Sunday, December 13, 2015

INTERESITNG 2015 OFFENDING THE AUDIEENCE PERFORMANCES

Dear Micheal,
Yes,
I did !

If you wanna translate, some more from french : 
You'll find some more infos in english on th eFTA site where I presented it in french in 2013.

My version is without actors.
The text is said by synthesis speeches.
It's not to heavy to tour !
And it works really well.
I do film the audience and make a time "trick" that reveal the score so much...
I was told many times that it seems like if the play was written not a long time ago to be done like that, some people even told me that it was some kind of definitive version like if the play took 50 years to find it's final destination.
I'm not sure about that but it was always surely nice to hear.

I know the play will be 50 years old soon.
I made a french and english version. 
I'd love to tour it more and maybe make a german version but I wonder who could present that in germany or austria for 50th...

The company that produce it paid for your rights through Davis Britta.

I hope you're all good !

Christian

https://nowtoronto.com/stage/summerworks-review-offending-the-audience/


n his bold new production of Peter Handke’s infamous 1966 “anti-play,” Christian Lapointeuses video and synthetic voices to fascinating effect, shedding even more light on aesthetic theory, the idea of theatre and audience endurance.
At the performance I attended, some people were so restless that they took selfies and checked their phones throughout the show. One idiot in the front row talked on his phone and left the theatre, only to return with some takeout sushi.
All of which indirectly commented on the idea of what we expect at the theatre. Technically brilliant, meditative and invigorating, this is a must-see for anyone interested in performance.


Tags

   

============================================



Playwright, Director and Artist Misha Neininger
Misha als Mensch

In a fierce new adaptation that takes Handke's experiments into the 21st century, Misha Neininger and John Berendzenorchestrate a complex musical, visual and conceptual score out of the original bare-bones text: sonically, rhythmic sung- spoken textual textures interact with an electronic soundscape; surveillance technology confronts the audience fumbling with messy feedback loops in the dark.


In 1965, Peter Handke began writing the seminal work of anti-theatre, Offending the Audience: a stripped-down, genre-defying and hilarious verbal happening that shook the establishment of the day. 50 years later, Portland performance group Liminalcreates an original multidisciplinary adaptation, reworking Handke's avant-garde classic for the modern age of pan-surveillance and fractured media self-reflections.
The play will be performed in German and English. There may or may not be subtitles. The ghosts of Edward Snowden, Joseph Beuys and Samuel Beckett may perform acts of defiance and nude interpretive dances. WARNING: They really, really dance.
Will you be offended? Answers Handke, "You don't have to feel offended. You were warned in advance."
Offending is one way to relate, adds Berendzen. "No one is offended by anything in the theatre anymore. Either way that's not the point. We want to democratize the space between us and the audience, a level playing field. We want you to feel involved."  
Misha Neininger came all the way from Berlin to find new audiences: “There is a real buzz from swarms of cyborg insects in the Northwest. People are getting pissed off. I watched people swatting drones with flip-flops. But who knows, the audience in Portland may just turn out to be a dismal failure. For the audience to be a smashing success, it needs to balance the fear of surveillance with the desire to be seen.”
In the end you may ask yourself: How do you look back at whoever is looking atyou? 
Written and directed by Misha Neininger and John Berendzen
Media and surveillance art by Misha Neininger
Sound design and music direction by John Berendzen 
Electronic smart costumes by Jenny Ampersand
Performed by Misha Neininger and John Berendzen with returning founding member Amanda Boekelheide and Starr Ahrens, Evan Corcoran, Carla Grantand Alex Reagan.  
“Sie werden kein Schauspiel sehen.
Ihre Schaulust wird nicht befriedigt werden.”
About Peter Handke
Best known for his screenwriting collaborations with Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Wrong Move), Austrian Peter Handke was a major voice among the anti-theatre experiments of the latter 20th century, along with Stein, Beckett, Fassbinder, Foreman, and other theatrical subversives. Simultaneously linguistic clown and ontological terrorist, he eviscerates language itself in order to expose its comic failings, giddily exploding false theatricalities in order to reveal beneath the pure presence of the raw, exhilarating and liberating liveness of the performance event. This series marks Liminal's third plunge into the depths of Handke, following 1998'sHandke Salmagundi (an amalgam of early writings) and The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other (2000), a completely silent play.
About Liminal
Liminal is a nonprofit Portland-based network of theatre, performing, and media artists. Liminal is known both for its uniquely staged plays (as in 2013's OUR TOWN), and also for its large-scale live walk-through performance installations (as in 2012's Liminal presents Gertrude Stein). Liminal was founded in Portland in 1997 and has produced nineteen original full-scale projects. Liminal has received numerous Portland Critics Circle (Drammy) awards, including Best Original Production (2000, 2003, and 2005); Best Choreography (2003); Best Sound Design and Best Music Direction (2000 and 2003).


Offending the Audience Submitted by Michael Neininger on October 22, 2015 - 2:13pm Playwright, Director and Artist Misha Neininger Misha als Mensch In a fierce new adaptation that takes Handke's experiments into the 21st century, Misha Neininger and John Berendzen orchestrate a complex musical, visual and conceptual score out of the original bare-bones text: sonically, rhythmic sung- spoken textual textures interact with an electronic soundscape; surveillance technology confronts the audience fumbling with messy feedback loops in the dark. In 1965, Peter Handke began writing the seminal work of anti-theatre, Offending the Audience: a stripped-down, genre-defying and hilarious verbal happening that shook the establishment of the day. 50 years later, Portland performance group Liminal creates an original multidisciplinary adaptation, reworking Handke's avant-garde classic for the modern age of pan-surveillance and fractured media self-reflections. The play will be performed in German & English.

===========================
Offending the Audience
Fictitious Theatre Company, Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., through Oct. 11, 563-4330
Be warned: I am about to give away the one and only surprise of the evening, which occurs the second the play begins.
The Austrian playwright Peter Handke's 1966 playOffending the Audience isn't a play. The actors do not play characters. The stage does not represent some other place. The time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time. Time passes as it passes in real life for the audience. There is no illusion. There is no play.
How do we know this? The actors tell us. When the curtain parts, four actors come out, the house lights come up, the actors stare at us and they tell us that this is not a play, that the stage does not represent some other place, that the time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time, that time passes as it passes in real life for the audience, that there is no illusion, that there is no play.
Handke's play (or whatever it is) is an hour-long polemical lecture about the theater, taking place in a theater, that tries to be as unlike theater as it possibly can be. We are asked to abandon every expectation, to be the subject of the actors' gaze the way that they are usually the subject of ours. There is nothing offensive in what is represented on the stage; the offense of the title is that nothing at all is represented.
To her credit, director Rosemary L'Erario keeps her four actors moving around, creating more variety and visual interest than Handke probably wanted. And the four actors (Fleur Frascella, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, Doug Thomas and Neil Wax) deliver their hour-long polemical lecture with charm and elan - again, perhaps more than Handke wanted.
If you have spent a lot of your time thinking a lot about the theater, you will find the subject of this lecture quite fascinating. I must confess that I've always wanted to see this play. It lacks the sheer theatrical brilliance of some of Handke's other experimental plays of the '60s: it's not a clown show about language and identity like Kaspar, or a game about theatrical meaning like The Ride Across Lake Constance. But I always imagined that the piece would be sustained by the sheer brilliance of its polemic.
Well, now I've seen it. I'm glad I have. And I was wrong.
-Cary M. Mazer
======================

Offending the Audience

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Offending the Audience is a play byAustrian writer Peter Handke. It is sometimes called an "anti-play" because of its renouncements of theatricality. It was originally published in German under the title Publikumsbeschimpfung (which better translates as "Insulting the Audience"[1]) in 1966. It premiered in June 1966 at the Theatre am Turm in Frankfurt, Germany as part of the "Experimental Theatre Week." The play was first produced in London in 1970 at the Almost Free Theatre in Soho by the Interaction Arts Cooperative's TOC (The Other Company) directed by the Israeli writer and theatre director, Naftali Yavin, the cast included Andrew Norton, Judy Monahan and Jan Chappell.

Contextual information[edit source | edit]

In a 1970 interview Handke said that the idea behind his plays was "making people aware of the world of the theatre--not of the outside world." He goes on to say that specifically in the case of Offending the Audience, his "point was to use words to encircle the audience so they'd want to free themselves by heckling; they might feel naked and get involved." He further goes on to explain his intentions:
The idea was to have the spectators in the orchestra thrown back upon themselves. What mattered to me was making them feel like going to the theatre more, making them see all plays more consciously and with a different consciousness. My theatrical plan is to have the audience always look upon my play as a means of testing other plays. I first intended to write an essay, a pamphlet, against the theatre, but then I realized that a paperback isn't an effective way to publish an anti-theatre statement. And so the outcome was, paradoxically, doing something onstage against the stage, using the theatre to protest against the theatre of the moment--I don't mean theatre as such, the Absolute, I mean theatre as a historical phenomenon, as it is to this day.[2]

Plot synopsis[edit source | edit]

In Offending the Audience there is no plot. No story is being told at all. Instead, the audience is made aware that what they see is not a representation of anything else, but is in fact quite literal. The actors continuously repeat the point that this is not a play, and that nothing theatrical will happen.
The first lines of the performance are "You are welcome. This piece is a prologue."[3] A prologue, that is, to all future theatrical performances.

Plot analysis[edit source | edit]

Handke used this rejection of traditional play structure to reinforce his anti-theatre intention. His point was to get the audience to consider what exactly theatre does, in particular, the role of language in the theatre.

Character guide[edit source | edit]

The only cast the play calls for are 'Four Speakers'. However, this has been performed with a cast of upwards of twenty actors.[4]Rather than placing the focus on themselves, the actors instead turn the audience into the main point of interest by making them aware of how they are breathing, sitting, thinking, etc. They draw attention to what they are wearing and how they have gone through the motions of "going to the theatre."

Character analysis[edit source | edit]

Four Speakers, a mixed group of men and women. The four characters in this play do not assumes a “role” in any traditional sense. The speakers remain merely anonymous actors who address the audience in the author’s words. They are also largely indistinguishable from one another and even from the members of the audience. Their clothing is ordinary casual dress. It is expected that the men, in both the audience and on stage, will be wearing dark jackets and white shirts with plain ties. Women are expected to be dressed in subdued colors. During their time onstage, the four speakers address the audience directly without singling out any specific individuals. They speak in a bland litany, free of emotion, vocal inflection, or any significant gestures. Nor are any specific lines assigned to the individual speakers. The characters merely pick up and leave off the discourse in a random order, speaking for varying lengths of time. Frequently, and without explanation, they contradict themselves and one another. In doing so, however, they give no indication of their own feelings about what they are saying beyond a general statement to the audience that their opinions may (or may not) be the same as those of the author. At the end of the performance, the four speakers react to the audience in exactly the same manner regardless of whether the audience’s response to their work has been favorable or unfavorable.
Since there are no actual characters, the actors' job is merely to recite the lines to the audience. The more objective they are, the closer they are to Handke's intention of isolating the actors from the audience in order to emphasize the language. Handke listed some "Rules for the actors" at the beginning of the script including such things as watching "the behaviour of tramps and idlers as they amble on the street and play the machines in the penny arcades."[5]

Genre[edit source | edit]

It is difficult to classify such a non-play play into a specific genre. In some waysOffending the Audience could be considered a dark comedy since it utilizes irony so heavily. However, Handke's intention was for it to be unclassifiable as anti-genre and anti-form.

Style[edit source | edit]

Offending the Audience falls under the style of epic theater as established by dramatist Bertolt Brecht. A major characteristic of epic theater is alienation, which is used to prevent the audience from becoming emotionally involved and distracted from the underlying issue of the play. In this particular case, the fact that the actors are not pretending to be other characters and are instead speaking straightforwardly to the audience is an alienation effect. Some other aspects of epic theater are minimal staging, anti-illusionment, and telling what is to come—all of which are seen in Offending the Audience.
Offending the Audience also falls heavily under the style of postmodernism since it is so unconventional in the fact that it lacks plot and characters.

Language[edit source | edit]

Handke wished to challenge the relationship of language and reality and to make the audience "intensely, unbearably conscious of the fundamentally arbitrary connections between words and things, until the linguistic mucilage that holds the world and our minds together crumbles."[6] The most prominent way of how Handke challenged the meaning of language is found at the very end of the play. The actors first begin to compliment the audience on how perfect they were and then proceed to call them various insults. The names the actors call the audience seem to become more and more random. The point here is to createacoustic patterns in the words so that they eventually become meaningless.

Theme/idea[edit source | edit]

As is evident from the name, the whole show leads up to the point at the end where the audience gets "offended." The significance of the insults at the end is questioned—what exactly makes these words (any words for that matter) more than just noise, but items which hold meaning.
Handke wanted to take the ideas of language and theatre—two subjects which were often accepted as they were without question—and point out why they didn't get questioned or challenged very often.

Spectacle[edit source | edit]

In theme with the whole anti-theatre idea,Offending the Audience has very minimalistic production values. The stage is usually bare, but there could be a false set in order to deceive the audience into thinking that it will be a conventional play.

Music[edit source | edit]

Handke was influenced and inspired by the music of the time. One the his "Rules for the actors" is to listen to "Tell Me" by the Rolling Stones. He was especially influenced by the Beatles. Two more of his rules are to see the Beatles' movies and "watch Ringo's smile" in "A Hard Day's Night."

Sample production history[edit source | edit]

Offending the Audience has been performed all over Europe since its German premiere in 1966, and after its translation was published to English in 1970 in Michael Roloff's translation as part of KASPAR & OTHER PLAYS bv Farrar, Straus & Giroux and then in individual editons by Eyre Methuen. First peformance were directed by the translator and Michael Locascio's troupe at various locations in New York City in 1969, subsequently at Herbert Berghof's HB STUDIO
Subsequently it was produced at numerous locations, especially, colleges. all over the U.S., Australia, China, South Africa and the U.K. Roloff, meanwhile, has put up a site that indicates how the insults at the end of the play can be kept being brought up to date:http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/
Roloff's handke.drama blog contains a list of three 2015 performances that show the variety of approaches that a director may want to take:
It was revived in 2008 at The Flea Theaterin New York City.[7]

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Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Handkes „Kindergeschichte“.as Theater

http://steiermark.orf.at/radio/stories/2737758/

Handke zum „Miniaturen“-Auftakt

Der Grazer Regisseur Ernst M. Binder wartet nach herben Budgetkürzungen mit der neuen kleinen Theaterreihe „Miniaturen“ auf, die es einmal jährlich geben soll. Zum Auftakt gibt es Handkes „Kindergeschichte“.
Die Erzählung „Kindergeschichte“, von Peter Handke 1980 verfasst, ist Teil der Tetralogie „Langsame Heimkehr“, entstanden nach Handkes erster Rückkehr aus Frankreich. Darin erzählt er von den ersten zehn Jahren eines namenlosen Kindes und dessen Zeit bei und mit seinem Vater, dem Erwachsenen, wie Handke schreibt, in einem anderen Land. Der Text verweist wohl auf Handkes Zeit mit seiner ersten Tochter im Ausland.
"Kindergeschichte"
"dramagraz"

Nahe am Leben

„Es ist eigentlich einer der ganz wenigen Texte von Peter Handke, die auf eine Art und Weise völlig uneitel und sehr persönlich sind. Und ich habe mir immer gedacht, wenn ich das gelesen habe, das sind diese Momente, wo dieser Mensch und Schriftsteller dem Leben wirklich einmal ganz nahe gewesen ist“, sagte Regisseur Ernst M. Binder. „Deshalb habe ich mich auch entschieden, diesen Text auf die Bühne zu bringen. Vor allem wollte ich ihn nicht mit einem Schauspieler besetzen, sondern mit jemand anderem, der aus diesem Text kein Schaupiel macht, sondern der sich diesen Text aneignet“, so Binder.

Sendungshinweis:

„Der Tag in der Steiermark“, 19.10.2015

Schonungslose Offenheit

Angeeignet hat sich Handkes Text der Filmemacher Heinz Trenczak, im „dramagraz“ zuletzt in einer stummen Rolle zu sehen: „Von null auf hundert. Es ist eine Riesenherausforderung, der ich mich nur stellen konnte, weil der Ernst mir das Vertrauen schenkt. Was ich an diesem Text bewundere, ist die Offenheit, die Präzision und auch die Schonungslosigkeit, mit der er sich selber bescheibt, auch mit Fehlern und teilweise mit Versagen“, so Trenczak.

Blumenzeichnungen und Parkbank

„Kindergeschichte“ von Peter Handke mit Heinz Trenczak auf einer Parkbank sitzend vor dem von Blumenzeichnungen aus Kinderhand fast blühenden Bühnenraum ist noch bis Ende November im „dramagraz“ zu sehen.

Link:

i tell ya, i'd consult DAS GEWICHT DER WELT & the poems in ALS DAS WUENSCHEN NOCH GEHOLFEN HAT for such a project. As a young girl to have had Handke as a father must be worse than having my dreadful governess or Margareth Thatcher! The section in the book where he objects to the women who upraid him for his parental methods manifests how guilty the writer sadist is who is was far more interested in writing than raising a daughter, who became a ball of of her own after Libgart Schwartz fled for cause. Handke treated Amina to the same kind of primal scene exposure as he had been as a child, a different kind of return of the return. i remember only too well the peculiarly silent 5 or six year old Amina in New York who had first been shown to me in Berlin in 1969. No wonder that woman turned out to be so odd herself
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Friday, June 19, 2015

AMERICAN "ARANJUEZ" DISCUSSION"

You are invited to participate in a discusion of ARANJUEZ . Use the comment function of this blog. 

Handke's THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF ARANJUEZ premiered in Chicago this week.
and has received two interesting review so far, (1) by Tony Adler of the Chicago Reader. 
https://twitter.com/taadler
tadler@chicagoreader.com

&

 (2)
BY 
http://chicagostagestandard.com/reviews/the-beautiful-days-of-aranjuez-theatre-y/

Poetry has the incredible ability to use the aesthetics and rhythms of words to invoke a meaning far greater than the face value of a phrase. This ability to elevate a simple message is what makes watching spoken word poetry (and, really, any kind of spoken performance) so wonderful when done well. It becomes the job of the performer(s) and creative team to take the already heightened text and enhance its effect. Unfortunately, with Theatre Y’s production of The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez—a US/English premiere of a Peter Handke play—the team toed the line between aiding the text and hindering it, ultimately falling on the wrong side....


The translation and language of The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez are beautiful. While this is intentionally not a drama and it’s supposed to be a summer dialogue, relaxing and easy, that ease toes a dangerous line between laid-back and uninteresting. It quickly becomes too easy to zone out while they wax poetic at each other while seemingly looking to gain little if anything at all. With a lack of solid goals and an ebb and flow to the story that was devoid of forward momentum, any hope for a plot to follow is lost until you are blindsided by a surprisingly beautiful ending.

========




Adler is first rate on the performance:

"A 2012 summer dialogue" by that formidable Austrian Peter Handke, Aranjuez is as heavy in its way as any of the company's previous efforts—and very, very European. It carries the weight extremely well, though, under the direction of Zeljko Djukic, best known locally as the founder of TUTA Theatre Chicago. ​Djukic's nearly perfect directorial touch. His approach is light and playful, sure, but more: It actually fulfills that ideal you hear tell so much about, of creating a world. Defined in no small part by Natasha Vuchurovich Dukich's costume and set designs, the atmosphere is so richly allusive you could go for a swim in it. We're on the lake where The Seagull takes place, at the Tuscan summerhouse from Stealing Beauty, witnessing an idyll from a Truffaut film (before all hell breaks loose). A bit involving an old parlor game takes on marvelous resonances.​​​"
Handke's opening of this
mytho-poeic text --
“And it’s summer again. And it’s another beautiful summer day. And once again the woman and the man sit at a table out in the open, under the sky. A garden. A terrace. Invisible yet audible trees, more as premonition than as presence amidst a shallow summer breeze whose fluttering pulse at times imposes its rhythm on the scene. The table is garden variety, on the large side. The man and the woman sit facing each other, at a certain distance, dressed unobtrusively, the woman on the bright side, the man darker, timeless the one as the other. The figures are timeless as well outside whatever actual time it is and whatever historical or social context; in that respect, the figures, too, exist more as premonitions than as presence. At the outset the woman as well as the man - no eyes for each other yet - hearken the rustling of invisible leaves under the sky, under a sky which one imagines as wide, as gentle as it is soothing, and do so for a long while.”
--thus could not be better served by Zelko Ducik & the principals of Theater Y.


Adler, in some respects, is hip to the kind of deep tic-tac-toe that is being played; in others I find him evasively superficial and/or plain wrong. Other comments are worth dwelling on at some length.

"The premise is disarmingly simple [1]. A Man and a Woman (youngish, but not too young) loll in a garden on yet "another beautiful summer day." She wears a long, white, breezy cotton gown of the type one can simply throw over one's head to be dressed. Or undressed. He affects a beat-up, short-brimmed Panama hat. He mostly sits at a rough grayed-wood picnic table, slicing up biblical apples. She mostly orbits him. They've just started playing a game in which he asks prying questions that she's obliged to answer. He opens, of course [2], with, "The first time, you and a man, how did it go?" But her answer isn't similarly dopey; in fact, it reminded me of Walt Whitman's account of making love to his own soul, in "Song of Myself." "I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning," Whitman wrote. "How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me. . . " And so it goes. Stimulus and unexpected response, eroticism that's powerfully present yet displaced, thickly, into language—into games, stories, philosophy, poetry, and sometimes into despair.  These discourses have a stilted air [3] to them in the new English translation by Michael Roloff and Scott Abbott. Maybe that's appropriate[3]. After all, Handke's given us characters who dream about the Pleiades, rhapsodize on the properties of a robin, and reference authors from Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill to Ödön von Horváth. Then too, there's something of the old man's valediction[4] about Aranjuez, both for better and for worse. Handke was 70 when the play premiered in German, and despite all the fascinating summing up it does, it can also settle into intellectual complacency[5]. The Woman, in particular, spouts retrograde foolishness at times, constructed out of tired old shards of the male gaze.[6]"

Thus, Adler provides occasion to open a discussion about the kind of play that ARANJUEZ is & is in Amerika
and in the precincts of Sexual Perversity.
Some initial comments were put on line a few weeks ago & I kept adding to them as the premiere approached.
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2015/03/aranjuez-comments-for-world-english.html

=I=

The Chicago performance may be the English premiere; however, the 1972 ARANJUEZ has had several German productions & French & Spanish and Portuguese premieres - that is, it has a bit of a quick past. Here the links to receptions of these productions.



Peter Handke's 'The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez' Receives Standing Ovation at the Lisbon-Estoril Film Festival

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt/peter-handkes-the-beautif_b_6163670.html


Moreover ARANJUEZ is discussed in extenso in Oberender's four part conversation with Peter Handke


The most interesting matters that Handke says about the play I think are the following. He calls the play
“a sketch,” and is rather liberal in making allowances to its directors; secondly, he emphasizes that it is his wish that the play be done in such a way as to direct attention to what the performers SPEAK, that is to the language & and that the physical action on stage do as little as possible to detract from that; a wish
he reiterates on the occasion of its performance in Portugal (see above Escorial link.) Thirdly, he mentions that at one point he hoped to end the play at Aranjuez market place at closing time! Instead we have a denouement that in some ways resembles, in minuendo, that of the 1983 WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES. The more direct expression of tristesse implied by the once impulse is absent. Oberender fails to follow up on Handke's comment.



=II=
Adller intimates that he knows Handke's work, I see no sign that he has ever reviewed any other Handke play & he makes no mention of any of them, most but not entirely all of which exist in English
​http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2012/07/peter-handke-plays-in-english.html​
and
Chicago has been good to Handke
as have few other American cities
although Seattle once upon a long ago:
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2012/09/handkes-theater-in-seattle-handke-among.html




III
Thus a prolegnomena about the kind of playwright Handke is & is, en especial, in ARANJUEZ, what kind of beast machine ARANJUEZ is, would seem in order.

As of the mid-eighties (after having translated all his early work up to and including his richest play, if not his altogether richest work,
the first great of the mytho-poeic texts
WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES
http://www.ariadnebooks.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=1572410000
I had time to give some thought to what kind of playwright Handke is
http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com/about.html
and once the noggin had churned a bit
I concluded that it was more fruitful
to approach Handke's stage work as
“happenings”
- that is as a specie of a very special
that become manifests itself
as soon as a space turns theatrical,
that is as
EXPERIENCES
But I suggest that on this score you look at what the formidable Handke specialist KLAUS KASTBERGER has to say:
&
http://www.theatermuseum.at/de/vor-dem-vorhang/ausstellungen/peter-handke/
  

It is the experience that a reviewer needs describe
rather than approach these texts with
inappropriate theatrical categories.
Without recapitulating my thinking @


http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/about.html


and as it is strewn throughout, in more and less complete comments, on the various plays @
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html:
let me be conclusionarily apodictic {adjective: incontestable because of having been demonstrated or proved to be demonstrable.
Logic. (of a proposition) necessarily true or logically certain.}
1.
(a)
The experience of each of Handke's theater pieces changes the spectator/ auditor's state of mind
and each play does so in its own way which means that the reviewer, in each instance, needs to work ab novo.

(b)
Thus, Handke does not repeat himself
although in the two instances of the 1969 THE RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE
& the 1991
THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER - the experience of two extremely different scores is similarly cathartic -
(we are talking Brecht's non-Aristotelian
catharses*: no blood, no tragic hero)
yet the mental discharge of tension & resources made available for thinking, good riddances, are achieved by seemingly very different means:
In the instance of LAKE CONSTANCE via linguistic querying and grammatical acrobatics
&
in the case of HOUR by means of the succession of seemingly infinite series of images that ultimately re-fabulate the world = not knowing as a new start, as innocence reborn. I am uncertain whether those great Greel playwright ever achieved anything along those lines.
I put experiences that other Handke's happenings produce into a NOTE @ the end.

Now on to an attempt to describe the ARANJUEZ machine & the effects it produces (ARANJUEZ was preceded by the great prize-winnig STILL STORM & succeeded by
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2014/10/die-unschuldigen-ich-und-die-unbekannte.html



and thus is starecely a “valedictory” (Adler) to Handke's playwrighting.
ARANJUEZ itself, according to Handke, grew out of a brainstorm of his while writing
DER GROSSE FALL
http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html
a fantastic piece of writing imbued with sexuality, say, as the work of the British lyrical novelist Henry Green
(forthcoming from Seagull Press).

ARANJUEZ starts of a an interrogatory tic-tac-toe and keep taking recourse to this method although not in a predictable manner. (A note to Adler's of course [2]:
ethe game could be easily reversed, or become mutual, if that was what Handke was up to.
The second major driving force is indeed Whitman's “the cradle forever rocking”
and experiencig ARANJUEZ
ensures the audience's participation in an hour long mating
ritual, that is what is going on between the two actors: this is one of the great pieces of pornography, it turns you on it makes you hot, and of course not the way customary pornography does.
If you and your date don't want to screw after this aphrodisiac... it's time to be friends!
As you look back on the experience...
The game that is being played may have started simply but complications ensue
on every level.

Thus Adler has a point when he finds that ARANJUEZ is the work of someone with a body of experience. Whether it is a
“valedictory” to Handke's sybaritic sexuality I would not venture a guess, Handke's grandfather Sivec was known to reach under the skirt of the milkmaids well inti his 90s!
For every woman with such a rich yet ultimately unsatisfied erotic history
there is a man's -
how easily the table could be turned,
I could re-assign the roles:
however, one thing for sure:
    this is a truly heterosexual play no matter the author's bi-sexual conflicts & his ability to write from a woman's experience in books such as THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN & CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS (and his saying about SORROW BEYOND DREAMS “ma mere c'est moi.”)
  • ARANJUEZ i a truly amusingly pornographic product, what else would you expect from this forever also linguistically GEIL now aging whore-master and exhibitionist! Perhaps that is what Tony Adler refers to with what he terms “shards of the male gaze”? I ask him to be more specific and and do a bit of citing. After all, he shows nice differentials in describing the performance. The text has some longeurs and if one wants to perform it to its own advantage (in service to the author's wish that as little as possible distract from its language) some cuts would seem useful.

As works of literary art,
Handke's plays obey certain formal rules, no matter that someone writing in the Austrian tradition is also a rule breaker.
These are independent formal creations.
These texts don't mimic, don't duplicate, don't evoke other worlds but, as independent creations, produce
particular states of mind.
The language, thus, that Scott and I devised - me in the lead and finalizing and taking ultimate responsibility -
sought first to breathe rhythmically the way the original text does -
that is the initial response.
Then the realization sets in that you are recreating a linguistically artificial {an artificer's artifice} text in another language, sculpting, kneading digging it out of the other language, sometimes working crazily as an animal will for truffles, and then introducing your own kind of playfulness, i.e. a bit of Spanish spice if not Spanish fly, urged on by Handke's “Flores Flores par los muertos.”
What you, WE ended up is not the language at you neighborhood bar, but I asked the director and actors to smooth out anything that stuck awkwardly in their craws.
It is a text that acknowledges its own artificiality. It has touches of the formal that heark back to its origins in Schiller's DON CARLOS:
 
1. Akt, 1.Auftritt: ​ACT I, SCENE I


Domingo (a priest):
​”The beautiful sojourn in Aranjuez has now come to an end. Your Royal Highness are not leaving it any happier. Our having been here has been futile. Por favor, my Prince, break your puzzling silence, open you heart to your father's heart. His son's - his only son's - silence is beginning to exact too dear a price from my Monarch.



Carlos looks to the ground
and remains silent.


Perhaps that is what Adler means by stilted. Again, I ask him to be citational.

  • Brechtian catharses always struck me a dependent on the exquisite aesthetic experience of his dramaturgy, and not inherent in the texts, though Mutter Kurasch pathos approximates the effect of Greek tragedy)
  • ===========

A NOTE
The experiences that Handkes plays elicit range from
a
The extraordinary self-consciousness induced by experiencing OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE.
to
{b}
the linguistic pain of KASPAR
To {C}
the auditory hallucinatory projection screen of QUODLIBET
TO {d}
the above-described LAKE CONSTANCE
TO
the variety of mytho=poeic texts
from WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, to ART OF ASKING, to the untranslated PREPARATIONS FOR IMMMORTALITY
via
THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER
(a text without words!)
to the 1993 VOYAGE BY DUGOUT
(the play about the film about the war)
that shows how Handke has absorbed the lessons of his immediate predecessors Brecht, HorVarth and of his contemporaries Kipphard, Weiss, Grass.
To the play that immediately precedes
ARANJUEZ
the great STILL STORM



Michael Roloff, June 2015,
the city named after Chief Sealth.




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