Barbarous Nights: 2010

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Talk Back Performance with Special Guests from Modern Languages!

After the performance on Thursday, Novemeber 11th, at 8pm there will be a talk back with the cast and creative team that is especially for Professor Candace Skibba's Spanish students who have been studying Lorca this semester. Get ready for some great questions that will really put our bilingual script to the test! This talk back should be a wonderful chance for the audience to give us feedback and ask about what they just saw and for us to learn more about how an audience reacts to and what it takes away from Barbarous Nights. Join us!

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Sailor Symbolism

In her book Lorca: The Drawings and Their Relation to the Poet’s Life and Work, Helen Oppenheimer analyzes the figure of the sailor in Lorca’s drawings and writing within the context of his work dealing with the nature of identity that emerged during the years of his close friendship with Dalí. While her reading of this symbolic character is useful to understanding the role of the sailor in our play, it is by no means the only interpretation and our play in many ways contradicts or challenges the ideas presented in this book.

The sailor is primarily a symbol of sexual freedom both as it relates to love and passion as well as creative freedom that Lorca saw as intertwined with sexual expression. Often the word “amor” appears in the picture with the sailor and he might be given wings to illustrate his association with flight and freedom. However, the sailor does not represent an attainable love, but one that is anticipatory. He occupies an abstract rather than a realistic life, and rather than a participant in life he is isolated from it. Although the sailor is exiled like the gypsy, his exile is by choice.

As an object of love in Lorca’s work, the sailor represents an unattainable ideal of love within the realm of dreams rather than reality. He is the object of a frustrated love, love “as it should be, but never as it is” (55). The sailor hails from a “dream-world of constant expectation,” and the flowers that often grow from his otherwise empty eyes or mouth symbolize a dream-like longing for a past or future happiness.

Lorca in Cadaqués visiting Salvador Dalí, 1927

Here, Lorca felt the most happy and closest to his own unattainable love for Dalí.

Despite his lofty associations with dreams and unattainable desires, the sailor is also an emblem of sexuality and passion, often appearing as an amorous lover. The drunken sailor or the sailor appearing from within a tomb is thus a symbol of a fatal passion that leads to death and demise.

Lorca, Sueño del marino, 1927

Lorca with Pablo Neruda and other friends dressed up as sailors in Buenos Aires, 1934

Buster Keaton out to sea in The Navigator

Some questions to consider…

How does this interpretation of the sailor relate to or differ from the Sailor in Barbarous Nights? What is the importance of the Sailor’s isolation from society in our play? How does the Sailor’s relationship with dreams and dreaming relate to the surrealist qualities of our play? Does the Maiden ever attain the unattainable love embodied by her Sailor? How does this symbolism surrounding the Sailor relate to issues of gender and identity in the play and in Lorca’s work in general?

Works Cited:

Oppenheimer, Helen. Lorca: The Drawings and Their Relation to the Poet’s Life and Work. New York, NY: Franklin Watts. 1987. Print.

The Meaning Behind the Mask in Lorca

Although the mask is a central motif throughout Lorca’s poetry, plays and drawings, its meaning is in no way clear. Why was Lorca so interested in masks? What do masks mean in Lorca’s work? Are they always symbolic? How does the mask relate to what Lorca was trying to do with his art overall?

Lorca, Mask

First, the mask is a key symbol that appears in Lorca’s drawings as an objectie representation of his notion of dual identity, or the mask that stands for one’s “social self” that conceals the “solitude behind” (Oppenheimer 50). For example, Lorca’s drawings often explore the image of the clown wearing a comic mask that falls away to reveal a different underneath. For Lorca, the clown mask was about the comic face that people are forced to wear “to face the world,” with Buster Keaton as the quintessential “tragic clown” (Oppenheimer 50). Lorca’s representations of the mask underscore the influence that the work of surrealist and cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and, of course, Salvador Dalí, had upon his drawings. His masked faces are often cubist in nature, revealing multiple and shifting perspectives, and exhibit his characteristic “involuntary style” that moved away from conventional representation without becoming complete abstraction (Oppenheimer 71).

Lorca, Falling Mask

Lorca, Face with Arrows

Lorca, Portrait of the Poet in New York

One of Lorca’s most famous mask drawings is his Self-Portrait of the poet in New York in which Lorca shows himself as a mask at the center of a New York landscape, surrounded by skyscrapers, strange black animals, and decaying plants. Just like his collection of poetry written during his stay in New York City that he believed should have been titled “New York in the poet,” Lorca is grappling with the issue of self-identity in a modern world, drawing a parallel between his own feelings of being “uprooted” from his homeland and the struggle of the African American community in New York. Whether the mask is a façade determined by the individual or forced upon him by society, Lorca understood the mask primarily as a symbol of a repressed interior identity.

Lorca, Music and Mask

Lorca, Clown Mask

Lorca, Mask with Animal

However, the mask also brings with it a number of other cultural associations that surely Lorca and his readers would have recognized and understood. While the most immediate association with the mask for theatre students is commedia dell’arte, I am going to focus on exploring the mask in regards to Spanish Carnival traditions and the rise of modern portrait painting in the early 20th century.

Carnival Masks

Carnival is a ritual festival that celebrates both the coming and spring and the beginning of Lent, gaining this latter Catholic definition in the 15th century when Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon conquered Spain from the Moors and introduced Christianity. Its festivities traditionally fall on the Tuesday before Lent, but it is also traditionally celebrated in Spain over the preceding weekend beginning on Friday with a traditional processional of floats and masqueraders. While it became a popular form of lowbrow entertainment during the 18th century, today it remains rooted in rural tradition. Since the Golden Age of Spanish literature, carnival has been closely associated with the genres of farce and satire, serving as a ritualized form of social critique and ridicule. Over the centuries Carnival has frequently been banned or regulated by the authorities that feared social unrest fostered by Carnival’s topsy-turvy spirit that challenges those in power. The masks worn during Carnival were considered especially dangerous because of their anonymous quality that allowed for crime, protest, and generally bad behavior. In 1937, Franco placed a ban on masquerade and festivals throughout Spain, demonstrating the political implications of Carnival as a symbol of the power possessed by the people themselves and the spirit of subversion, disorder and defiance embodied by the mask (Regalado).

Morena, or cow, mask for Carnival

Masks and the Modern Portrait

The mask is also a tool of modernist portrait painting that developed during the early 20th century and dominated the European art world of Lorca’s lifetime. In painting, modernist art sought to challenge traditional European representational or “realistic” art by instead expressing an essentially “existentialist vision” of the instability and hyper-fragmentation of the human identity as these artists of the historical avant-garde saw it (Serraller 7). Many of these modernist painters like Pablo Picasso were drawn to “primitive” tribal masks because of the unconventional, non-western facial representations that they offered (Klein 31).

Matisse, Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1912-13

Picasso, Mask of a Woman, 1908

Lorca, Portrait of Dalí.

Joan Miró, Portrait of Madame K., 1924

Modernist painters seized upon the mask as a “strategy” for mediating between the artist and their subject because of its transformative properties (Klein 27). Rather than using the mask strictly as a means of concealing or revealing an interior individual identity with an exterior social one, modernist portrait artists saw the mask as a tool for performance and used it to seek the liminal space as defined by the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner between two clearly defined states of being where new identities are formed (Klein 28). The portrait’s subject was not simply the face beneath the mask in the painting but the mask-like identity presented by the portrait itself with no suggestion of a different face hidden beneath. The portrait was no longer a static representation of the individual, but a “bricolage” of face with mask as the portrait shifted between the subjectivity of the artist and that of the model to show multiple perspectives, periods of time, or identities (Klein 33). Just as traces of the Surrealist, Cubist and Expressionist art movements can be found throughout Lorca’s work, this same understanding of the relationship between the mask and identity exists in Lorca’s own artwork with his own highly non-representational drawing style. In his self-portrait in New York, for example, are we looking at the poet or his mask, or has he become his mask? While the mask is certainly a symbol of dual identity in Lorca’s work, it also challenges this concept of identity within the context of modernist portrait painting in which the mask creates a new identity that is not necessarily an oppressive social force upon the individual.

Egon Shiele, Self-Portrait, 1912

Kathe Kollwitz, Lament or Self-Portrait, 1938

Dalí, Self-Portrait, 1921-22

Dalí, Cubist Self-Portrait, 1923

Dalí, Self-Portrait, 1941

Frida Khalo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940

A portrait of Lorca by Dalí

Works Cited:

Klein, John. “The Mask as Image and Strategy.” The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso. Alarco, Paloma and Malcolm Warner. Yale University Press. 2007. Print.

Oppenheimer, Helen. Lorca: The Drawings and Their Relation to the Poet’s Life and Work. New York, NY: Franklin Watts. 1987. Print.

Regalado, Mariana. “Entroida in Spain.” Carnaval! Ed. Barbara Mauldin. University of Washington Press. 2004. Print.

Serraller, Francisco Calvo. “The Spirit Behind the Mask.” The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso. Alarco, Paloma and Malcolm Warner. Yale University Press. 2007. Print.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Impossible Theatre

Selected quotes from “Toward and Impossible Theatre: An Introduction and Imagined Manifesto” by Caridad Svich, the translator of Lorca’s “impossible theatre" including Buster Keaton's Stroll, The Maiden, the Sailor and the Student, and Chimera.

“To begin, there must be space. In it, an image of yearning—the yearning to fill said space with one’s soul. The soul is composed of signs and metaphors, symbols and lines. Odd disruptions are marked by time, which is incessant and not to be trusted. In the most innocent object lies malice. Trust nothing. Trust only heartbreak. Make theatre out of that which is broken. Then take it apart again.”

“This is a naked theatre, a poetic theatre, a theatre of the impossible because it wishes to present on stage elements of the divine, the inexplicable and the unnamed…Too much is at stake here…The impossible theatre…is forever marked by the culture from which it springs.”

“What is Spanish here is everything: the emphasis on the lyric; the felicitous intrusion of low humor within the tragic or the refined; the inescapable, suffocating nostalgia for a time other than the present; and the coded behavior the restricts relationships and places them in the realm of the public even if what is happening is private.”

“The audience is positioned as decoder of the event being witnessed, not merely as spectator…The irrational holds the key.”

“Talk is abolished. In its place is poetry or musical interchanges that owe as much to the world of commedia as avant-garde song. Phrases are repeated at intervals. Each time they are repeated, the meaning changes. The very repetition makes the audience and the characters question the meaning of what is being said. Characters in the impossible theatre function as mutable fractals in a fickle universe over which they have little to no control. Fate overhangs…a more cruel, less defined fate colored by Catholicism and inevitably marked by sacrifice.”

“The refuge that is found in this theatre is the one offered by the free mixing of forms. Here are the flickering images and devices of the silent screen…There is also a profound use of the techniques of animation. In this theatre, objects move and talk, mannequins weep and sing, and it is only natural…”

“I give you an exquisite corpse. Pastiche, assemblage, and montage are delivered here in the body of the poet made martyr and celebrated in the cult of death that surrounds celebrity. Made up of old texts and new, and those yet to be written, this is queer theatre for a non-queer age. Suffused with fear, trembling at its virility, impassioned at the very thought of love and its possibilities, the body thrashes in the bed of memory, and assembles out of it and its artifacts a text governed by the laws of synchronicity and simultaneity. Time is elastic…”

“Perspectives shift….To step into the impossible, you must leave preconceptions behind but also bring them with you. The work demands that you understand deeply and with a profound sense of humor the traditions that are being called upon and how they are being dismantled and re-assembled.”

“The two-dimensional experiments are transported into the realm of the three-dimensional. Painting becomes installation.”

“Vision is sought, as in trying to capture a dream when waking. Sometimes the vision is lucid, sometimes obscure.”

“An unconditional acceptance of the impossible is asked of the audience. After all, the experience of theatre itself is chimerical. What is at heart here is an evocation of particular states of the human condition…”

“The poet’s visions play in the grooves of our mind long after the actual experience in the theatre if over.”

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Lorca's Drawings

It is no wonder that Lorca was a visual artist as well considering the vivid images that saturate his writing. While he began by doodling caricatures of his professors and friends at school in Granada, Lorca continued to draw throughout his life, both exploring new ideas and illustrating his own plays and poems. Most of his drawings come several distinct periods in his life, including the times surrounding his friendship with Dalí, while Lorca was studying and writing in New York, and later while in Buenos Aires, where he spent a great deal of time drawing rather than writing and even worked on illustrations for Pablo Neruda (Stainton 342). In 1926, Lorca even exhibited his art work at the Dalman Galleries in Barcelona with the help of Dalí and his friend the critic Sebastía Gasch, and his drawings were published in the newspapers and in his own magazine, gallo, throughout his career (Cuitiño 51, Stainton).

The following is a selection of drawings and paintings made by Lorca. While they are not necessarily illustrations, they demonstrate the way in which Lorca was thinking about particular themes, symbols and recurring motifs in both language and line, and help us to better understand the images and feelings that are expressed in his writing.