Observations of an Orchestrated Catastrophe - Softcover

Magnus, Jenny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 149444500X ISBN 13: 9781494445003

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Synopsis

This is the invitation -- a kind of dare, really -- that Jenny Magnus proffers in “The Trips,” probably one of her best known and most admired scripts. Note the imperative: there’s something not so much commanding as compelling in the phrasing. It is a prompt not to interrogate but to collaborate. In this way, the artist and the audience will investigate together. Then look again: Ask me something hard. Let’s make it challenging. And again: Ask me something secret, something dangerous. Let’s chance exposure, chance vulnerability. Ask me something ambiguous -- let’s be brave enough to complicate the question. In these plays, Magnus is asking us to meet her intelligence, her wit, the naked soul of her unknowables with our own because, in her work, the question is the quest. Like Brecht, she uses music, text, broad characters, very few props. Her people are curious and smart and very funny. They are always out on a limb, divulging something terribly embarrassing. They use a lot of words, or very few. Metaphors are often over-the-top, but particulars can be few. The fourth wall, when it’s there, is just a flimsy film -- which means the performers who take on these stories must be experienced high-flyers, actors who know the consequences of working without a net. In Magnus’ stories, characters have unexplained encounters that are so lively and absurd that it takes a moment to realize they are in pain. The pain is sometimes mysterious in origin, sometimes as sharp as a spear point, often uncomfortable to listen to. But it is also a deeply, deeply honest pain: stripped down, fearless in its emotional complexity, uncompromising in its directness and contradictions. “Sometimes we fuck things up beyond repair,” Magnus says in “The Strange.” In other words, what to do -- how do we go on with our lives -- when there’s no mending the rupture or erasing the scar? Sure, we can learn to live with the consequences -- but not by surrendering to them, not by “accepting” them except to grapple mano a mano with them forever. There’s just no rest for the lazy in these scripts. Here is the work of an artist as courageous as you’ll ever experience. Here is the work of an artist timeless and true. Relish it. Achy Obejas Oakland, California

About this title

About the Author

Jenny Magnus is an interdisciplinary artist who brings composition, intention, rhythm, dynamics, and inventiveness to every form of making she encounters. She has created hybrid forms of performance, music, images, and philosophy in her explorations and meditations about awareness, attention, and the performative moment, riding a shifting line between singing and speaking, talking about thinking and thinking about talking, and live and mediated images. She is a founding co-Artistic Director of The Curious Theatre Branch, and has shown work at Steppenwolf Theater, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, at the former Lunar Cabaret, the Prop Thtr and on tour throughout America and Europe. She was a longtime member of the band Maestro Subgum and the Whole, and now records with The Crooked Mouth. Her intrepid curiosity about being present in front of people has also lead to an active teaching career, in which she brings a conscious intention to challenge students of whatever age or situation to see themselves as the authors of their own education, striving for excellence in their attention and intention. jennymagnus.com

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 149444500X
• ISBN 13: 9781494445003
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384