WHAT BIG IDEAS HAVE NOT BEEN EXPLORED IN OUR THEATRE YET?

Convener(s): Sam Jones 

Participants: Sam, Tom, Darragh, Fiona Watt, Darren Abrahams, Richard Hayhow, Ken Turner, the cat

 

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

 This topic arose because I had met a Russian playwright last week who told me that all contemporary Russian plays, apart from those written for the Western market, were about The Spirit and The Soul.  I thought ‘Crikey! All those millions of people thinking about the spirit and the soul – what must that be like.?

 

The following came up in our discussion:

• There was a lot of overlap with the ‘Faith’ session that Stella presented.
• Faith is personal
• Opera deals with heaven and hell – the epic
• Even TIE is allowed to deal with big issues eg right and wrong – and this matters to children directly
• When we verbalise it moves out of the heart into the head
• The collective
• PERFUME (the film) Smell was evoked through visceral music and lush colour, which bypasses the intellect
• Transmution and transportation – concept into presentation
• Passion – eg why football is exciting – because you have a sense of participation and feel you can change the action
• Does a big idea have to be an intellectual thought?
• JOY
• How to put philosophy on stage.
• Philosophy is poetry.  Don’t need words – silence and metaphor
• The place between thinking and feeling – the dynamic between them is poetic expression
• The potency of metaphor
• Containment is important – the containment of ideas within a special place
• Semantics
• The Sultans Elephant – why was this such a potent spectacle? Public response very intense and visceral.  Because of scale? Because there was no narrative? Because it was in a public space and changed the public space?  Because it was a pilgrimage?
• Empty spectacle versus full spectacle
• What theatre can learn from visual art – the abstract to the concrete.  An engagement with the abstract
• Cultural crisis – A powerful culture of fear – imagine the opposite ie a powerful culture of joy.
• The job of an artist is to examine the culture critically
• Censorship / self- censorship
• The desensitising and emptying of images eg.  Images of war