RE: [-empyre-] poetics...



Hello all and a Happy New Year 
 
with thanks for your ringing in some resonant ideas that get my head spinning out of (usual) ruts... Reading and feeling intrigued, uneasy about responding because not quite sure where/ how to pitch it but here goes... 
 
I'm interested to read Aleksandra your reflection/ comparison of shadow theatre/ cinema, as this differentiation between live and mechanically driven performance and the borders between these two sectors is something I've been working on for a while, particularly with respect to puppetry, automats, robots, etc. I think what amazed me when I first saw wayang shadow puppets move (as a privileged witness of Jacques Pimpaneau's collections/ demonstrations in Paris) was their voluptuous three-dimensionality and their colourfulness, which belied my illusions about flat shadows and challenged my hasty mental comparisons with black and white cinema. Another question picking up on Jim's re the Balinese acquisition of writing, I'd like to know Aleksandra how much importance you  attribute to the Ramayana and Mahabarata epics as narrative threads sufficiently commonly understood to allow for the high level of "localised" adaptation, reappropriation, improvisation that you mention - and also as eminently literary threads from Sanskrit which work/ed their way into  Balinese theatre. 
 
Many experts consider that while wayang theatre forms long predated Hindu influences, and while latter Javanese creations drawing on the Hindu epics are very clearly localised, at the same time there are forms of sanskrit used amongst dalangs that refer to literary links not to be overlooked - without trying to undermine multidisciplinary "braiding" we're talking about, but without eclipsing ostensibly literary strands for fear of their dominance.
 
This isn't meant to be a pedantic history question, and sorry it's so unclear, but I often wonder whether our attempts to define work as "narrative arc" or "multimedia texture weaving" aren't much more prone to contextual readings/ cultural bias as 20-21st century thinkers than we wish to admit. In other words, we've acquired historico-cultural distance from some types of work that makes it convenient to consider them as essentially linear narratives when in fact they may have been hugely differently experienced at the time of their creation. Conversely, perhaps today's tendency to conceptualise in terms of braided, rhizomatic, equal-parts-interwoven, emergent and processual dynamics and let's skip the rest of the rhetoric... leads us to view too exclusively in these terms works that might be seen by others including our descendants as conveying very different dynamics to those (we think) we're building? Perhaps they'll see work that describes sweeping teleological curves and narrative arcs where we reveled in the leveling effects of chance and process?
 
Just an idle query from a (happily) tormented mind!
 
best wishes to all
 
sjn
 
 
 

________________________________

From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Kenneth Newby
Sent: Sun 08/01/2006 02:09
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] poetics...



Hi Jim,

The poetics of form you imply remind me of a variety of interesting
alternatives to the Aristotelian narrative arc that have come up within
the Euro-American thread of culture.   Ars Combinatoria, the
Musicalische Wurfelspiel of Mozart, Haydn and others, English change
ringing of permutations on sets of bells, Schoenberg's serial
formalism, Cage and Cunningham's exploration of compositional process,
Oulipo to name a few... all interesting proposals for other ways of
doing it.

The south and south-east Asian examples are of particular interest in
that they are typically made up of profoundly integrated
multidisciplinary forms: music, narrative, dance, dramatic elements,
character, scenography, projections on screens, etc.  And in the
Balinese example all of this complexity  is orchestrated with an
openness that allows the work to respond to the local characteristics
of its performance.

Kenneth.

On 7-Jan-06, at 6:24 AM, Jim Andrews wrote:

> After I posted, I thought of Aleksandra's posts that talk about the
> process-oriented, braided 'poetics' of Balinese drama versus the less
> process-oriented poetics of Aristotle and much of western literature.
> Certainly writers involved in digital media have wrestled with the
> apparent
> disjunction between the structure of western narratives and drama, on
> the
> one hand, and the more process-oriented possibilities of new media. It
> may
> be that the sort of thing you and Aleksandra note--that useful
> paradigms for
> dramatic, process-oriented art exist (as in Balinese drama)--could be
> useful
> to writers and others. Interesting that the 'braided process' approach
> is
> not only of drama but song and dance...Greek theatre also had these
> elements...it seems likely that the roots of Greek drama go back to
> religious rites/rituals (so much work done on that matter by the
> 'Cambridge
> anthropologists' Jane Harrison et all).
>
> I wonder if you know when the Balinesians acquired writing? Much later
> than
> their dramatic form? It would be natural for writing to be strongly
> influential on form emerging from cultures that have writing.
>
> I'm currently reading one of the better books I've encountered in a
> long
> time, called Snow by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Though there are
> conventional progressions between chapters in the narrative, you can
> pick it
> up at any point and its interesting to read from there. That's a fairly
> 'simple' poetics, in a sense, but difficult to achieve: excellence at
> every
> point. I suppose it doesn't hurt that the main character is a poet.
>
> The approach is hinted at in the first paragraph of chapter one
> (titled The
> Journey to Kars).
>
> "The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus
> driver. If
> this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he
> felt
> inside him the silence of snow."
>
> A wonderful introduction to the character's poetics--and the
> novelist's.
> Poetics as what we mediate experience and language with.
>
> ja
> http://subtle.net/empyre
> http://vispo.com
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>

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