New Year Celebration

A Richard Foreman quote to stir up the New Year, which comes courtesy of New York blogger/playwright George Hunka:

I BELIEVE THAT NOW IS THE TIME FOR A CELEBRATION OF ELITIST ART!

Let's dare proclaim that in the face of a society increasingly crying for a media-driven, market-oriented, popular art, reaching out to everyone at once – while 'deep thoughts' are officially allowed in such art, they must only come in a form that is easily communicable to all.

BUT I MAINTAIN
that to feed the individual human spirit, the true art of these times must be a kind of demanding gymnasium where sensibilities get rigorous exercise – so that those sensibilities then become more refined, able to pick up on and appreciate the patterned intricacies of a world which is usually, in art, simplified into recognizable social and psychological clichés or knock-out effect. Such normal strategies lie about the world because they talk about what we already know (which is always wrong) in languages with which we are already familiar (and therefore put our more delicate mental mechanisms to sleep) – all this, instead of waking us up with the uncharted energies that throb behind the facade of the shared world of communicable convention.

Theatre Notes is limbering up - back next week.