Modernity has about it a rejection of the past and the modern actor's predecessors. Of necessity that puts modernity in opposition to the traditional.
"An unfaltering belief in the future complemented an uncompromising scorn for the past." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 411).
Modernism exults
"the triumph of man over nature, now assured by industrial might. ... Above all there was a belief – more than that, an intoxicating self-excitement – in the sheer power of the human will, in our power to shape our destiny. It is not, I think, by accident that the age of modernism also saw the rise of totalitarian ideologies in Russia, Germany and Italy" (Ibid).
"... there is no polarity between the tradition and originality. ... The tradition gets taken up – aufgehoben – into the whole personality of the artist and is for that reason new, rather than novel by an effort of will. There's a fear that without novelty there is only banality, but the pay-off is that it is precisely the striving for novelty that leads to banality. We confuse novelty with newness. No one ever decided not to fall in love because it's been done before, or because its expressions are banal. They are both as old as the hills and completely fresh in every case of genuine love." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 413).
Our task is to make of the tradition something beautiful, engaging and fresh; to infuse it with life, energy and pride; to make the tradition something that allows us to see the present and the future with penetrating insight and liberating optimism. Our task is to make our tradition into an adventure.
The objective of traditional media is to move the experience away from the head and towards the sense organs. The experience should as closely as possible occur in its embodied rather than its disembodied form and format.
No comments:
Post a Comment