There is an element of risk in any work of art. There is the simple risk of not knowing if it will get finished, and then there is the more complex risk, of meaning. Are you saying what you want to say? But deeper than that, are you forcing yourself to look beyond your previously determined limitations? Working in a medium like writing this kind of concern becomes clear, in lighting it is much more oblique. Still, we are concerned in the first degree with language and its derivative, meaning. Verbal and oral language on the one hand and visual language on the other.
In a very real sense I do not feel there is any point in doing art if one is unconcerned with risk taking. One can make pretty things by following a formula. Hell, Martha Stewart made an entire career out of the attractiveness of formulaic aesthetics. But this is not art. Art is about risk, it is about danger. Art is about sacrificing that which comes easiest to you and looking for a new path upon which to forge ahead. Art is about failure.
The best art, and yes I am making sweeping generalizations here, always fails. It fails because it does not conform to the accepted aesthetic criteria of its time. It fails because the standards by which it is judged can not encompass it. It can be neither measured nor quantified. It stands apart from the judges, alone and solitary.
But it does something else too. Something positive. Its very reason for failure, its iconoclastic nature, causes it to transform the environment around it. It molds and shapes the world around it until that world learns the new tools by which to measure the work. This is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. This is Brecht, Weill and Neher presenting Mahagonny at the Baden Baden Festival and getting booed off the stage. This is creating a work so powerful that it alters the way we look at the world.
Very few works will have the kind of effect that these two have had, and not all need to. What is important is the failure. The risk that what is being made may not turn out well. It may not appeal to the mass audience. Yet it still must be done. Without that risk we accept the status quo. Without standing on that ledge and staring into the void we are accepting this world and all that it stands for at face value without asking “what more?”
Guernica did not end war and The Seven Deadly Sins did not end Capitalistic exploitation. I am not sure any work of art can. That is not the role of art in society. Art in general and theatre in particular operates in a very powerful way as a kind of magnifying glass on society and self. It examines closely one or two specific areas of concern and forces us to look at those places within ourselves. This is one area where the live-ness of theatre is unparalleled. We can not escape the fact that this is a person before us. It is not an image or a likeness or a rendering. It is a person. A living breathing thing. It looks like us and speaks like us. Could it be . . .
It is not enough to look at where we are. It is not enough to explore the status quo. And in a way this is why a lot of overtly political art fails(in a bad way) for me. It leaves no room for further exploration. There is no question. Didacticism is rarely interesting. Brecht is not interesting because he proved that Capitalism is bad. He is interesting because in each of his works there is a question. It is not a question that begs an answer so much as a question that simply begs to be asked. Every time we approach a text for production we are not looking to answer anything definitively, rather we are looking to reopen the discussion.
Asking questions is a risk. There is an inherent danger in the act of asking a question because society does not like them. Trotsky argued for perpetual revolution because he knew that any socio-political system that remains static for too long will feel the calcifying tendencies of authoritarianism. It happened in Russia and Cuba almost immediately. It is occurring in the United States right now. Fewer and fewer questions are being asked. Statements are being disguised as questions to maintain the illusion, but that freedom of asking has already gone away. Though not quite completely. There are still cracks in the armor. And this is what we can do as artists. Ask those questions that need be asked and perhaps we might get some light through those cracks. Perhaps we will find the counter force to totalitarianism and control. Perhaps we will risk everything and fail gloriously.
