{"id":88,"date":"2011-07-06T02:21:24","date_gmt":"2011-07-06T09:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=88"},"modified":"2011-07-05T22:22:26","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T05:22:26","slug":"in-whose-hands-does-meaning-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2011\/07\/in-whose-hands-does-meaning-live.html","title":{"rendered":"In Whose Hands Does Meaning Live?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: "DSC07227" by Phillip Torrone from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.<\/p><\/div>\n

Where does the meaning of a piece of work live?\u00a0 When does its particular resonance take shape?\u00a0<\/p>\n

When a playwright puts words down on paper and submits them to be produced, is there something already inherent in those words that form the shape of the meaning?\u00a0 Or is the true shape of that meaning created by a director, whose particular eye and concept elevate the words from the page to the proscenium?<\/p>\n

This is not, it turns out, just an esoteric conversation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As we move into an age where ownership in other arenas becomes more and more fragmentary\u2014where re-appropriation and remixing and re-envisioning are ever more frequently being both pursued and encouraged as reinforcement that works of art continue to be relevant\u2014the theatre world seems, in some ways, stuck in an old argument.\u00a0 Who owns the rights to the art seems less the point, these days, than who has the right to play around with that art.<\/p>\n

In an article<\/a> yesterday in the New York Times<\/em>, opera critic Anthony Tommasini, writing about the dual Ring<\/em> Cycles of the San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, opened with this line: \u201cEvery production of an opera is a commentary on the work. But how and to what extent a director should make such commentary is the question.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about the imprint of the director for a week or so now, and reading these two sentences sparked a clarity for me because it showed me that, in opera, much of the ground has already been ceded.\u00a0 Great operas are already great, to put it overly simply, and so, like Shakespeare, they can by and large stand a little (or a lot) of artifice built on top of them.\u00a0 They have, in a sense, become playgrounds for auteurs, and that is, I think, why big names like Julie Taymor really get a kick out of directing operas\u2014who, honestly, can mess up The Magic Flute<\/em>, with such a strong backbone provided by Mozart, no matter how many\u00a0giant bear kites<\/a>\u00a0and Masonic symbols <\/a>and outlandish costumes<\/a> you throw in?<\/p>\n

But at what point does a work become either so strong or so irrelevant that drastic re-imagination is encouraged, and a strong director\u2019s hand empowered?\u00a0 Is it really at that magical moment when copyright runs out?<\/p>\n

Partly I\u2019ve been thinking about this concept\u2014of whether there\u2019s a heart to a good play that consistently beats, or whether it\u2019s all built up out of the paper by those who come after the playwright (or both)\u2014because at AFTA this year, for the first time, I presented some very rudimentary aggregated numbers from the intrinsic impact <\/a>work.\u00a0 In the week prior to AFTA, as I was frantically pulling together numbers, one graph that I created really startled me.\u00a0 You see, purely by chance (okay, almost purely by chance), we have as part of the study two theatre companies doing different productions of the same play.\u00a0 When I graphed the aggregated impact scores for those two productions side-by-side, this is what I saw:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With the one half-step exception in aesthetic growth, the results are, as the opposing counsel in My Cousin Vinny <\/em>says while\u00a0standing in front of the jury and pumping his hands, \u201cEeeeey-dentical!\u201d\u00a0 On average, audiences for these two productions of the same play, one in California and one on the East Coast, were impacted identically intellectually, socially, empathetically, and in overall captivation.\u00a0 Which could either be absolutely awesome or could mean nothing.<\/p>\n

This idea of where meaning is made comes from my colleague Rebecca Ratzkin, who works at WolfBrown<\/a> and is very deeply involved in this intrinsic impact research\u2014and it\u2019s important I note (because she would kill me if I didn\u2019t) that drawing any real conclusions from two productions, relatively few surveys, separated by a continent, without any other comparison, is nigh on impossible.\u00a0 But, if not conclusions here, I guess what I see is the possibility of something that I find absolutely fascinating: what if this play really does have its own peculiar heartbeat, and neither director nor star nor venue nor time nor city can alter that particular rhythm?\u00a0 What if, in essence, the impacts of the play are hardwired into it?<\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky<\/a>, a linguist and anarchist (okay, political theorist) now known more for the second appellation than the first, outlined a concept in the late 1960\u2019s that he called universal grammar<\/a>.\u00a0 He was investigating how languages are created and acquired, and he settled on this idea that all of us, from the moment we\u2019re born, carry in us common, innate, fundamental rules of grammar, and we use that inherent understanding to gradually build up our language comprehension and production.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I often think of art in this way\u2014as the manifestation of something fundamental and internal, built from blocks we all carry with us even if we don\u2019t know it.\u00a0 And so, in a poetic sense, it seems not out of the realm of possibility that the first step in that manifestation in the theatre would be with the words on the page.\u00a0 By forming the lines, the playwright in a sense locks into essence just a bit of that ineffable something that we sometimes call empathy, or sixth sense, or maybe just love or joy or common pain.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t, however, minimize the role of the director in that world, nor that of the designers or the actors or anyone else involved\u2014including the audience. \u00a0In the terms of intrinsic impact, I would say that the contributions of the others involved increase the imprint of the impact over time.\u00a0 They add levels and details, nooks and crannies of complexity and surprise, that make the print of the experience that is left on people more tenacious, more ingenious, more memorable.\u00a0 All of which has nothing whatsoever to do with copyright.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to Little Shop of Horrors<\/em>.\u00a0 I\u2019ve deliberately avoided mentioning Little Shop<\/em> until now, and don\u2019t plan to spend too much time on the particulars of what has gone on at Boxcar Theatre here in San Francisco (feel free to read along here<\/a> if you want to be caught up), and here\u2019s why: I think that the particulars of the Boxcar situation dumb down what should be a nuanced discussion about the evolving role of one artist in a socially artistic enterprise (within the context of a society that is quickly changing its opinions about what is good, and respectful, and extraordinary, and so on).\u00a0 The truth of the matter is that, as much as Nick Olivero wants us all to focus on the (in many ways very legitimate and enticing) arguments about the value of the aggregated, manipulated, surgically enhanced work he did with his particular production of Little Shop<\/em>, at the end of the day almost everyone I\u2019ve spoken to or read comes back to a very simple, black-and-white conclusion: Dude shouldn\u2019t have signed a contract he wasn\u2019t going to abide by.\u00a0 And I agree.\u00a0 And so I\u2019d ask that this conversation be taken in the context of something larger, or at least more legal\u2014something like, say, the amazing multimedia production of Brief Encounter<\/em> that toured the world last year, and that Jason Robert Brown referenced<\/a> in his insightful comments on Olivero\u2019s letter here.\u00a0 That show shows what can happen within the confines of legality that still empower remixing, reimagination, reinterpretation.<\/p>\n

In my conversation with Rebecca Ratzkin, she directed me back to Roland Barthes\u2019 The Death of the Author<\/a><\/em>, a book I remember being both dense and boring that I read only small parts of in college.\u00a0 She noted that conversations around ownership have in some ways advanced further (or at least been going on longer) in the visual arts world and music world, and she reminded me that Barthes\u2019 essential argument was that once a piece is completed and handed out into the world, it is the world\u2019s, and is given over to the manipulations and interpretations of those who chose to consume it.\u00a0 I think that visual arts and music scholars may have grappled with this more, in a way, because in both of those cases there is a possibility that more<\/em> of the original work is left behind once the initial production is completed\u2014which is to say, there\u2019s still a painting, there\u2019s still a recording, there\u2019s still the possibility of sitting down in your living room on any day, at any time, and experiencing the fullness of that work again.\u00a0 In theatre we don\u2019t so much have that\u2014because all of the stuff that turns a play from a beautiful book of dialogue into a representation of life dissipates the minute it\u2019s done, and we\u2019re basically left to argue over (and buy rights to) the small, valuable, absolutely essential bit that\u2019s left at the end.<\/p>\n

I think of it sometimes as Pandora\u2019s box<\/a>, but without the ominous music.\u00a0 When the box was made, it was crafted carefully, artfully, in just these dimensions and with just this clasp and lock, and it was filled with this item and that item, all humming and waiting like Jacks in the Box to spring out when it was opened.\u00a0 And then it was opened, and they did, and it was extraordinary, and then someone put them all back, and they waited for the next time.\u00a0 Every time, the same pieces, placed back differently by different hands, arranged with care, but a different specific care, each time.\u00a0 The core remains, but it\u2019s nothing without the hands that present it to the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where does the meaning of a piece of work live?\u00a0 When does its particular resonance take shape?\u00a0 When a playwright puts words down on paper and submits them to be produced, is there something already inherent in those words that form the shape of the meaning?\u00a0 Or is the true shape of that meaning created […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-88","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-audience-development","8":"category-language","9":"category-main","10":"category-research","11":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}