RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

Borut Trekman

THE CREATIVE PROCESSES OF RADIO DRAMA

When we attempted to defme the theme and real content of our symposium at one of the preparatory meetings a few months ago, it seems that the title which spoke of the relation between the technical and the aesthetic in the radiophonic medium was not quite clear to us; it seemed to us somehow too abstract, too ambivalent, as if it included a whole series of acute problems of the radiophonic medium at the same time and not one sufficiently exhaustively. Then the discussion began. It was necessary to give a theme to all the viewpoints and nuances offered and made possible by the title, to discover an appropriate order and system for them, lend them meaning with inner coherence and links; in order to actually perceive all that had been mentioned in the discussion and which we were fmally convinced must be the subject of consideration of our symposium, we chose the very creative process within which radio drama is gradually realized, *while individual phases of this realization served as sufficiently concrete themes of the individual papers. The subsidiary themes which quite unambiguously indicate the basic problems of contemporary radiophonic creation, as well as its expressive images were also created in this way; and we thus had the impression that we had overcome our initial hesitation (and perhaps even a certain initial scepticism) rather effectively. But, nevertheless, when I began to think over what I really ought to say in the introductory word 1 had to recall all that several times, lor very Uttle of that pleasant feeling which had permeated us earlier remained. A whole maze of questions again presented themselves and, the more intensive the reflection the more these questions became involved in ever greater skems of confusion. How was one to treat all that determines and makes up the complex core of the contemporary radiophonic medium as aesthetic and technical, two basic constituents which seem to be mutually exc!usive? How was one to determine the actual aesthetic circumstances of the medium which by its very nature and average professed orientation is expressly contemporary, born in the spirit of our century, when even in modern creative art the concept and category of the aesthetic is somewhat vague, not completely thought through, in some people’s opinion nonexistent? Finally, how was one to draw a boundary between these two antipodian categories, how to defme the influence and importance of both one and the other, if we knew for sure that their inner unity and consistency had long since made up one of the leading criteria for determining the authenticity of a particular artistic creation.