As I’m thinking about the Great Recession
and it’s impact on art
the image of Roger Blin
comes to mind.
He had decided to produce
the work of Samuel Beckett.
he had to make a choice between two unpublished scripts,
Eleutheria or Waiting for Godot.
I have a sense that
if Blin had not picked Godot,
primarily because its smaller/single set
fit his limited budget,
this significant moment
in the history of the contemporary theater
would have been very different.
I admit:
the choice to do a cheaper project
is not always a pleasing aesthetic option,
but there is some significance
that if Blin had been operating in a subsidized institution,
the direction performance practices and theory have taken
might have been much more ordinary.
While it wasn’t the sole stimulus,
Beckett’s bare stages
contributed richly to the visual simplification of theater images
in the 1960s and 1970s
an aesthetic that privileged
the image of human figures in space.