*The Empty Space

The Empty Space: A Book About the Theater: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate - Peter Brook

"The exchange of impressions through images is our basic language: at the moment when one man expresses an image at that same instant the other man meets him in belief."

"Chekhov never just made a slice of life, he was a doctor who with infinite gentleness and care took thousands and thousands of fine layer off life. These he cultured and then arranged them in an exquisitely cunning, completely artificial and meaningful order in which part of the cunning lay in so disguising the artifice that the result looked like the keyhole view it never had been."

I was wondering if there is any benefit in disguising the artifice of art, it seems another unworthy goal. Hiding the process seems an attempt to trick an audience, why not invite them in by showing the inner workings? What is there that is useful in a secret?

"I stopped, and walked away from my book, in amongst the actors, and I have never looked at a written plan since. I recognized once and for all the presumption and the folly of thinking that an inanimate model can stand for a man."

"He is searching inside himself for an alphabet that is also fossilized, for the language of signs from life that he knows is the language not of invention but of his conditioning. His observations of behavior are often observations of projections of himself...Clearly the true and instantaneous inner reaction was checked and like lighting the memory substituted some imitation of a form once seen. Dabbing the paint was even more revealing: the hair's breadth of terror before the blackness, and then the reassuring ready-made idea coming to the rescue. This Deadly Theater lurks inside all of us."

"A creative actor will be most ready to discard the hardened shells of his work at the last rehearsal because here, with the first night approaching, a brilliant searchlight is cast on his creation, and he sees its pitiful inadequacy. The creative actor also longs to cling on to all he's found, he too wants at all costs to avoid the trauma of appearing in front of an audience, naked and unprepared - still this is exactly what he must do. He must destroy and abandon his results even if what he picks up seems almost the same...And this is the only way that a part, instead of being built, can be born."

"In everyday life, 'if' is a fiction, in the theater 'if' is an experiment.
In everyday life, 'if; is an evasion, in the theater 'if' is the truth.
When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theater and life are one.
This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work.
To play needs much work. But when we experience the work as play, then it is not work anymore."
A play is play."

The Holy Theater is the one chapter in this book I would definitely want you guys to read. In it they talk about theater as a ritual. I seem to knock up against the idea of art as ritual quite a bit in my reading, Joseph Campbell or those European Marxist literary critics with their penchant for romanticizing Oriental art, or Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, but I have yet to be convinced of the necessity of ritual. what purpose does it really serve? It seems to create a separation, a privileged portion (and perhaps players) in life, which I think is dangerous. who gets to pick what constitutes a ritual? Anything that connects us to something bigger? I dunno, lets talk about this one...