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17 October 1971: Having last night seen Ariane Mnouchkine’s breathtaking company in 1789 at the Round House, I attend a discussion of the production with Mnouchkine, Arnold Wesker and Jonathan Miller. Wesker views the show darkly, saying that collective authorship can lead to “group hysteria” and in any case must always lack the “focus” that a single writer can bring to bear on events. I rise to say that it is precisely that single focus that has led to the state of drama today -- too many private plays about private middle-class people. When such authors attempt historical subjects, they always see them through the eyes of individuals (usually prominent or powerful figures). Collective authorship, on the other hand, dispenses with individual psychology and is thus uniquely fitted to present the movements of masses, classes and social groups. Mnouchkine’s company, for instance, uses five or six different actors to play Louis XVI in various different guises and situations; so that it’s impossible for us to identify with him. Arnold, I fear, is still enslaved to the idea of a play as the private property of the author -- a strange bourgeois hangover. Mnouchkine points out that she was not allowed to register the play with the Societe des Auteurs as the joint work of Le Theatre du Soleil: it had to be attributed to one named person. Thus does the law carry out its appointed duty to keep property private.
-- Kenneth Tynan, Diaries
We live in uncertain times. Perhaps times have always been uncertain. But it seems to me than now the uncertainty of the modern condition is particularly palpable, as a strange soft porn mentality has begun to govern our lives. There seems to be an increasing, and alarmingly so, lack of clarity not only in local but global culture, as those in power refuse with egregious nonchalance and arrogance to acknowledge the fragile ecologies that need subsist in our world, and the rate of poverty that grows exponentially whilst an infinitesimal percentage of people control the economy.
Those of us who practice art are faced daily with not only the blank page, stone, or screen, but also the seeming impracticality and irrelevance of making work for a consumer-driven culture. The worth and value of a piece of work is measured often by how much one has sold one's work and to whom. Intrinsic value is not a marketable commodity, but therein lies the strength and power of what we as theatremakers and artisans do. We are joined at the hip to the ephemeral, to the vanishing moment, or the passing look.
We make something for it to last not eternally but finite time. Art is like life: finite, and subjected to random destiny. It takes fortitude, will, a good sense of humor and precious little nonsense to get things done and do them with honesty and integrity. We know we are passing through, we know art is a simple mark of our passing through this time and space. Reveling in the temporal, we need look both inside and outside ourselves in order to document properly what we see, hear, and feel, what impacts us truly, regardless of fashion's impatient sensibility. It is tempting and comfortable to submit to fashion. But what if fashion is fascist or inhumane? Do we go along with it anyway? It is not for me to judge or preach. But it is important to me to keep vigilant to culture, and how it transforms and evolves over time.
Practitioners are involved in a constant and never-ending lab experiment with the art form, the discipline, and society. Each mark, cyberscrawl, or invisible footprint (consciously drawn or not) becomes part of the skin stretched out over the planet, and part of the living membrane of society. It is our job as theatremakers to not only make the mark but be alert to the other marks that have been made before us and in our time. We cannot predict the future, even as it is constantly within our reach as every second goes by. But we can make a living present, a truly living present (living for all) out of the strength of our conscience, and a willingness to refuse intolerance in our world.
-- Caridad Svich
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