The Nature of Art--Theater

Back to one of my favorite subjects--the human responses to the arts. Recall that we have worked to establish music as a human need based on the requirement to cleanse and to express the endless supply of emotions. This holds true for visual arts and for theater arts as well. One could argue that in theater we find the greatest potential for human expression, and that theater can occur in a moment in any kind of established locale. According to Shakespeare, "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players..."--Best, Michael.

Shakespeare's Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria: Victoria, BC, 2001-2005. . Visited 6-8-07.

A theater is a building with a stage and seats for experiencing drama, but a theater can also be the drama of life, and the walls--there are always walls--represent the limits designed by the personal profile of the human psyche. Your theater was designed by you, for you, and your theater is your own personality, traits, ethos, and preferences. For example, my theater does not include professional wrestling, a popular sport that for me has no redeeming qualities and provides no personal satisfaction either as a viewer or a participant (okay, I'll admit that I suspect if I were a participant I would not last very long), and therefore does not play any kind of role in my theater. Wrestling exists outside the walls for me.

I have a friend who has a personal aversion to country music. When he hears a country western song on the radio, his pulse quickens, he becomes angry, and immediately responds in disgust as he changes the station. In a way, his abhorrence is funny and maybe quirky but in other ways it is real and most likely represents his own value system, world-view, priorities, and an establishment of his personal framework. The theater he has built that works for him is remarkably unique, as is everyone's, and is designed for him, by him, and the plots in his theater fit the nature of who he is. Country music is outside of the walls. Why? This is conjecture, but my friend is a committed time-keeper, a man who always knows direction, space, distance, and a man who lives with precision. He is not obsessive, does not display any characteristics of neurosis, is intelligent, a good conversationalist, a committed Christian, a hard-worker with a pleasant demeanor, a thinker, and has a warm, kind heart. He loves the arts and in particular music. So why this physical aversion to country music?

Most music, notice the qualifier, has a specific rhythm, melody, harmony, and system. Music on the radio, in particular, begins with a bass line, a background rhythm, a guitar or other instruments, followed by a singer. In country music, however, there is a random quality to the performance. The beat may be precise, but the freedom of performance of the rhythm gives it a flexibility that can be unsettling, inconsistent, and even discomfiting. This is then made worse by a singer who sings from his or her heart by adjusting the prescribed melody according to personal feelings and expression. For many people, this makes the music ideal and wonderfully earthy, but for others, it makes the music disturbing and imprecise. When a person seeks order in the arts, he will most likely find it in classical and even some rock music, but he probably will not find it in aleatoric music, jazz, or country western. Quality, of course, is not determined by order or by a system, but one's preference for order and discipline will not find fruition in some types of music. This means that my friend's theater does not include country western music. His preference is determined by his nature; to ask him to do otherwise is to deny him his own theater.

Yet, there is no doubt that art, and in particular theater, is not an exact science, the term science meaning "systematized knowledge in general." All our efforts as artists to avoid the randomness that we see around us each and every day still result in a certain flexibility, a freedom of expression, and a representation of the complexity of feelings that surround us each day. The arts are a manifestation of emotions, and emotions change often by the minute and certainly are subject to intrinsic and extrinsic experiences, including environment, history, fear, worry, joy, sorrow, anticipation, humor, and list of emotions is infinite.

Theater is one of the most complex of the art forms and probably the most inclusive of the arts, for in theater we often find music, visual arts, literature, and drama. It is in theater that we work diligently as performers to be precise and to apply scientific principles to our performance, to make each performance the same, and to be markedly disciplined as we seek perfection. But it seems that no matter how strenuous is the attempt to be precise, to have the exact tempo required, to have the delivery the same, to have the volume balanced, to place the feet in the same places for every performance, there is always a hint of the imperfect human struggling to systematize and order himself to do it the same way.

Ah, but in the end, regardless of how dedicated we are to objectivity, how much we work diligently for order, and how desperately we seek consistency and we always want to make our theater a science, and we desire to apply self-control to our art, ultimately, if truth can be found in the subjective, the arts are flexible and flexible they will remain. As has been pointed out many times, however, the journey, the personal theater, and the endless quest for perfection is the reward.