RE: [-empyre-] poetics...

["James Barrett" <jim.barrett@humlab.umu.se>]

An excellent start to a new year on empyre.
Thinking about the statement:
> "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."

Brought to mind the description given by Derek Walcott in his Nobel
Lecture of 1992 on how deep the braiding can be:

The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory

"Multiply that moment of self-conviction when an actor, made-up and
costumed, nods to his mirror before stopping on stage in the belief that
he is a reality entering an illusion and you would have what I presumed
was happening to the actors of this epic. But they were not actors. They
had been chosen; or they themselves had chosen their roles in this sacred
story that would go on for nine afternoons over a two-hour period till the
sun set. They were not amateurs but believers. There was no theatrical
term to define them. They did not have to psych themselves up to play
their roles. Their acting would probably be as buoyant and as natural as
those bamboo arrows crisscrossing the afternoon pasture. They believed in
what they were playing, in the sacredness of the text, the validity of
India, while I, out of the writer's habit, searched for some sense of
elegy, of loss, even of degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the
boy-warriors or the heraldic profiles of the village princes. I was
polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration. I
misread the event through a visual echo of History - the cane fields,
indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting
elephants - when all around me there was quite the opposite: elation,
delight in the boys' screams, in the sweets-stalls, in more and more
costumed characters appearing; a delight of conviction, not loss. The name
Felicity made sense."

http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1992/walcott-lecture.html

Felicity is the village in "Trinidad on the edge of the Caroni plain". The
"play" as we may call it in Europe is "Ramleela, the epic dramatization of
the Hindu epic the Ramayana". Walcott writes (speaks) of the boundaries we
erect (threads we weave) between what we make and who we are, between what
we do and where we have been, the vision of our dream and the "history" of
our "future".

Jim B.

> 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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> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>


-- 
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Department of Modern Languages/HUMlab
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