Seven Theses on Music and Theatre
(against passive
consumption
and mystification)
Stanko Juzbasic, Zagreb 1995
Why should one write on music and theatre in a moment when it seems as if all that could have been said about it is long time said, and neither of them has to depend on a co-habitation with each other´s freedom of expression? Recent practice in the field of new media has grown up borrowing from the structural elements of the both for its own cause so much that it may look as if theatre and music were some pre-historic seeds of the new powerful art yet to come. This may be a good point to stop, look back and ask oneself if the vitality of the performing arts can go side by side with the power of the new media. After all, some old thoughts may appear refreshing if brought up to the surface by asking the right question.
Music and theatre have at least one thing in common: they feel unconfortable facing innovation for its own sake, and most probably they suffer upon giving into it. Yet, dedicating oneself to creative procedures once proven as promising or even successful in likely to make creative attempts fail in a sense "things start to happen elsewhere". The remark could probably be extended to some fields of visual arts and literature, however it goes beyond concern of this article.
Most of the truly innovative and inventive directions in both music and theatre seem to have originated in interactive experience of action and reflection from within the creative process. This experience can be of enormous complexity and is often intersubjective. Questions like "How to write music after all" or "Why do we need theatre at all" are neither unlikely to be encountered along the creative path, nor it is hard to agree upon therapeutic value once they emerge. A task not as easy as it appears to be proceed into question.
Various cases of minimal strategies of withstanding the impact with the unknown have been revealed, tried, adopted and dismissed as guidelines to preserve what was thought to be creative attitude by various individuals, groups or schools throughout the art history. Some of them have been also published in the form of manifestos, theses or textbooks, mostly in this century.
Today this field of unknown can range from anywhere arround the global presence of new visual and audio mediato the changing position of the theatre in tran-sition societies. The fact that I had been challenged to theatralise my work of sound and music as well as to participate in several projects of transpersonal experience directed me to adopt a specific strategy of creative patience based on a credo which can be put down into seven theses:
INTEGRITY
Theatre, as a set of ideas about "what the theatre should be", need not be limited to prose theatre, music theatre, or any other theatre of attributions. Such a denomination deprives the theatrical event of its integrity - which is its basic presumption.
POLYCENTRICITY
Side by side with the dramatic thought considered a motive, a theatricali event inevitably implies a musical and visual identity. Both of them cannot accept to be less than they are: expressions of autonomous musical and visual arts, reflecting their own engagement in the performance.
ESTHETISATlON
To perceive a theatrical event, means to share action in a particular space and time, which, mediated by means of sound and vision, obliges to esthetisation.
AUTHORSHIP
The esthetisation itself obliges. In the theatre there are no such things as: "What the authors wanted to tell". There are just the things that they have, or have not expressed.
lNTERACTION
Musical time serves as a link between dramatic time and real time.
FORMALISATION
Let music formalise the theatre. Let theatre formalise the music in order to set free the irrational powers of the both: which have been stuck during the historical rationalisations of artistic concepts. So may we restore mythical dignity to the both.
NORMALITY
That, which is impossible weights as much as that which is possible.
A system is consequence to temptations of a spirit.
The result documents the method, the method implies the result.
A defect within a system always had metaphysical meanings.
Dreaming of perfect systems is over. Good morning!
(Stanko Juzbasic: Released in March 1992, on the opening of Timon of Athens -
A Financial Drama, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
ELEMENTS OF ANTICIPATION
1) The Mojave Indians have a custom of prolonging a conversation long after the bid farewell and gone, and vice versa.
2) Holographic action - forms of spatial theatralization.
3) Entropy - the omni-oneness of the world.
4) Known space is transformed into to the unknown according to the principle of simulation - state of space.
5) Imitation of reproduction without the original.
SPACE OF ENHANCED SENSIBILITY
1) An exhibition without paintings. Bridges fade at the place of arrival
2) Theme: a ban and its passage
3) Form: the time of duration.
4) External laws do not exist. All that exists is a single action and the imperative of its realization.
5) Entertainment is a cunning with which the dream is forcing itself towards the industry.
(Stanko Juzbasic, Boris Bakal, Darko Fritz, Ivan Marusic, Goran Premec. Released in February 1988, on opening of the Cathedral, Extended Media Gallery Zagreb)
WHY DO WE NEED THEATRE AT ALL
Genres in theatre (music, prose, etc....) are better not to be taken as finished facts, an artist should approach this problem more thoughtfully. (Whatever the end result is) ... we may still ask ourselves why do we need theatre at all.
(From an interview for the Slovenian magazine "Delo", March 1992)