but i'm not. Others with much more authority have already done that. Beckett's experiments with elements, like plot, were attempts to show audiences/readers what is unshowable, unexpressable, meaningless, impossible. 'Attempt' is very important here, because like theatre, disciplines of movement and dance, etc of the Japanese tradition, Beckett, along with his characters, recognized his attempt impossible, but allows us to pay witness to the struggle. It is the struggle of impossibility that is intriguing, not the plot. The veritable grace a master artist can exercise even in moments they know they will fail is truly remarkable. Failing, but doing it beautifully. Suzuki, not the method of music training but the 20th century movement discipline, is based on the idea of failure. A series of poses, body contortions and movements that all have one singular perfect execution in mind, but are physically impossible for the body to accomplish. You will always fail. You cannot succeed. It is therefore not necessary to judge your performance, but only attempt to obtain that idolized perfect end.

I have deviated from the initial discussion of plot to discuss failure. Because the idea of failure allows us into what is sensual and affecting about our own human nature. The japanese recognized this long before western traditions. Beckett was pivotal in experimenting with this in theatre, literature and film, but it was the French who really allowed for this. During the age of neoclassicism with their self-effaced organization who congregated to uphold the legal requirements of art. The board, as it were, was handed down a series of elements specific to disciplines of theatre, ballet, opera, literature, even architecture. Their responsibility was to use this list to review and evaluate an artists work. The artists responsibility was to adhere to the rules. I think this incredible, that there could be legal-artwork and illegal-artwork. But it is the establishment of these rules, that is important. These rules became limits. The limits became points of inspiration. So while the artist experiments within these limits/rules and shows us how resourceful he/she can be, the artist is also more effective in breaking them, recognizing what these elements accomplish, i.e. plot.

i'm rambling.

(i'm not sure where all this analysis just spawned from. my background is strongly rooted in theatre, especially 20th century aesthetics and experimental work. i haven't worked in the theatre in a long while, except for a quick directing stint last november. i think i miss it.)