Editorial/Rant – Page 24

Image shared on Flickr via a creative commons license by gnackgnackgnack

I’ve been meaning to write a post on the Unlimited Theatre (@untheatre) show which I went to see at Curve in the middle of April for a couple of weeks. I am currently struggling to blog with other commitments crashing into my schedule, including (but not limited to) the preparation of the material for my first year PhD progress panel, but I really wanted to talk about Ethics of Progress. Not in a traditional ‘review’ sense, but more in terms of my personal reaction to the subject matter. So here I am. Bear with me.

At the age of 16, and having got the same grades across the board at GCSE, I found myself facing a choice – the local science specialist 6th form – to do Maths, Chemistry, and Physics, or the specialist performing arts 6th form, to do Performing Arts, English Lit and Fine Art. Being young and unburdened with worry, I left it to chance, and gravity, and tossed a coin. The arts it was. I don’t regret that, but I regret being made to choose, and I am lucky to have in some degree returned to it in my PhD.

If you know one thing about me, know this: I work hard at learning.

I passionately believe, above all, that there is nothing that you cannot understand, and that knowledge and understanding are two of the most subversive tools at our disposal.

There is nothing you cannot understand, only the voices of others instilled in your head that tell you some kinds of knowledge are not for you.

The recent forcing through of the ignorant and immensely damaging Digital Economy Bill did not speak to me, as it did to many, of a broken democracy. It spoke to me, ultimately, of a society that fetishes technological ignorance. A society that contains within it whole swathes of people who will proudly declare that they’ve never sent an email. Politicians who will believe the monied hands of lobbyists over the people interacting in online worlds every day and who understand them. A country who will believe the tabloid journalist over the eminent peer-reviewed scientist. Pretty is stupid. Clever is dangerous. How many people have you heard utter the phrase ‘I just don’t understand politics’?

A democracy is really broken when the people are convinced that it is beyond their understanding.

A society is fractured each time a person considers any of its contents beyond their comprehension. Continue reading The Ethics of Progress

Image shared on Flickr via a creative commons license by Stephan Geyer.

This may start off sounding like criticism, but it isn’t, more like a lack of an applicable critical language.

At the point I started writing this blog post, in my eyes #suchtweet had lost a lot of its artistic and realistic credibility – the characters were tweeting at a party, about secret things, to each other, about each other, knowing that everyone can see them. There was earlier, hideous, product placement (more later), and the language had turned from the irritatingly truncated to an odd kind of a poesy, apart from Juliet, who got even more screechy

It was really unrealistic.

But so’s Hollyoaks, lots of people watch that.

There’s a danger my criticism becomes irrelevant, and that’s the point at which it’s not about language skill, understanding of the form, theatre or performance. It’s just a story everyone knows, threading into people’s lives.

Such Tweet Sorrow is no longer about the quality or nature of storytelling (art), this is about the power of familiar stories and love.

People love, love. They love the idea that they might give up so much for something so beautiful. They love the idea of love at first sight, and that someone as simple, or normal as they might be fated for someone. And they love to see this in a place they visit, an intimate and constructed space that they go to each day – it’s more inside them (I believe that as we reconstruct ourselves in these online spaces we build others into us), their lives, than film or theatre ever is.

We go through our lives feeling not enough, half of what we should be, the stories shilled by marketing, capitalism and the gaps left by the loss of what the post-modernists termed grand narratives (religion, class, the state) make sure of that. To want to believe in completion is understandable.

Maybe that’s what Romeo and Juliet should be about.

Continue reading Such Tweet Sorrow II