Herbert Blau
Biographic Data
| ID | 3629539 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Herbert Blau |
| GIVEN NAMES | Herbert |
| FAMILY NAME | Blau |
| SIGNATURE | BLAU H |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1953 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Critical Theory and Performance
The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive
The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive:Herbert Blau Herbert Blau (bio) Memory seems to be doing double duty these days, since I've been working on an autobiography, and quite recently, for a conference in St. Petersburg, I gave a keynote on "The Emotional Memory of Directing." The conference was held at Meyerhold's theatre, the Alexandrinsky, but if the title defers to Stanislavski, by way of AnActor Prepares, the emotional memory was mine—or, with irr…
Article
New Literary History - Volume 29, Number 2, Spring 1998
Fervently Impossible
Ages of the Avant-Garde
Bonnie Marranca, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Carolee Schneemann, Maria Irene Fornes, Deborah Jowitt, Deborah Hay, Rachel Rosenthal, Jill Johnston, Kenneth Bernard, Yvonne Rainer, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Dick Higgins, Richard Kostelanetz, Judith Malina, Joyce Aaron, Herbert Blau, Anna Halprin, Barbara Hammer, Rosalyn Drexler, Rochelle Owens, Allan Kaprow, Ages of the Avant-Garde, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1, Bodies of Work (Jan., …
The Play of Thought
The Audience
The Surpassing Body
When one breaks a hand or a leg, writes Trotsky in his chapter on futurism in Literature and Revolution, bones, the tendons, the muscles, the arteries, the nerves, and the skin do not break and tear in one line, nor afterwards do they grow together and heal at the same time. So, in a revolutionary break in the life of society, there is no simultaneousness and no symmetry of processes either in the ideology of society, or in its economic structure…
The Audience
The Less Said
Gary Winogrand’s Continuous Expectation
The Thin, Thin Crust and the Colophon of Doubt
continuity of ego is myth, he said in an interview some months after production of Baal (1926), where he was dealing with buying and selling of imagination and degradation of creative genius. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew.' What other prospect, then, for audience-as subject is salvaged from atomization of historythan to construct its own meanings, which also break up and form themselves anew? (There was also in Baal m…
Receding into Illusion
The idea of Alienation, derived from the Russian formalists and relating Brecht to Eisenstein, is more than an effect or technique. It may even be an illusion. But if it is to be distinguished from Marx's alienation of labor, it remains inseparable from the politics of modernism which, as it becomes embarrassed by the autonomous object of art, eventually turns to the composition of the audience. The movement of this enterprise has been from deter…
Spacing out in the American Theater
America has been, even beyond the closing of the frontier, a legend of space receding into a horizon which is the absence of a past. That absence was in a sense compounded in the theater, not only by the nature of theater whose subject is absence, but because the theater is a secondary and belated form in a country whose culture was to begin with something of an afterthought. That is the material condition in witch those who work in the theater c…
With Your Permission
I must confess to some uneasiness about the subject here today, for I'm beginning to feel like the Ancient Mariner with his baleful eye telling the same story. Nor is it any consolation to think that it's not merely my story, nor even quite the same, since when history repeats itself it may, tragic to begin with, repeat itself as farce. That, you may recall, was the way Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire, as he described how revolutions occur…
The Eye of Prey
Herbert Blau here reflects on performance as it moved from theatricalized activism of sixties into theoretical activism of eighties. The essays theorize rather than formulate an ideological program. Blau takes risks at speculative edge of thought. The Eye of Prey is comprised of diverse subject matter: love and mourning, play and aging, radical feminist and homosexual discourse, politics of representation, comedy since Absurd, Barthes and Beckett…
The Audition of Dream and Events
The Bloody Show and The Eye of Prey
I didn't propose the subtitle of this essay, Beckett and Deconstruction,'2 though fortune disposes in ways that might have been foreseen. For I became a father again as I started to work on this paper. I am not speaking, as they do in deconstruction, of the paternity of the text. The major obsession of poststructuralist thought is, to be sure, the question of origins, the allure and (re)lapse of beginnings, the illusory subject of the instituting…
Odd, Anonymous Needs
Interface
The Absolved Riddle
T HE RIDDLE of the Duchess in Women Pleas'd has to do with the Freudian question: What does woman want? That's the question whose subject is the answer to which, as Freud might have guessed without saying, there is no question, which is why the riddle has to be not answered but-as Fletcher has the Duchess say, not once (or intentionally) but prophetically twice-absolved (2.5.112-13),1 as if it never should have been asked. Her daughter's lover Si…
Odd, Anonymous Needs
The Impossible Takes a Little Time
Take up the Bodies
Take up the Bodies
Critical Theory and Performance
The Eye of Prey
Herbert Blau here reflects on performance as it moved from theatricalized activism of sixties into theoretical activism of eighties. The essays theorize rather than formulate an ideological program. Blau takes risks at speculative edge of thought. The Eye of Prey is comprised of diverse subject matter: love and mourning, play and aging, radical feminist and homosexual discourse, politics of representation, comedy since Absurd, Barthes and Beckett…
Ideology and Performance
I was going to start by talking about power, or rather what they call in poststructuralist theory the discourse of power. But I happened to read, after I had done some writing, a speech made by Harold Pinter when he was awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. That set me thinking about theory in what has become an extended preface which has preempted much of the essay but will not be unideological as we circle back to where I had started, reflectin…
Universals of Performance; Or, Amortizing Play
Herbert Blau, Universals of Performance; Or, Amortizing Play, SubStance, Vol. 11/12, Vol. 11, no. 4 - Vol. 12, no. 1, Issue 37-38: A Special Issue from the Center for Twentieth Century Studies (1982/1983), pp. 140-161
Heaven's Sugar Cake
A MONG the dilemmas caused by Calvin's rejection of the lorthodox conception of original sin was that regarding sacramental grace. To the congenitally depraved, the satisfactions of communion were simply inaccessible. Whereas the Anglican, whose universal law (according to Hooker) was the law of reason, could make a voluntary movement toward God, the Calvinist, whose universal law was that of predestination, could at best stand and wait. This was…
Kenneth Burke
THE question of has beguiled the hours of literary men with increasing exasperation since T. S. Eliot attempted to build in the early twenties stylistic and cultural revolution around the word.' Along with the desire for or tradition-a unified system of thought and feeling-has arisen curious antagonism toward certain new modes of inquiry which seem to oppose tradition. And thus we have so astute critic as R. P. Blackmur complaining of a whole ser…
Seeming, Seeming
Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water? St. John 4:11 What we want to show is not only the structure we have come to but the conceiving process in the structure, what led to it and what leads back to its sources, in the world, in us, in the friction between us, the work, each other, the rage, the work, each playing upon each other, receding, the world, our gravity; a memory trace in…
Off the Top of the Head
Theatre and History
Making History
In the early seventies, when the fervor of participatory democracy had not yet subsided on the public scene, the KRAKEN group-in relatively hermetic residence at Oberlin College-was starting on a project which was, as we came to see, a selfbaffling prospect of collective process. The subject was historical but felt more like a premonition. So far as history goes, it was a sort of double-jointed perspective, long distance and close up. In that rab…
Precipitations of Theater
HE CUE IS LYRIC, but a preview of theater-this surreptitious anxiety tensed out of us by words. There is an incitement of action in the insidious motion, a play of mind that will not hold still. What we see in the quatrain is enlarged on the stage, as if the dull substance of the flesh were thought. No sooner thought, it may leap to the quick in a conditional passion: beauty have a soul ... If... If ... If . ..; thus Troilus, publishing a of Cres…
Missing Persons; Or, the Marriage of True Minds
It seems natural to think of the theater as the theater thinks of itself, as interchangeable with dream. The stagings of the unconscious are similarly duplicitous; they to be doing one thing but are really doing another. The theatricality of dream is what we remember, the hallucinatory events which seem to be wholly happening. We tend to forget, however, what is being dramatized, the dreamthoughts played out in visual and acoustic images. In drea…
Take up the Bodies
Ideology and Performance
I was going to start by talking about power, or rather what they call in poststructuralist theory the discourse of power. But I happened to read, after I had done some writing, a speech made by Harold Pinter when he was awarded the German Shakespeare Prize. That set me thinking about theory in what has become an extended preface which has preempted much of the essay but will not be unideological as we circle back to where I had started, reflectin…
Universals of Performance; Or, Amortizing Play
Herbert Blau, Universals of Performance; Or, Amortizing Play, SubStance, Vol. 11/12, Vol. 11, no. 4 - Vol. 12, no. 1, Issue 37-38: A Special Issue from the Center for Twentieth Century Studies (1982/1983), pp. 140-161
The Impossible Takes a Little Time
Take up the Bodies
Take up the Bodies
Odd, Anonymous Needs
Odd, Anonymous Needs
Interface
The Absolved Riddle
T HE RIDDLE of the Duchess in Women Pleas'd has to do with the Freudian question: What does woman want? That's the question whose subject is the answer to which, as Freud might have guessed without saying, there is no question, which is why the riddle has to be not answered but-as Fletcher has the Duchess say, not once (or intentionally) but prophetically twice-absolved (2.5.112-13),1 as if it never should have been asked. Her daughter's lover Si…
The Audition of Dream and Events
The Bloody Show and The Eye of Prey
I didn't propose the subtitle of this essay, Beckett and Deconstruction,'2 though fortune disposes in ways that might have been foreseen. For I became a father again as I started to work on this paper. I am not speaking, as they do in deconstruction, of the paternity of the text. The major obsession of poststructuralist thought is, to be sure, the question of origins, the allure and (re)lapse of beginnings, the illusory subject of the instituting…
Spacing out in the American Theater
America has been, even beyond the closing of the frontier, a legend of space receding into a horizon which is the absence of a past. That absence was in a sense compounded in the theater, not only by the nature of theater whose subject is absence, but because the theater is a secondary and belated form in a country whose culture was to begin with something of an afterthought. That is the material condition in witch those who work in the theater c…
With Your Permission
I must confess to some uneasiness about the subject here today, for I'm beginning to feel like the Ancient Mariner with his baleful eye telling the same story. Nor is it any consolation to think that it's not merely my story, nor even quite the same, since when history repeats itself it may, tragic to begin with, repeat itself as farce. That, you may recall, was the way Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire, as he described how revolutions occur…
The Eye of Prey
Herbert Blau here reflects on performance as it moved from theatricalized activism of sixties into theoretical activism of eighties. The essays theorize rather than formulate an ideological program. Blau takes risks at speculative edge of thought. The Eye of Prey is comprised of diverse subject matter: love and mourning, play and aging, radical feminist and homosexual discourse, politics of representation, comedy since Absurd, Barthes and Beckett…
Gary Winogrand’s Continuous Expectation
The Thin, Thin Crust and the Colophon of Doubt
continuity of ego is myth, he said in an interview some months after production of Baal (1926), where he was dealing with buying and selling of imagination and degradation of creative genius. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew.' What other prospect, then, for audience-as subject is salvaged from atomization of historythan to construct its own meanings, which also break up and form themselves anew? (There was also in Baal m…
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