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Between Two Silences: Talking with Peter Brook by Peter Brook, Dale Moffitt, Gregory A. Boyd
scherzo's review
5.0
Quotes:
"Are we awakening amongst ourselves something positive or are we just using our indignation to make ourselves more negative than we were? And if political theatre is one-sided, however justified the cause, if it doesn't simultaneously lead to something that is not only active but active in a healthy way then the political theatre is reproducing the conditions that produce the very thing that that theatre is denouncing. I think that's what one always has to weigh because there are moments when issues are so burning one can't keep silent about them. One has to see, however the danger of whether the cry of protest is hammering the nail in deeper, or whether the cry of protest is helping to pull the nail out."
"Brook's production of US, which dealt with the Vietnam war, culminated in one of the actors setting fire to butterflies. On this particular evening a woman got up from the front row of the stalls and climbed onto the stage of the Aldwych Theatre. She was a woman in her late fifties, balanced, sane, perfectly sort of middle class. She took the lighter and the box containing the butterflies out of the actor's hand, and she released the butterflies into the air. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she turned to the audience, and said, 'I'm not mad, and I'm not a fool. I just believe that there is something we can do.' Then she returned to her seat, and a discussion began which rocketed all around the theatre."
"Mahabharata is an extraordinarily dense, complex work, which on one level deals with the psychological misunderstandings that there can be anywhere on the inside of any family. On another level, it deals with the essence of politics, with what leads to factions, to strife, to conflict. On an even larger level, it is about what war is made of, and on a still wider level, the actual meaning of conflict, not in society, but in humanity and, you can even say, in cosmic existence."
"The most important thing for everyone, I think, is to be able to affirm and yield. To affirm strongly, otherwise your work is weak. And to yield willingly, otherwise you're pigheaded."
"Gertrude Stein wrote about Picasso that very few of us actually see with the eyes of our time. We actually look at our time, but because of all the memories, all the conditioning in our brain, we see with the eyes of yesterday. She wrote this at the beginning of cubism. When Picasso sees, as a cubist, he's not seeing with the eyes of tomorrow, he's actually seeing quite directly with the eyes of today, but it shocks people because they're still locked in the vision of yesterday."
"Are we awakening amongst ourselves something positive or are we just using our indignation to make ourselves more negative than we were? And if political theatre is one-sided, however justified the cause, if it doesn't simultaneously lead to something that is not only active but active in a healthy way then the political theatre is reproducing the conditions that produce the very thing that that theatre is denouncing. I think that's what one always has to weigh because there are moments when issues are so burning one can't keep silent about them. One has to see, however the danger of whether the cry of protest is hammering the nail in deeper, or whether the cry of protest is helping to pull the nail out."
"Brook's production of US, which dealt with the Vietnam war, culminated in one of the actors setting fire to butterflies. On this particular evening a woman got up from the front row of the stalls and climbed onto the stage of the Aldwych Theatre. She was a woman in her late fifties, balanced, sane, perfectly sort of middle class. She took the lighter and the box containing the butterflies out of the actor's hand, and she released the butterflies into the air. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she turned to the audience, and said, 'I'm not mad, and I'm not a fool. I just believe that there is something we can do.' Then she returned to her seat, and a discussion began which rocketed all around the theatre."
"Mahabharata is an extraordinarily dense, complex work, which on one level deals with the psychological misunderstandings that there can be anywhere on the inside of any family. On another level, it deals with the essence of politics, with what leads to factions, to strife, to conflict. On an even larger level, it is about what war is made of, and on a still wider level, the actual meaning of conflict, not in society, but in humanity and, you can even say, in cosmic existence."
"The most important thing for everyone, I think, is to be able to affirm and yield. To affirm strongly, otherwise your work is weak. And to yield willingly, otherwise you're pigheaded."
"Gertrude Stein wrote about Picasso that very few of us actually see with the eyes of our time. We actually look at our time, but because of all the memories, all the conditioning in our brain, we see with the eyes of yesterday. She wrote this at the beginning of cubism. When Picasso sees, as a cubist, he's not seeing with the eyes of tomorrow, he's actually seeing quite directly with the eyes of today, but it shocks people because they're still locked in the vision of yesterday."
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