Tag: Sacrifice

Pernicious Enemies of Art

Featured Monica Carroll5 Comments

In Stanislavski’s diary he wrote that his teacher, Arkadi Tortsov, spoke to the class against pernicious enemies of art. He said, “‘You must fight them as hard as possible, and, if that does not work, then they must be driven off the stage. And so,’ he turned to Varya once more, ‘make up your mind once and for all. Did you come here to serve art and make sacrifices for it or to exploit it for your own personal ends?’” (Stanislavski 2008:35).

Serve art. Make your sacrifices, Writer.

Stanislavski, K. 2008. An Actor’s Work. A Student’s Diary. Trans. Jean Benedetti. London: Routledge: From Konstantin Stanislavsky, 1950. Rabota Aktera nad Soboi [The Actor’s Work on Oneself] Moscow: Iskusstvo

Why write?

Featured Monica Carroll1 Comment

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz is renowned for writing on the poetics of power, especially on the use of ritual and symbol in political spectacle.

In Negara, The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali, Geertz constructs an ethnographic account using historical descriptions of theatrical sacrifice. He includes an archival description of three sacrificed concubines, kept by a deceased Rajah. As part of a public ritualised spectacle, the women leapt to their deaths, diving into a sea of flames, each holding a small dove which flew upwards as the women fell, symbolising their escaping spirits (p.101).

Geertz says, “It was an argument, made over and over again in the insistent vocabulary of ritual, that worldly status has a cosmic base, that hierarchy is the governing principle of the universe, and that
the arrangements of human life are but approximations, more close or less, to those of the divine” (p.102).

An interesting aspect of Geertz’ argument in this, and his other works, is that political theatre is neither a means to displaying nor gaining power, it is political theatre as an end in itself.

Can you, writer, devote your heart and hours as an end in itself?

Geertz, C. 1981. Negara, The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali, Princeton University Press