Bitef

THE THEATRE and its ambivalent relationship to courage. One might say that theatre has always been an exhortatation to courage. It powerfully affects its public. It starts, in its heyday, as the entrepreneur of it, courage, the Homeric bicep. Great theatre depends on great audiences. That is why social action is so important: how can people perceive if the soul has been hanged because it is a subversive in a society in which feeling comes last. In the theatre we place a platter in the center of the dancing floor and collect the intelligence of the public. Then we shape it, hone it, inject it with fever for glory, then we suck the spirit of the audience into a big black bag, then we whirl it and squeeze it and puff and inject it with the foulest of delights: the delight in pleasure, in ticklish pleasure, in flight,

in careless love for everything. In the theatre we gather the intuition of the public into a fine little ball like an opium pompon and light it, smoke it, and expect to find the secret of the guide. For a long time I was interested in the subversion of our moeurs and morals, at instigating the disintegration of placques of iron (torn by hard labor out of the bowels of all beautiful earth), at the undoing of the knots in the net in which we are so fish-like ensnared; but now I want the magic transformation of our fish - selves into that which can pass thru and swim, clear mind, flop up on the beach, grow feet, arms, big heart, clear mind, retention, and being-that-iscapable-of-surviving. The theatre is, like the oracle of Delphi, an entranced priestess who gives the answer. The absolute dimension of being which in essence is composed of the intangible: the emotions, thought, the spirit. What we seek in the theatre is ultimately that: the experience of the Absolute. ■ Julian Beck