I recently finished re-reading Howard Barker's seminal work of performance theory, "Arguments for a Theatre," and was reminded once again of the darkly inspirational force of his writing and uncompromising artistic vision. Cruel, cold, and inflamatory, he has long been an implacable foe of the liberal British establishment, and champion of radical theatre worldwide. I can't say that I fully endorse his "Theatre of Catastrophe" or many of his specific views about performance, but I greatly admire his imaginative rigor, brash rhetorical style, and willingness to fuck with the established paradigms and sacred cows of contemporary theatre. For those of you unfamiliar with Barker and his works, here are a few choice and representative quotes from "Arguments..."
"A carnival is not a revolution. After the carnival, after the removal of the masks, you are precisely who you were before. After the tragedy, you are not certain who you are."
"There are more people in pursuit of knowledge than the accountants will admit...Some people want to grow in their souls...But not all people. Consequently, tragedy is elitist."
"The Public, as an invention, becomes the enemy of the artist, a solid block of immovable entertainment-seekers whose numbers and subsequent economic power forbid intelligence."
"We find quality to be revolutionary, discrimination subversive, unanimity a spiritual poverty and the intelligensia flinging its wits away, clambering through the decomposing heap of video and pop stars' bones that constitutes monetarist art."
"It is not for nothing that the word 'cunt' operates both as the most extreme notation of abuse and also the furthest reach of desire, and not only in male speech, and in attempting to eliminate the word the thing itself is eliminated, since nothing can stand in for it. Since what cannot be expressed cannot exist dramatically, the attempt to abolish the word becomes an attack on the body itself - a veiled attempt to remove the body from dramatic space."
"...if the People want your art they will obviously pay for it, and if they don't, by what right does it exist?"
"Laughter appears to be a manifestation of solidarity, but it is now more often a sign of subordination. It is pain that the audience needs to experience, and not contempt. We have a theatre of contempt masquerading as comedy."
"It is always the case that the audience is willing to know more, and to endure more, than the dramatist or producer trusts it with...A new theatre will not force anyone to be free. Rather it will be an invitation to ask what freedom is."
"The usual focus of contemprorary theatre is how we live with one another on given moral predicates ('it is bad to hurt people', 'the unfortunate should induce feelings of pity', etc.), but clearly there is now a problem with the predicates themselves. A braver theatre asks the audience to test the validity of the categories it believes it lives by."
"The verb 'to dramatize' is part of the kitsch vocabulary of issues, in which actors are employed as a means to a didactic end, the education of the ignorant audience, and by 'research' we are threatened with the spurious legitimacy of so-called facts. 'It's all right', the actors seem to tell you in researched plays, 'everything we demonstrate has occurred', is in effect 'true'. But the theatre is not true, it is not a true action, its very power, its whole authority comes from the fact that it is not true, and the idea of accuracy, or reference to a source outside the theatre walls, is fatal to its particular unsettling and revolutionary power....The theatre is without evidence, it 'makes believe', it forces belief."
"(The Catastropist playwright) will not know how to structure a play, let alone make it well-made, and, what is more, will, in a spasm of shocking elitism, appear to be 'wrestling with his own demons', the very antithesis of the accessible play, where authors grapple with everybody else's demons. This is the theatre of selfishness, and its maker is someone who sees himself or herself unashamedly as an artist, the power of whose imagination is their sole claim on public attention."
"...it is the performance which turns the audience from potential critics into collaborators and accomplices in an illicit act."
"Let me state here unequivocally that theatre is without use, is the abnegation of use-value, and defies annexation or appropriation, being neither a diversion from the tedium of common life nor a palliative for deformed social relations, and therefore it reconciles no one either to his neighbor or his fate...Its nature is torrential, barbaric, non-evidential, its methods are those of plethora and excess, and by its very origin in simulation, theatre is an unlikely host for the ameliorative project of humanism and its hyperbole of truth."
"Conscience kills art as surely as pity kills love."
