Email to collaborators on 25 July 2010: "The Don Juan Project"
The project is taking the Don Juan legend as its material. This is a sister myth to the Faust legend which I have been exploring with my students for the last few years, and which resulted in 3 theatrical productions. The first expression of this legend was the play The Trickster of Seville, which was written by the Spanish monk Tirso de Molina in the 16th century. After that the Don Juan myth found further expression in Spain, Italy, France (notably by Moliere) Germany and England (notably by Byron) in plays, poems, operas, puppet and commedia dell' arte theatre which culminated in its most famous version by Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in the 18th century.
Modern versions include Shaw's play Man and Superman and the myth was also influential for modern cinema (notably Jim Jarmush's Broken Flowers). Like Faust, Don Juan became a figure symbolic for the transition from the middle ages to the modern times and as with Faust I would like to argue that our contemporary society can look back at this myth and see it becoming meaningful again at the transition to post modernity, in which we find ourselves asking similar questions again about where we are going and if we are right or wrong in going the way we are going.
At the centre of myth is the concept of "seduction" (as it was to some degree also in Faust). I want to explore what seduction meant then, but above all, what it means now. It has been argued by Jean Baudrillard (Fatal Strategies) that postmodern consumer society is based on the idea of seduction and that this could lead to our doom like it did in the old myth. According to Baudrillard our seduction or what he calls "our perversion" "lies in this, that we never desire the real event, but its spectacle, never things, but their sign". We may be like Don Juan who is only interested in the process of seduction, never in the actual possession or love of the women he pursues. But Baudrillard also includes the desire for change into this argument: "change must also seduce us" or "in order for the revolution to come it has to seduce us". This is the irony in which we find ourselves, we have "made irony a Mephistophelian form": "The necessity of irony, like that of pleasure, is part of the necessity of Evil." In this light Don Juan cannot only be seen as a "revolutionist" (as Shaw did) but also as a thoroughly postmodern character whose singular pursuit of pleasure must by necessity end in the hell of his own making. So the questions that we will ask in the pursuit of our own spectacle making are philosophical, existential, political, moral, aesthetic and at the same time self-referential. In this project we explore the idea of theatre or spectacle making through making the theatre or spectacle in question and we make our world of simulation into the object of our artistic simulation and our creative inquiry.
The project is taking the Don Juan legend as its material. This is a sister myth to the Faust legend which I have been exploring with my students for the last few years, and which resulted in 3 theatrical productions. The first expression of this legend was the play The Trickster of Seville, which was written by the Spanish monk Tirso de Molina in the 16th century. After that the Don Juan myth found further expression in Spain, Italy, France (notably by Moliere) Germany and England (notably by Byron) in plays, poems, operas, puppet and commedia dell' arte theatre which culminated in its most famous version by Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in the 18th century.
Modern versions include Shaw's play Man and Superman and the myth was also influential for modern cinema (notably Jim Jarmush's Broken Flowers). Like Faust, Don Juan became a figure symbolic for the transition from the middle ages to the modern times and as with Faust I would like to argue that our contemporary society can look back at this myth and see it becoming meaningful again at the transition to post modernity, in which we find ourselves asking similar questions again about where we are going and if we are right or wrong in going the way we are going.
At the centre of myth is the concept of "seduction" (as it was to some degree also in Faust). I want to explore what seduction meant then, but above all, what it means now. It has been argued by Jean Baudrillard (Fatal Strategies) that postmodern consumer society is based on the idea of seduction and that this could lead to our doom like it did in the old myth. According to Baudrillard our seduction or what he calls "our perversion" "lies in this, that we never desire the real event, but its spectacle, never things, but their sign". We may be like Don Juan who is only interested in the process of seduction, never in the actual possession or love of the women he pursues. But Baudrillard also includes the desire for change into this argument: "change must also seduce us" or "in order for the revolution to come it has to seduce us". This is the irony in which we find ourselves, we have "made irony a Mephistophelian form": "The necessity of irony, like that of pleasure, is part of the necessity of Evil." In this light Don Juan cannot only be seen as a "revolutionist" (as Shaw did) but also as a thoroughly postmodern character whose singular pursuit of pleasure must by necessity end in the hell of his own making. So the questions that we will ask in the pursuit of our own spectacle making are philosophical, existential, political, moral, aesthetic and at the same time self-referential. In this project we explore the idea of theatre or spectacle making through making the theatre or spectacle in question and we make our world of simulation into the object of our artistic simulation and our creative inquiry.
