Just a topic for discussion!
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The Handwriting on the Road: An Artist Draws the Flood Line
Randy Kennedy, June 16, 2007
Hope all have a productive semester.
Best,
Terri
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
So the Drama...
This blog usually deals with things visual, but recent events have conspired to turn our attention to issues of representation in theater. Politcal theater, to be precise. “Pure” political theater in the president’s words. Take this detour into theater criticism for what it is…dilettante.
According to the New York Times, there have been more than a half dozen uses of the phrase “political theater” in the last few weeks. Some focus group must find this an especially damning criticism given the spike in its use. But what does it mean coming from a president whose administration is more fond of conducting pageantry than setting policy (in case you forgot, this is one heck of a stage-managed administration…)?
The idea that genuine disagreements over political issues could be dismissed as “theatrics” is shared by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently described wrangling over the state budget as “kabuki”. Wait...didn't the governor used to have another career?
But the straw that broke the camel's back here at HyperCriticalWriting was an NPR report on a terrorism readiness drill at the Orange Bowl. Listen to the FBI's Stephanie Veigas talking about the "more highly choreographed demonstration than we would usually have", narrating the "dynamic entrance" of the SWAT team (armed with paintball guns for the demo), and excitedly doing play-by-play on the demise of the “bad guys”. Message? Political theater...bad. Terror theater...? Good!
This last foolishness deserves comment not only for its insistance that the world can be divided into “good guys” and “bad guys”, but for its status as the supreme theatrical spectacle of the week. The premise of the exercise --ripped from TV drama -- was that terrorists had a ‘dirty bomb’ (I’d love to see some polling on how many Americans know what a ‘dirty bomb’ is…who cares? It sure sounds bad.) Nevermind that the most damaging acts of terror have been accomplished with such mundane things as commercial aircraft )the four 9/11 hijackings), a speedboat (the 2000 attack on the USS Cole), and, in 1995, fertilizer (the Murrah Federal Building…oops! That one was conducted by a US citizen!).
Shortly after 9/11, the media beat itself up for covering too many shark attacks not noticing who was enrolled in flight school. Now it seems everyone has decided it’s okay to go back into spectacle mode, to stop thinking of the world as a place in which people have genuinely opposing views of how the world ought to be run – not “good guy” and bad guy” views like on 24 or some thing (it's worth noting that some people are glad that shark attack coverage is up again...see here). When I started asking around if anyone had noticed the up-tick in references to theater, my colleague Paul Falzone, saw right away that it was code for gay, for artificial, for insincere.
As anyone who’s ever been to the theater knows, extreme artifice is capable of generating extraordinary amounts of genuine emotion. But it reduces legitimate viewpoints to potagonist/antagonist dynamics and suggests a kind of extreme egotism in which the accuser is really saying that his foil is just spouting lines before the plot reaches an inevitable conclusion. Politics isn't literature, or film, or theater. It's people arguing for what they believe they need, struggling for the right to say what will happen and what won't. Marginalizing the concerns of your opponents by calling there actions "theatrics" is a cheap tactic...not mention an extreme case of the pot calling the kettle black.
According to the New York Times, there have been more than a half dozen uses of the phrase “political theater” in the last few weeks. Some focus group must find this an especially damning criticism given the spike in its use. But what does it mean coming from a president whose administration is more fond of conducting pageantry than setting policy (in case you forgot, this is one heck of a stage-managed administration…)?
The idea that genuine disagreements over political issues could be dismissed as “theatrics” is shared by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently described wrangling over the state budget as “kabuki”. Wait...didn't the governor used to have another career?
But the straw that broke the camel's back here at HyperCriticalWriting was an NPR report on a terrorism readiness drill at the Orange Bowl. Listen to the FBI's Stephanie Veigas talking about the "more highly choreographed demonstration than we would usually have", narrating the "dynamic entrance" of the SWAT team (armed with paintball guns for the demo), and excitedly doing play-by-play on the demise of the “bad guys”. Message? Political theater...bad. Terror theater...? Good!
This last foolishness deserves comment not only for its insistance that the world can be divided into “good guys” and “bad guys”, but for its status as the supreme theatrical spectacle of the week. The premise of the exercise --ripped from TV drama -- was that terrorists had a ‘dirty bomb’ (I’d love to see some polling on how many Americans know what a ‘dirty bomb’ is…who cares? It sure sounds bad.) Nevermind that the most damaging acts of terror have been accomplished with such mundane things as commercial aircraft )the four 9/11 hijackings), a speedboat (the 2000 attack on the USS Cole), and, in 1995, fertilizer (the Murrah Federal Building…oops! That one was conducted by a US citizen!).
Shortly after 9/11, the media beat itself up for covering too many shark attacks not noticing who was enrolled in flight school. Now it seems everyone has decided it’s okay to go back into spectacle mode, to stop thinking of the world as a place in which people have genuinely opposing views of how the world ought to be run – not “good guy” and bad guy” views like on 24 or some thing (it's worth noting that some people are glad that shark attack coverage is up again...see here). When I started asking around if anyone had noticed the up-tick in references to theater, my colleague Paul Falzone, saw right away that it was code for gay, for artificial, for insincere.
As anyone who’s ever been to the theater knows, extreme artifice is capable of generating extraordinary amounts of genuine emotion. But it reduces legitimate viewpoints to potagonist/antagonist dynamics and suggests a kind of extreme egotism in which the accuser is really saying that his foil is just spouting lines before the plot reaches an inevitable conclusion. Politics isn't literature, or film, or theater. It's people arguing for what they believe they need, struggling for the right to say what will happen and what won't. Marginalizing the concerns of your opponents by calling there actions "theatrics" is a cheap tactic...not mention an extreme case of the pot calling the kettle black.
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