Making It Really New: The Next Step in Theater and Arts
Sometimes something comes down the avenue that has the ability to turn heads. When I read about the play The Gatz, the article in the Boston Herald did just that. I like when things are shaken and stirred, just anything but normal when it comes to the arts. It is the meaning of post-modern for me. If the modernist were able to make things new by innovative forms while still connecting to socials issues through realism, then postmodern wanted to make things newer. The Gatz has the ability to capture the new from a modernist work. This brings me to my quests: First, are we beyond postmodern work and on to something new in arts and literature; second, what books would you like to have read to you from start to finish in one setting?
A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation with a friend who suggested we are in the age of intertextuality. He suggested that this new age of art and literature is being redefined by the multiple and accessible mediums to communicate an artist or writer’s meaning. The technology is so new that it deserves its own period in artistic movement. A book can come in different formats. Most books, magazines and papers no longer look like their ancestors that have rarely changed in five hundred years. The visual is connected to the reading while audio is also an important means to access the same work, sometimes and the same time. One would not even contribute an article without adding an enticing picture and marketing has all come down to covers. There are artful podcasts, paintings on jpegs, books or pdfs, writing done in real time, and the most damning evidence that postmodernism may be dead – the critics, editors and publishers, no matter how progressive or traditional, are evaporating quicker than the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
I want to believe that the world has become so open to different mediums and voices that postmodernism has come back to its father, modernism. That in a couple hundred years, postmodernism will be just a footnote, though important for its impact on challenging mainstream society and media’s perception of minorities and women and always What is art? But as much as postmodernism moved society forward, it also pushed many people away from art and literature as being important functions in society and part of everyday life. It moved writers and artists to the fringes of society and alienated age old crafts to poverty level occupations or catering to the wealthy’s penchant for cutting edge cool. If my friend is right and intertextuality is the movement we are in, then this concept has the ability to bring art back into the homes and lives of every American because of its accessibility, its omnipresence, and its trendiness for all ages. It may be another footnote of modernism, but it has the ability to connect and unite people unlike postmodernism.
And that is why I am excited to see the seven hour performance of The Gatz. It mixes the novel with a play with a voice and an audience. It is marathon experience of the familiar canon, The Great Gatsby, with a whole new experience. I imagine it will be an exhausting, exhilarating and $150 dollar drink bill that will necessitate a cab ride home. Now that is worthwhile whether it is modern, postmodern, intertextual.
What novel would you like to hear performed on stage in its entirety? Novels in my mind have a setting outside of the book. Where you read the book and at what age are as important as the content of the book. I would like to go back into past to read some of the books I have. I was attracted to good literature for the moments of realization and how a good piece of literature can awaken the senses and make everything around you have more poignancy. The book I would like read would be Crime and Punishment. It would probably break fifteen hours but the saga and heartache and the words would take me back to my first college apartment, and the low Fall dusk, and the heavy shadows. It would be sentimental and intense just like life was at eighteen; and the reading would be long just like that first Fall in college in a strange city when life seemed so different than what I had imagined just months before. It would be nice to go back there now after I know the ending of the book.
So you are given an assignment with this post: What book would you like read to you in a theatre and Why? Come fill up the comment section with any medium you want. Just don’t call me. It is rude to have a cell phone call in the theater.
Nick Carraway
Check out Ulysses in youtube format:
Reader Comments (2)
I think you are really on to something here. Music, art, literature, and other artistic expressions have a whole new multi-channel canvass out there. And it can be interactive.
Good thoughts! I think I would like to see Moby Dick as a play.