Spurious mentioning Handke reminds me, not of the brief writings I've read by him (always elegant, exquisitely tooled, even if they do seem to leave the universe a little darker and more hopeless); but of a completely amazing stage work I saw by Handke in 1994, and reviewed for an academic newsletter. I can't find the review on my computer – the electronic text is probably long lost – but I remember how amazing the piece was, and how (unfortunately) practically indescribable. That puts it partly in line with the other radical Handke stage works, especially his famous and wonderfully obnoxious Publikumsbeschimpfung ('Insulting the Public'), the final word in the game of épater le bourgeoisie (there's an English phrase for that – what is it? – 'shocking the bourgeois' or something like that).
But I'll try to describe it a bit anyway... though most of it has vanished: only the impression of being amazed has really stayed with me, after all these years. The beautiful little program book (German programs are always so perfect, like German paperbacks), though I have it here beside me, doesn't help much either – it collects a scenario, some notes, a foldout reproduction of a painting of the stage set. It's an exquisite souvenir, but doesn't really evoke anything about the piece, except, well, the impossibility of accurately evoking the piece....
Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten (something like: The Hour In Which We Knew Nothing About Each Other) is not really drama, because it doesn't have any words, at all; but it's not really dance either, and doesn't fit any of even the more unexpected categories of experimental theater or performance art. It is a mime/movement piece, I suppose, but unlike all those I've ever seen; fluid, silent (no music), graceful and choreographed, but also everyday and not at all dance-like. I suppose it would have to be seen as a quasi-real, quasi-surreal exploration of everyday movement at its edges where it becomes aesthetic movement (i.e. where the body becomes deeply involved); the fact that the piece happens on street corners and in rooms constantly brings it back to earth, because the resonance is always with normal people in the street, not with any kind of spectacle. I suppose among the many reasons that it isn't really a dance piece (no music, etc.) is that it isn't either narrative, or a work of pure form (as in, say, a Balanchine/Stravinsky collaboration) – it is in fact constructed just as one would construct a play, except there aren't any words. Or plot. Or coherent characters....
I suppose it serves me right: the piece was hard enough to explain when I wrote a three-page review in 1994, in the afterglow of a beautiful performance in Berlin; and now, as you can see, all I can come up with is negatives, things that it is not like. Experiencing the piece wasn't negative at all, however: it felt entirely graceful and alive, like something very real and important.
Hmm, points up the difficulties I had teaching performance analysis last semester: the really wonderful works seem to be based on experiences, embodiments, that are exactly the parts that evaporate when you try to apply tradition, or semiotics, or in fact the rational mind....
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