Avignon, France. July 25, 2013.
No one can comprehend the pain of another, and no one can comprehend the joy of another. One is always going towards another, but is never going beside another. —Franz Schubert, Journal 1824
How do we know the pain of another? It is a question tangled in the roots of the theater, since Aristotle first hailed that peculiar word catharsis and sent countless others off to describe the shape of that unwieldy lodestone anchoring the tragic. A purging, they say, a release. But who gets to feel that relief we have heard so much about? There is the famous story of the Greek actor Polus playing Electra and mourning over the urn she thinks contains the ashes of her lost brother Orestes. Polus filled the vessel with the remains of his own dead son, his lamentations gathering fictional force from actual loss. Who are we to say that the actor's pain is less than ours or greater? And if someone is in pain in a theater is it real pain? Or, like a chair put onstage, does it, too, become something other than itself—a theatrical chair all dressed up in costume and set, a character playing its part?
These are big, big questions—old, old questions, too—and I will not pretend to answer them. Having spent the last few weeks between the Avignon Festival and the Edinburgh Festival, two of the largest and most historically-grounded theater festivals in the world (both founded in 1947 and both occupying medieval cities), I raise them in an attempt to make some sense of a recent spate of work I have seen over here that has left me reeling. If one of the basic impulses behind the theatrical event is the desire to experience empathy, to understand how another feels, then these pieces expose the gap between that desire and any possibility of meeting. As Schubert put it so long ago in my awkward translation above, one is always going towards another, but is never going beside another.
Talya Kingston, who is also here in Scotland for the festival, has written some on the work at Edinburgh that asks its audiences to bear witness to testimony. In my brief writing here and in the second part of this posting, I will offer some words on work I have seen here at Avignon that addressed similar questions, but from radically different angles.
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