From: ma-AT-panix.com
Subject: Re: 16!
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 11:02:15 -0400 (EDT)


Ruth wrote:

>  performance and entertainment are not the same thing. e,g Brechtian
> alienation of the spectator.

Eh heh heh heh heh heh.  Brecht, of all people?

"From the first it has been the theater's business to entertain people, as it
has been for all the other arts.  It is this business which always gives it 
its particular dignity; it needs no other passport than fun, but this it has
got to have.  We should not by any means be giving it a higher status if
we were to turn it e.g. into a purveyor of morality; it would on the 
contrary run the risk of being debased, and this would occur at once if it
failed to make its moral lesson enjoyable, and enjoyable to the senses at that:
a principle, admittedly, by which morality can only gain.  Not even instruction
can be demanded of it: at any rate, no more utilitarian lesson than how to
move pleasurably, whether in the physical or in the spiritual sphere.  The
theater must in fact remain something entirely superfluous, though this
indeed means that it is the superfluous for which we live.  Nothing needs
less justification than pleasure."

                                     [A Short Organum for the Theatre, #3]


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