Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

• Sign up now (Find out more)
• Order tickets
• Log in

• I was there (Missed it)
• • Your rating
  • • Current rating /5
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5
    
• Follow (What’s this? follow_reactions_only_tooltip)
• Tell-a-friend

1. #1 in 2 years ago by defranseslag

   Rate this comment 0

   Synopsis van de lezing van Luca Scarlini

   The mystical machine: views of the Other in performing arts

   Theatre is always a mystical machine, also outside from any religious imprinting, because its first aim is to give reality of different figures of imagination. In the tradition of last two centuries, this aim was many times discussed by theoreticians and realizers in theatre, giving space mostly to the ethical aspect of this feature of culture, according to the model of thinking brought and from the works of Konstantin Stanislavski, always rethinking The Paradox of Actor by Denis Diderot. More interesting now is simply to see how this system had worked in different scenes, reacting a similar mechanism. Charcot in Paris did real psychiatric shows for all the intellectuals in Paris, often using as a subject of experiment the beautiful Blanche, portrayed in a painting of the beginning of XXth Century, who gave life to images of disease and glory under hypnosis. Sigmund Freud, at the time pupil of the french psychiatrist tells some of these wild happenings, telling every details to his girlfriend in Vienna. In the 50’s Konstatin Raudive, a Latvian obsessed by mystical visions invented a machine to capture the sounds and the voices of dead people, making fascinating as absurd records of those voices (some fragments were used by Raffaello Sanzio). Saint Thérese de Lisieux was playwright and metteur en scene in the space of the Convent of Carmelitan, she was a very harsh director of her sisters (sometimes she not only shouted to them), because, apparently, for her was difficulty to listen to voices from Heaven and those one of her actresses. Twenty years ago at the beginning of researches about virtual reality many philosophers spoke of immersion in a different dimension (ad did the Italian Elemire Zolla in the interesting book Ways out from the World), in which creatures of imagination could creep outside any programmer’s will, those theories are now fading, because Internet it’s a reality of everyday, not anymore a dream, but the fact of trusting in pictures appearing on television screens and monitors, a condition almost everybody shares today, brings back a different perception, in which ghosts may appear, with no rules. One of the roles of theatre is to create a space for those revenants, welcoming them in all their disturbing power. Using technology allows us to scan darkly (quoting a famous novel by Philip K. Dick) in reality, finding paths for a representation of reality that should be complex in layers, but also self-evident as every respectable icon, in any mystical system, religious or not.

   Luca Scarlini – all rights reserved

   Reply

   Keep this (0)

Post a comment