Tag Archive | "game"

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Blocked Keys


The etude by Gyorgy Ligeti I would like you to pay attention to is the second one. It starts at 2′15″.
Here is what a competent source has to say about the work:

The third etude, “Touches bloquees” (“Blocked Keys”), uses the same technique that first appeared in “Selbstportrait,” the second of the Three Pieces for Two Pianos. Certain keys are held down silently with one hand while the other hand plays a very fast chromatic line on and around the blocked keys, which of course do not sound. The result is a complicated rhythmic pattern that gives the music a somewhat mechanical quality. At first the silent gaps are all the duration of a single eighth, but eventually the gaps are two eighths, then three, and continue to increase in length until the texture becomes increasingly sparse. Again, this etude is about the creation of illusion; we see a continuous pattern of eighth notes on the page, but what results in performance are quirky rhythmic patterns that are not discernible to the eye and would be all but impossible to notate in a more traditional fashion to achieve the desired effect.

Actually, it wasn’t so much about the listening for me. What put me in a state of awe was the seeing. It is the clear struggle between the hands, the tension between the immobile one and the one that runs crazily above it or under it. Also, the tension of the one that is supposed to stay immobile, simply blocking some keys, but cannot resist the opportunity and spurts out sounds now and again, as if to underline it has total power. And then they switch. And we hear it, we hear this body negiation, we hear it once we see it, once we understand the game, it becomes obvious.
The music becomes obvious. Because it’s about music, right?
And the soldier-fingers, constantly attempting to design the space through movement. A movement whose purpose is not something else – like a sound – is a dance. If you ever needed proof, here is one.

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Wooster Group’s Hamlet (aftermath)


This is not a review. And it will probably remain incomprehensible if you don’t at least read what the Wooster Group show is about. So you might want to start off with a positive review and/or a negative one.
(And, possibly, move to an insight into how they prepared it. And an insightful interview about the group. And an interview with Kate Valk.)

I had been waiting to see this for a long time. This is the group I always talk about during workshops and I have never seen act live. This particular show, well, could be an experimentum crucis of my (wavering) faith in theater as a live form of live art. I leave you with my transcribed raw notes from the show, and below, a couple of ideas.

Theater as reproduction
- of what?
of our reality
=> cinema (is our reality)

other way: reality reproduces art
body is our basic reality

body as choreography

BUT it’s first and foremost a SHOW

spaces of absence

The dance of the impotent body

to perform = to enact

puppets

retro

conventionality of movement

performance as video art or rather as
echo of image
=> afterimage

The action lies between the acts

Playing on the players like on instruments
The players accompany a great
video
Is that bad?

“They killed theater” (audience member, calmly)
(So many deaths of theater before)
Good Heavens,
if that be so,
if this is the thing,
I humbly thank you.

Musical work – when works.

Women have more problems with show formula- because of
more emotional roles?

2nd part much better – uses the new convention.
(but also ends up more conventional)
Hamlet – actor – manipulates the actors – logical gesture.
Strong

search for an
aesthetic experience
(e.g. songs)
showSHOWshowSPECTACLE

5 technicians operating video/sound/lights

Brilliant technical solutions – eg. moving screen in loop CCTV.

Warping time/space

But then it becomes simply multimedia entertainment.

+ + +


A man crosses the stage, says Peter Brook, and you have theater.
Pathos. That’s what you get when a man crosses the stage. Anthropocentrism. The idea that it’s all about us, really. The sin of vanity in all its splendor.

Who are we, really (on stage)?
How do we conduct our paths (on stage)?
What can we see if we introduce breaks into the surface of our behavior (on stage)?

The body becomes heavy.
It becomes an accessory. An object more than a tool. An instrument that cannot be played in a clean way is more of itself. It is less melody, and more instrument.
This body that struggles to fit into the image that will always outsmart it.

Their “on/off” stage presence (in the middle of a scene: “Let’s skip this dialogue”) is not shocking, it is part of the language of contemporary performance. It is part of our thinking, feeling of the frame/work of art as ambiguously present, intermittently present. Nice: it’s when it turns us on, not the other way around. Hence the decadent flirt, hence the false opening, hence the play outside of a play outside of a play.

______________________________

What do you want out of this? Out of this experience? What do you want out of a play?

Try this: Say: This is silly. Say: Theater is the essence of the misconception that it is all about the human. It is the place of the old-fashioned, stubborn faith in 1) the communion of the believers, and 2) the hierarchy of presentation. It is a stage which seems so enchanted with the universal human condition, it forgets the subtle yet profound changes of the aesthetic, the sensible, the eye of the beholder. It is a place whose very existence in this time is so out of joint, it is funny.

What if we accepted this as part of the game? What if we played this game, using this as a platform to inquire into what conditions we are in, as the humans that have no choice but to, at one point or another, remain anthropocentric? What if we surrendered ourselves to the collision of times, this our present time of, say, having to read this text one line at a time, and the time of too many lines behind, and the time of too many lines besides, after, above? What sort of figures are we once we let go of our need for the unique now? Entirely?

Sensation> This our too too solid flesh is extremely flexible. And it goes along with the lines of tension, it follows the cracks and bounces off whatever is left as the aftermath.
Abstract? No, this is not abstract. It means: somehow, miraculously, we deal with change, since we live through it. And yet, we do not melt, we do not resolve ourselves into a dew. If we manage to tune in – we dance. Every step, stumble, vibration becomes a choreography of ourselves.

Sensation> We are not enough. The body fights to correspond to the twitches of the images, yet it lags behind. The eyes go back to the screen. We have no way of knowing how correct we are, yet the need of knowledge unveils our total, complete inadequacy. We are but thinking puppets, we are but repeating Plato, we are but warming up the stage for the image that comes behind. Whatever surrounds us is more powerful, and yet -

Sensation> The eye of the beholder might make a difference. The beholder as object, the beholder as a weaker alter ego. The beholder as the one who submits to the role of a prop, and whose tragedy, a subject realizing he is an object, becomes the juiciest work, the perfect crack in the façade of the perfect spectacle.

Oh, and don’t pay attention to the ending. Don’t pay attention to the illusion that the slave has become the master, that the technology is, after all, a tool, that we can use the past, control the present, cope with the future, that things are what we want them to be. Don’t fall in the trap of theater, which numbs us into believing it’s okay, images end, we are here, devising our entries and winning our exits.
There is a stage behind that one, and on it, well, take a peak.

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Alberto Sughi, That need of reconstructing the meaning of one’s own work­­­.


Although I have already done so in previous blogs usually I would prefer not to talk about my paintings, because the meaning that I attach to them is then transformed over time in the eyes of the spectator, into the thoughts of those who imagine something that the painter has not conceived, but which is still a perfectly legitimate way of interpreting the painting. Despite this, since I have recently spent a good deal of time reconstructing the meaning of my work (a reasonable task you will probably agree for an artist who will be eighty very soon) in this blog I will describe how almost twenty years ago I came to create a group of paintings (reproduced here alongside the blog) which I consider quite significant to understanding not only how my own work but also how a painting is born and how from this others may unexpectedly come into being.

In 1992, or the years before, there was the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of hope for an ideology that had affected the whole first half of this century and a conspicuous portion of the second half. Many people had believed in this ideology, the first great socialist revolution of the world. This idea of revolution was common place, the home of the thoughts, justice, and ideas that a great revolution promises. However, we know that all revolutions are unfortunately destined to be betrayed and, in the end, lead to corruption, fear and abandonment by the very people who had believed in them. And then I imagined a painting in red like the red flag of Communism, where the star is still visible, but everything is smashed and distorted. To create this painting I examined the painting of De Kooning in depth, because it seemed to me that, through those broken and continuous structures, I could more profoundly express the significance of this crisis. A man in the foreground, like a ­­­black silhouette, is leaving with a pair of suitcases, and the title is perhaps an indication to help understand the meaning.

Going where? I immediately made another painting in this cycle still concerned with the same problem: Going where? Goodbye to the red house which also has writing going across the top of the house, in almost Cyrillic characters. Here, too, a man with suitcases is leaving this house, which is, perhaps, the house of his hopes and dreams. Then the subject became dilated and no longer concerned the fall, the implosion of Communism, but the destiny of man. So then, immediately afterwards, or, in some cases, even before this painting, I painted green paintings with men in a landscape or looking down from a terrace, and who seem to be lost in contemplation, all entitled Going where?, almost as though Man is in a critical, temporary situation and is searching for an identity inside a labyrinth, represented in this case by the natural world. This could have been a great moment, a problem set out before modern Man that he has to resolve, but as to how, that is a mystery.

Then I made a very large painting, two meters by two meters thirty-five, entitled The game, more fantastic, or rather, more mysterious, in which I borrowed from Cézanne the silhouette of the two card players, while on the right a man looks as if he wants to know how this game is going to end. It is a red painting which, even if the characters’ silhouettes were not so clear, could be exhibited just for its background, almost like an abstract painting.

Alberto Sughi
For more info on Alberto Sughi see. www.albertosughi.com

Created by Alberto Sughi On 09/18/08 At 09:46 AM

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