Systems of Rehearsal Pt. II (Shomit Miller)

Unfortunately for me the final chapters logarithmically increased the amount of barely intelligible artistic babel and doubled down on the assertion that Peter Brook is a bad (or at least, uninteresting) artist because he synthesizes styles instead of having his own precious, unique holistic style of acting.

To add onto what I said yesterday, it’s frustrating that we’ve corrupted an art form which should be about the beauty that comes from collaboration and turned it into a referendum of one part of the organism. I don’t want to think about the director when I go see much of anything, and I don’t want to think about the writer, and I don’t want to think about the actors, I wanted to think of the story and how it affects me, my life, and my thinking, and this omnipresent focus on the factory that creates the art, I think, hinders our own ability to judge things and to place them in the context of our lives.

That expectation isn’t very practical though, I suppose.

What have I learned? I’ve learned the way that three prominent people approached the art of theatre and how they tried to communicate that to people (and ultimately how they each turned away from their original ideas in favor of something less tangible.) I didn’t learn much that I could put into everyday practice, except that maybe inducting my actors in my way of thinking might be a good way to make them think higher of me.

Bah.