The new theatre at la mama is beautiful. It's like The Ohio but exaggerated in depth, the playing space a long projected image reaching back toward the old proscenium. Endless possibilities, and mysteries, too, like a dream's version of a maquette. I'm not sure the play I saw there last night has a life outside of the festival of which it was a part--a bit farce, a bit Pirandello, a bit about the Czech revolution; I like that theatre can always be revolutionary, even if it's just the actors electing to scream a battle cry of perseverance.
My pen has been at the ready these days, compelled to write down and remember things I'm often willing to notice, accept, and pocket away. I'm sure they're not really forgotten, but my fisherman's instinct is in overdrive lately, and I've been collecting not objects, as is my usual wont, but ideas. "A community whose voice is repressed begins to use gesture to express itself." The line spoken last night referred to a moment in the Velvet Revolution when students gathered at Wenceslav Square and jingled their keys all together, the resulting chimes gesturing the demand for the unlocking of doors, for the exit of the communist party from the building. It also can't help but refer to the theatre, where gesture was eventually transformed to natural reality. The idea of the sound of a thousand keys tinkling together made me think again of Keats, and the "viewless wings of Poesy;" idea, sound, and then sense. To find sense in such ephemera--this must be why Pirandello wrote relentlessly about the theatre. It's cyclical, it's never-ending, it's a skeleton key to the universe.
And then there's this (thanks to ZF for pointing me in this direction):
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1599922023?bctid=50273075001
If there's a key to
this, it will either mean the end of the world or the saving of it, I'm not sure.
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