![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Notes
1 The theatrical ‘life’ of the pause in Maxwell's performances has its antecedents in the avant-garde's investments in silence, most notably in the work of John Cage. The correspondences between Cage's and Maxwell's work were recently reinforced for me at the centennial celebrations of John Cage's work by Miami's New World Symphony in February 2013, particularly in the way that Cage's ‘mission’ was cast by artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas, as a desire ‘to create the opportunity for the performance to exist while at the same time interfere with it as little or as subtly as possible’ (Thomas Citation2013: 3).
2 The phrase ‘how theatre means’ is borrowed from Ric Knowles' forthcoming book of that title, How Theatre Means, under contract with Palgrave UK. Merleau-Ponty's analysis of how painting ‘speaks’ in response to a slow-motion recording of Matisse painting takes up the better part of his essay ‘Indirect language and the voices of silence’ and is too extensive to cite here. It should be mentioned, however, that his observations of Matisse painting in slow motion lead him to consider the nature of expressive speech, which is pertinent to my considerations of the pause here: ‘[W]e must consider speech before it is spoken, the background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing’ (Merleau-Ponty Citation1964: 46).
3 The assumptions and received wisdom about Maxwell's work often find their way into the rehearsal room and, for some, short-circuit the process. During my observations of rehearsals for Maxwell's production of Henry IV at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn, New York City, in 2003, an actor demonstrated some resistance to an exercise and jumped to what he assumed to be the desired end-point of the task, quipping something to the effect of (and I paraphrase), ‘Oh, I get it, you want me to do this dead-pan?’
4 In the context of Heidegger's notion of ‘world disclosure’ and the impossibility of the aesthetic aims of neutrality, it's tempting to consider whether the impact of Hurricane Sandy (2012) on The Kitchen and set of Neutral Hero serves as an illustrative example. The theatre was severely flooded during the storm, which interrupted the run of Neutral Hero in the first week of November. When the show resumed on 30 November 2012, the stains of the water line from the flooding remained on the walls of the theatre and the proscenium frame. These markings, which became part of the set, served as a reminder of the mass destruction and the rebuilding efforts that were taking place beyond the theatre's walls in Manhattan and along the entire eastern seaboard.
5 Richard Maxwell's pursuit of neutrality can be situated in a genealogy of minimalism within the avant-garde that, as Hal Foster contends, in reference to the work of Robert Raushenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Wilson, among others, ‘pushed art toward the quotidian, the utilitarian, the nonartistic’ (Foster Citation1996: 38). However, my use of Heidegger to query how Neutral Hero operates as a hermeneutic that makes the movement of aletheia overt, departs from Foster's assertion that minimalism ‘tends toward the epistemological more than the ontological, for it focuses on the perceptual conditions and conventional limits of art more than on its formal essence and categorical being’ (1996: 40). In my analysis of the pause, I hope to demonstrate how Maxwell's project of Neutral Hero uniquely straddles both the epistemological and the ontological.
6 In her Lectures in America, Gertrude Stein describes ‘syncopated time’ as a discord between what is seen on stage and what is felt: ‘[T]he thing seen and the thing felt about the thing seen not going on at the same tempo is what makes the being at the theatre something that makes anybody nervous’ (Stein Citation1935: 94-5). Roland Barthes 1978 lecture series at the College de France, published under the title The Neutral, has much to say to this discussion of neutrality and the pause, particularly for the ways in which he identifies silence as one among the possible modalities and embodiments of “the Neutral.”
7 Roland Barthes 1978 lecture series at the Collège de France, published under the title The Neutral, has much to say to this discussion of neutrality and the pause, particularly for the ways in which he identifies silence as one among the possible modalities and embodiments of “the Neutral.”