Fw: Happy World Theatre Day!

[Denis Salter]

Dear Colleagues,

Amela Simic at PUC has asked me to forward this on PUC's behalf.

Denis.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Amela Simic" <pucmembers at on.aibn.com>
To: "Denis Salter" <d.salter at VIDEOTRON.CA>
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2002 12:12 PM
Subject: Happy World Theatre Day!


> Hello Denis,
>
> I wanted to post the international message on CANDRAMA Listserve, but
> for some reason my e-mail address was rejected. Would you like to
> forward this.
>
> All the best,
> Amela Simic
> Playwrights Union of Canada
>
> WORLD THEATRE DAY - 27th March  2002: International Message
> Girish KARNAD, Playwright
>
> The Natyasastra is one of the world's earliest treatises on theatre. It
> dates back to at least the third century B.C. and its first chapter
> tells the story of  the Birth of Drama.
>
> It was a time when the world was sunk in moral turpitude. People had
> become slaves to irrational passions. A new means had to be found
> ("pleasing to the eyes and ears as well as edifying") which could uplift
> humanity. So Brahma, the Creator, combined elements from the four Vedas
> ( sacred texts) to form a fifth text, the Veda of Performance. But since
> the gods are not capable of the discipline  of drama, the new Veda was
> passed on to Bharata, a human being. And Bharata, with the help of his
> hundred sons, and some celestial dancers sent by Brahma,  staged the
> first play. The gods enthusiastically contributed  to the enhancement of
> the expressive possibilities of the new art.
>
> The play Bharata presented dealt with the history of the conflict
> between the gods and the demons, and celebrated the ultimate victory of
> the gods. The production delighted the gods and the humans. But the
> demons in the audience were deeply offended.They therefore used their
> supernatural powers and disrupted the performance by paralyzing the
> speech, movements and memory of  the actors. The gods in turn attacked
> the demons  and killed many of them.
>
> Mayhem ensued. So Brahma, the Creator, approached the demons and spoke
> to them. Drama, he explained, is the representation of the state of the
> three worlds. It incorporates  the ethical goals of life?the spiritual,
> the secular and the sensuous--its joys and sorrows. There is no wisdom,
> no art, no emotion which is not found in it.
>
> He then asked Bharata to proceed with the performance. We are not told
> if the second performance was any more of a success.
>
> Scholars commenting on this chapter take it for granted that the myth
> condemns the demons. Their behaviour is seen to prove they had failed to
> comprehend the true nature of theatre. Brahma's discourse on theatre
> then becomes  the essence of the myth..
>
> That, it seems to me, is to misunderstand the myth entirely. For a
> start, the  fact that the demons (unlike the gods) do not resort to
> physical violence but attack only the "speech, movements and memory" of
> the actors shows a remarkable grasp of the finer aspects of performance.
>
> More to the  point, here is a  revered text, written to instruct us in
> the art  and techniques of play-production, talking of  the very first
> performance in the history of humanity. The Creator himself, along with
> other  gods, celestial nymphs and trained actors,  was involved in the
> project. The  result should have been a thundering success.
>
> Instead, we are told it was a  disaster.
>
> There is an implicit statement here that scholars have avoided looking
> at. Possibly they are embarrassed by it. Certainly the implications fly
> in the face of the later Indian aesthetics which asserts that the main
> purpose of theatre is to detach the audience from the world outside and
> ease it into a shared state of delectation.
>
> The myth, it seems to me,  is  pointing to an essential characteristic
> of theatre which Brahma's placatory remarks could not possibly
> acknowledge, that every performance - however carefully devised -
> carries within itself the risk of failure, of disruption and therefore
> of violence. The minimum that a live performance requires is a human
> being performing (that is, pretending to be someone else) and another
> one watching him or her, and that is a situation already fraught with
> uncertainty.
>
> The world has never before had as much drama as today. Radio, films,
> television and video inundate us with  drama. But while these forms can
> engage or even enrage the audience, in none of them can the viewer's
> response alter the artistic event itself. The Myth of the First
> Performance points out that in theatre, the playwright, the performers
> and the audience form a continuum, but one which will always be unstable
> and therefore potentially explosive.
>
> That is why theatre is signing its own death warrant when it tries to
> play  too safe. On the other hand, that is also the reason why, although
> its future often seems  bleak,  theatre will continue to live and to
> provoke.
>
> Girish Karnad was born in 1938 in Matheran, India and educated in
> Karnatak University, Dharwad and at Oxford where he was a Rhodes
> Scholar.  After serving for seven years with the Oxford University Press
> in India, he resigned to devote himself to writing and film-making. He
> served as the Director of the Film and Television Institute at Pune in
> 1974, 1975 and is at present the Director of the Nehru Centre, the
> cultural wing of the High Commission of India in London.
>
> He writes his plays in Kannada, the language of the state of Karnataka
> where he lives, and has translated them into English.  His second play,
> Tughlaq (1966), established him as a playwright of all-India stature.
> The Guthrie Theatre of Minneapolis presented his play, Nagamandala, for
> its 30th Anniversary Celebrations in 1993 and went on to commission his
> next play, The Fire and the Rain.  The Leicester Haymarket Theatre
> commissioned Bali The Sacrifice which is scheduled to open in June 2002.
>
> He was a Fulbright Playwright-in Residence and Visiting Professor at the
> University of Chicago in 1987-88.  He has been decorated with a Padma
> Bhushan by the President of India and was the Chairman of the Sangeet
> Natak Akademi, the National Academy of the Performing Arts during
> 1988-93.  He was awarded the Bharatiya Jnanpith, India's highest
> literary prize, in 1999.
>
> He has also directed films which have won national and international
> awards and has acted for renowned film-makers such as Satyajit Ray,
> Mrinal Sen and Shyam Benegal.
>
> For more information, check http://www.iti-worldwide.org/
>
>