In the middle of a very interesting book by Anne Bogart - A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre. I like her writing style - it’s very engaging. It actually makes me want to read instead of rolling my eyes in the back of my head. I do believe that university sort of ruined reading for me. So many years in front of dense text after dense text, my natural reaction is to look at a book and instantly fall asleep. I also speed read everything now - even paperback mysteries and pulpy romances - I often have to read them twice. Or three times.
The seven essays each follow a theme: memory, violence, terror, stereotype, embararssment, resistence and eroticism.  It’s clear in reading the essays that Bogart has a love of theatre that she wants to share - she doesn’t want to impress with her high talking critical know how like those absurd theatre guys.

I just finished the violence essay which I found quite illuminating. She talks about how violence is a decisive act - to be decisive is violent and quotes Artaud who said that “cruelty is unrelenting decisiveness.”

It’s a vivid idea. Something that sort of blooms like a flower in fast motion in my head. I’m working on a play where, I think, a character has to die. I wrote the death scene last week and it was so “decisive” that I haven’t been able to go back to it since. Is that what I really want in the play? I think I do, which is for lack of a grown up word - freaky.

Bogart also talked about the Japanese concept of irimi - Go to death, entering death. When you’re being attacked you either go around the attack or you go right for it, “to death.”  Again, another startling concept. Sounds like a play. See, people tease me all the time - don’t say anything in front of Lindsay, you never know what she’ll turn into a play. Or they’ll do something rather banal and look at me and say “Sounds like a play!” No it doesn’t. Irimi - now that sounds like a play.

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