THE PROGRAM: We shall stage, without regard for text:
1. An adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent with our present troubled state of mind, whether one of the apocryphal plays of Shakespeare, such as Arden of Feversham, or an entirely different play from the same period.
2. A play of extreme poetic freedom by Leon-Paul Fargue.
3. An extract from the Zohar: The Story of Rabbi Simeon, which has the ever present violence and force of a confla-gration. [Editor's note: The Zohar is a pseudo-epigraphic work, supposedly a mystiecal text written by Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, but scholars have identified the author as thirteenth century Kabbalist, Moses de Leon.
4. The story of Bluebeard reconstructed according to the historical records and with a new idea of eroticism and cruelty.
5. The Fall of Jerusalem, according to the Bible and history; with the blood-red color that trickles from it and the people's feeling of abandon and panic visible even in the light; and on the other hand the metaphysical disputes of the prophets, the frightful intellectual agitation they create and the repercussions of which physically affect the King, the Temple, the People, and Events themselves.
6. A Tale by the Marquis de Sade, in which the eroticism will be transposed, allegorically mounted and figured, to create a violent exteriorization of cruelty, and a dissimulation of the remainder.
7. One or more romantic melodramas in which the im-probability will become an active and concrete element of poetry.
8. Büchner's Wozzek, in a spirit of reaction against our principles and as an example of what can be drawn from a formal text in terms of the stage.
9. Works from the Elizabethan theater stripped of their text and retaining only the accouterments of period, situa-tions, characters, and action.
Many circles of the contemporary religious public share the view which states that the Book of Zohar--the basic work of kabbalah whose importance to Jewish mysticism is as the importance of the Talmud to Jewish Halacha--was written by Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai, one of the Tannaim, the Mishnaic sages of the 2nd century CE. This view is so ordinary and accepted that the covers of many editions of the Zohar, published by religious people and organizations, are labeled "The Book of the Zohar by Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai." Based on this style, outreach workers look for the Zohar descriptions of events, which took place long after the death of Rabbi Simeon Bar Yoha, and tell them as predications which were fulfilled.
ReplyDeleteZohar literary structure is a set of essays, and bits of essays, which include pieces of medrash, long homilies and lectures on different topics. Most of them seem to be the words of the Tanna Rabbi Simeon Bar Yochai (Rashbi) and his friends (the Hevraya), but there are also long sections written by unknown people. This is not just a single book but an entire world of literature joined under a single name. In printed editions the Zohar is comprised of five volumes: three--based on the division in most editions--are printed under the names Sefer HaZohar Al HaTorah, a volume called Tikunei HaZohar and one called Zohar Hadash. After the printing of the main Zohar text and the printing of the manuscripts, this was gathered by Abraham Halevi Bruchim. Manuscripts are made up with compostions and essays of the Sefad Kabbalists. 1940-1953 was the Jerusalem edition which will be quoted as Zohar’s linguistic highlights.
The divisions which comprise the Zohar in its widest sense are:
The main text of Zohar is organized into pieces according to torah.
Sifra di-Tzeniuta (The Book of Concealment), a brief commentary on the portion of Bereshit using short, obscure sentences, a sort of anonymous Mishna, five chapters long (printed after the portions of Terumah or Bereshit).
I hope this is the right thing as I took me ages to find and now I know why Mr Pope said god help you as it so complicated and mind wrecking I still don’t understand it probably myself but yeah I’ve tried to make it as clear as I could possibly can. All my information was found on this site that tell you
Rubin E (2002) When was the Zohar written?
Talk reason – articles – Zohar
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/zohar.cfm
(this is not my work it other people as it not letting them post so im posting it for them)
ReplyDeleteLIAM SAYS:An adaptation of the work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent with our present troubled state of mind, wether one of the apocryphal plays of Shakespere, such as Ardem of Feversham, or an entirely different play from the same period.
Apocryphal -adj
1. of questionable authenticity
2. (Christian Religious Writings / Bible) (sometimes capital) of or like the Apocrypha
3. untrue; counterfeit
apocryphally adv
Significant event (during Artaud's lifetime to represent a troubled state of mind):
The First World War.
Outbreak of Spanish influenza.
Large parts of French were left destroyed post-War.
He suffered from clinical depression (which was treated with opium
Ardem of Feversham -
The author is unknown. T.S. Eliot believed that Thomas Kyd was the probable author.[1] Some have claimed, through computer analysis, that it was William Shakespeare. The debate continues to interest academics.It depicts the murder of one Thomas Arden by his wife Alice Arden and her lover, and their subsequent discovery and punishment. The play is notable as perhaps the earliest surviving example of domestic tragedy, a form of Renaissance play which dramatized recent and local crimes rather than far-off and historical events. First printed in 1952.
Significant plays of this period:
The works of Shakespeare from 1590 to 1613 (37 in total)
This is the best I could do not sure if it is one hundred percent what I was asked to do. O and thanks you Jess for posting this for me.
#8 Georg Büchner's Wozzek
ReplyDeleteWoyzeck is a stage play written by Georg Büchner. He left the work incomplete at his death, but it has been variously and posthumously "finished" by a variety of authors, editors and translators. Woyzeck has become one of the most performed and influential plays in the German theatre repertory.
Woyzeck deals with the dehumanising effects of doctors and the military on a young man's life. It is often seen as 'working class' tragedy, though it can also be viewed as having another dimension, portraying the 'perennial tragedy of human jealousy'
Büchner's Wozzek based his play upon an actual documented events. In 1821, Johann Christian Woyzeck, an ex-soldier and barber, murdered his mistress.
Büchner had already developed a politically activist philosophy even before writing Woyzeck. He became a leader of an underground political movement obsessed with overthrowing the autocratic governments of German states. Anticipating Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the originators of the Communist Manifesto (1848), Büchner was determined to expose and overthrow what he saw as the oppression of the poor by the rich and powerful. Thus, his play casts figures of authority (the Doctor and Captain) as evil, selfish, manipulative, and callous, while the poor, represented by Woyzeck, are exploited and have no control over their destiny.
But no opera before Wozzeck had had a psychotic anti-hero as its central character, and no opera before Wozzeck (and, perhaps, none since) had depicted mental instability in such a way that the audience shared this instability, rather than simply observing its outward effects. The expressionist language of the first decades of the twentieth century was peculiarly well suited to deal with such extreme mental and emotional states.
#Expressionism, an artistic movement in which reality or aspects of reality were deliberately distorted in order to express the artist's emotional response to a subject, dominated all the arts in Germany and Austria from about 1910 to the early 1920s. The movement had its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century, in the work of painters such as Van Gogh, who, in the 1880s, described how he consciously exaggerated colours and forms in his paintings so as to express his feelings about, rather than simply record, what he saw.
"7. One or more romantic melodramas in which the im-probability will become an active and concrete element of poetry."
ReplyDeleteMy goodness, you have no idea how broad this one is. Let's take a look at what Melodrama is.
Basically, before the revolutionary practices introduced to the theatrical world by our beloved Stanislavski, theatre in the 19th century, and earlier 20th century revolved around movements such as romanticism, where an emphasis on emotion and other metaphysical ideas such as nature, the unattainable, paranormal forces and those intangible ripples that left imprints on the human psyche. Existing in other forms like art, romanticism's influence on the stage was witnessed mostly through melodrama.
Melodrama is very similar to commedia dell'arte; in the scheme of things, no character is different in any portrayal; a French actor might take up the role of the melodramatic protagonist, and one would find an English actor playing the same character, with little disparity in characterisation or rationality between either nationality. Much like the itinerant commedia troupes, Melodrama was a framework which incorporated 'stock' characters and scenarios.
Melodrama takes morality to the extremes. Melodrama takes physicality to the extremes. Melodrama takes articulation, enunciation and projection to the extremes. An emphasis on affectation is an important component; used to illustrate the virtue of our protagonist, in many cases the dashing young bachelor, in juxtaposition to the scheming, insidious land baron; his pointed facial hair and yellow-toothed smirk. Compound these characters with a romance plot involving a nubile young woman unable to repay her land-baron debtor, ensure some sort of 'duel of honour' is fought, and have the entire debacle take place within a curiously fashioned manor house and you have melodrama. Perhaps the woman is tied to a set of train tracks at one point or another.
Melodrama's aesthetic is a gaudy and shameless one; it's no wonder why Artaud had ambitions for it. After all, if we had established that perhaps surreal means 'hyper realistic', then melodrama falls into this category as much as it does romanticism. Tasteless depictions of good versus evil, of love, coupled with flouncing and prancing on stage, with grotesque characters?
We can only speculate as to how Artaud would make this into 'poetry', though doubtlessly, the similarity in melodramatic techniques when observing theatre of cruelty practices such as the emphasis on gesticulation and unintelligible sound ensures compatibility between surrealism and melodrama, and the foundation for development.