Quote of the Day
"To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and see somebody playing somebody else's life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. It's a very different concept. It's about true reality."
-Marina Abramovic, in polemical mode.
Yes it's fake. And that's why I love it.
(hat tip: Noises Off.)
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1 comment:
The mistake Abramovic makes is one that many people fall into--to insult theater because it is not sufficiently real, compared to other media (movies, performance art, etc.). When in fact, what theater is trying for is not to be "real" but to be "true." Theater is complete artifice, often proudly so, but all in the service of an emotional or philosophical truth. It doesn't matter that the knife and blood aren't real--together, they can communicate something profound that an actual knife and actual blood often can't. That's the power of metaphor.
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