https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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. http://www.chicagoreader.com/
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.
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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.
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http://www.theatreinchicago.com/the-beautiful-days-of-aranjuez/7770/
CHICAGO REVIEWS @ END OF PAGE
The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez
Theatre Y
2649 N. Franciso Chicago
The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez is a voluptuous prose-poem for the stage between a Man and a Woman, two 'figures' in the heart of a bucolic garden in the heart of high summer-something of an eternity, something of an irretrievable moment. It is not a drama that occurs between them, but a summer dialogue that proceeds by way of interrogation-play. The mysteries of eroticism and nature surface in their incursions into untold memories, silent happenings that for the first time demand a language. In Handke's text, amorous attraction is transfigured into metaphysical desire; a game of questions becomes a game of passions, and this play of passion becomes a world of poetic images as sensuous as the soundscape of the outside world: premonitory and encroaching.
Jun 13 - Jul 19, 2015
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It is a summer dialogue which proceeds by way of interrogation-play, exploring the metaphysical heights and sensual depths of human desire encircled by the wild simplicity of nature itself. This latest of Handke’s plays is a sterling investigation of how and what we talk about when we talk about love.
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YOU TUBE THEATER Y ACTORS DISCUSS HANDKE'S "ARANJUEZ"
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Handke's THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF
ARANJUEZ premieres in Chicago.
ARANJUEZ IS NOT ONLY IN GOOD HANDS @:
WITH DIRECTOR ZELJKO DUKIC, BUT ALSO WITH THESE TWO ACTORS!
COMMENTS
FOR
& THE ACTORS + DIRECTOR
Of
Theater Y's
English
Language World Premiere
of
Peter Handke's
THE
BEAUTTIFUL DAYS OF ARANJUEZ
directed
by Zejlko
Dukich
translated
by
Michael Roloff
with
Scott Abbott
The actors:
The actors:
======================
Friedrich Schiller, 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.
==========================THE ARANJUEZ ,BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF PHOTO ALBUM https://plus.google.com/photos/106505819654688893791/albums/5743345630124877873?sort=1
========================
http://www.stefanodeponti.it/les-beaux-jours-daranjuez-i-bei-giorni-di-aranjuez/
=====================
Peter
Handke's 2012
two
character
-
A WOMAN & A MAN -
THE
BEAUTTIFUL DAYS of ARANJUEZ,
[approximately
his twentieth play,
most
but not all of which exist in English]
is
subtitled
“a
summer dialog.”
However,
if you regard the first half of what, formally,
is
a parallelogram construct,
“interrogatory”,
of THE WOMAN, would strike you as a more fitting description, than
“dialog”, of a piece whose second, THE MAN'S half, reverses the
querying while yet the man goes off on his parallel tangent riff
about Aranjuez & its proliferating fruit and vegetables.
Love
& sex & fertility
and
how one can talk about them in
the
age of universal pornography
might
be one way of teasing out the themes for a play that I think of as
Handke's
Cat
on the Hot Roof,
a
play where you want to hearken to the language -
what
THE MAN & THE WOMAN say
THAT
is the action here! -
and
that is why I suggested
certain
short cuts
for
the
PLAYING
VERSION
where
the play becomes verbose
and
the text stands between the play and an audience that we hope will
be
ALL
EARS.
The
play is appr. 11,500 words long, 10 k of it spoken text, appr. evenly
divided between THE MAN & THE WOMAN. Some of the long speeches
might be a stretch for the audience. I myself would do TWO test
readings for the closest supporters of my theater, telling them that
it was a translation in progress - i.e. suggestions welcome, and then
read the text to them, and check where they tuned out if they did
(praying
that they don't hate the piece)
for
the second reading I'd ask the dirty dozen or two to be alert to
those moments when they attention wandered or they lost the thread.
At that point you ought to have an idea where to cut if
you need to cut.
I
would make the text available with the program, thus facilitating the
audience's ability to be follow a text that is generally entrancing.
Not
too many visual distractions?
Handke's conversations with Oberender
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2014/11/peter-handke-thomas-oberender-50-jahre.html
contains a wealth of Handke comments about what he calls Handke's conversations with Oberender
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2014/11/peter-handke-thomas-oberender-50-jahre.html
"a sketch".
Perhaps
the actors mesmerize the audience no matter what they say or do.
Peter Brooks' actors at BUFFE DU NORD do so invariably.
================
ARANJUEZ
starts like
“tell
me your sexual history,”
the
kind of thing that can of course occur on a first date
or
“first sex”
(as
first dates came to be known at least in the New York of what Updike
called “post pill paradise”
as
of the 70s).
On
the other hand my recollection of that wonderful time indicates that
such history telling
-
whatever its motivation -
then
succeeded a successful first date and did not initiate it.
Thus
this couple
THIS
ETERNAL, MYTHIC
WOMAN
& MAN
may
have
“a
past”
and
we the audience are forced to be intrigued by the nature of the
relationship
that
is not spelled out:
our
natural voyeurism envy to participate in their sexual activity comes
into play...
This
question is left ambiguous and mysterious in
ARANJUEZ
we
don't know the relationship:
but
we sense erotic tension.
Is
THE
MAN
being
seductive with his evocation of ARANJUEZ???
There
is a kind of bridge between the parallelogram's
two
main emphases where
dialog
of sorts, a rather formal yet at times also earthy crude way of
conversing, is comparatively balanced. However, natural as the
somewhat formal dialogue may seem
it
is anything but naturalistic.
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2012/07/peter-handke-plays-in-english.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2014/09/celebrating-handkes-ibsen-prize.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/12/die-schonen-tage-von-aranjuez.html
http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2014/01/los-hermosos-dias-de-aranjuez-de-peter.html
=====================
I
think the most useful way to think of Handke's theater - until THE
HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER of 1993 [the summary of all his
work from the 1966 OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE until 1993]
is
within the context of
the
da-da of
happenings;
that
is, not within
standard
theater categories
but
in terms of creating
uniquely
arresting experiences.
.
All
the earlyish pieces -
OFFENDING
THE AUDIENCE, SELF-ACCUSATION, CRIES FOR HELP, QUODLIBET THE RIDE
ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE, MY FOOT MY TUTOR
(but
for the more standard Austrian type farce, 1973 THEY ARE DYING OUT)
are
independent,
non-naturalistic word or wordless/ i.e. body-language pieces
that
obey an artistic logic of their own
and
are shaped by
formal
musical principles.
Some
may see a occasional resemblance with Ionesco's early work
- La Lecon,La Cantratrice Chauve-except that there is nothing absurdist about Handke'sso playfultheater, no matter thatKASPARappears to suffer from being locked in an absurdly imprisoning language house.The Handke translation sitehttp://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/has a piece describing what became involved in translating the early pieces a piece that I myself still quite like&contains some stabs of mine in locating Handke's drama within the world of contemporary theaterthat needs editing and revision.
That
is:
I've
given a lot of thought to how Handke's other plays work, work &
cogitation of mine that you don't necessarily want or have the time
to absorb, attempts that are strewn throughout my pieces on the plays
and the on-line drama lectures.
One
thing to note is that Handke from early on used classical German
language conventions & that since the great majority of his
pieces are formally perfect the designation
“experimental”
is inappropriate and only manifests an unthinking reviewer when you
happen upon it.
I
regard Handke as being
a
Shakepearean talent
something
that becomes manifest as early as his
1970
play QUODLIBET
-
straight out of Hamlet -
where
“the
audience”
is
king
whose
conscience
is
to be caught
in
this instance
via
auditory
hallucinatory projections
which
indicates what Handke will be after
Although
Handke remains faithful to creating artificial theater pieces, their
nature begins to change with the 1982 WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES
Handke
has begun to take recourse to features of Greek drama & the
drama of the German and European classics.
His
thinking along those lines can be followed in the second volume of
his diary excerpts
DIE
GESCHICHTE DES BLEISTIFTS
(History
of the Pencil)
which
also exists in various Romance language translations but not in
English despite the succces of Volume One,
The
Weight of the World.
Chief
among the recourse that Handke takes is to indirect alternating
discourse, and to long speeches where characters, or what sometimes
seem like shadows of allegory, begin to speak.
1994
THE ART OF ASKING, 1999 VOYAGE BY DUGOUT
which
owes a host of debt to
the
well absorbed lessons of Brecht & Kipphard & German
docu-drama
=================
Although
THE
BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF ARANJUEZ
fits
into that very wide category
“happening”
and
is very much an artificer's artifice
I
myself have a bit of a tough time in finding the actual formal
principle or logic according to which this play operates,
by
which criteria one can, and which Handke allows, critics to judge his
work
- and of which we receive just a single long and very ambiguous section.
and
it is not a problem I have with any of Handke's other plays, unless
“excerpt” is the operating principle in this instance...
an
excerpt from a conversation that has been going on for a long time
Ambiguity
rules, the imagination is forced to foist its projection on to what
it hears, that is the work the audience must perform
here
as well as in Handke's other pieces,
and
what the imagination then reveals to itself as it begins to speak.
This
“conversation”, this “dialog” is something we the audience
are entered into,
it
is an artifice and therefore it requires an honestly artificial
beginning, something quite self-conscious.
I
look forward to how Zeljko Dukich will handle the “quote”, the
artificial nature aspect of this dialogue that appears to be grounded
in some kind of prior agreement between MAN & WOMAN. And also, of
coure, what Wenders will do with it on film who, I gather, is using
the play in its French text.
Various
possibilities:
the
actors come on stage, discard the play text...
The
director leads them on stage, introduces them, the play & the
author...
============
The
quote “the dialogue” itself
is
in the nature of an “as if”, that then is realized on stage –
that is, its artificiality stands in a tense relationship to the
non-as if, and we are at the heart of what makes theater such a
wonderful world to be engaged in as compared to...
=====================
Like
Handke's screenplay for Wenders HIMMEL UEBER BERLIN/WINGS OF DESIRE
(1985) The Beautiful Days of ARANJUEZ
is to an extent a collage assembled from Handke's other work, in
this case dating back to the mid-70 NONSENSE & HAPPINESS poems,
which I translated, the novel KALI (Saltworks-2004),(1)
Voyage by Dugout (1999), etc. etc, and especially, at
Aranjuez' end, from WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES (1982, 1996
Ariadne Pres) which I translated -
I
wrote at length on WINGS OF DESIRE in the mid-80s for the St. Monica
Review where I discovered how Handke works as a collagist, our man's
ability as a JS Bach of his own work, but did not focus on this
feature.
The
strongest theft from work of his own occurs with the way that Handke
pull's out of
ARANJUEZ
its
long denouement
VILLAGE'S
religious
response form
ARANJUEZ
mimics
this kind of ending
in
much diminished fashion
and
for the nearly entirely different purpose of finding a way of ending,
pulling out of the parallelogram dialogue between
THE
WOMAN & THE MAN:
an
inkfish blows a lot of ink
or
a cat or dog throws a lot of dirt into the face of an audience
puzzled by the diametrically opposite versions of the erotic and
fertility that
MAN
& WOMAN
have
exposed
their
ears
to.
Thus
the nature of ARANJUEZ
itself, as a kind of quote, excerpt.
The
quote is introduced by the description of what kind of summer day it
is and what kind of perennial couple; and it fades out as the
ordinary world and its noises start to intrude.
As
a quote it derives possibly from the 1969
RIDE
ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE
the
ultimate inversion of a boulevard play
Handke's
dream play that
creates
the most exquisite catharsis by means of discombobulating the
audience's expectations of reasons, very Ionesco like at moments,
inducing a state beyond reason, multiple subliminal syntactical and
experiential levels, which constitutes the renovation of the nervous
system, catharsis, catharses,
an effect that I then compare to what's called "a good hour"
in psychoanalysis; produced, surprisingly, in positivistic
ways.
ARANJUEZ
which
features far simpler dialog to and fro
we
nonetheless come on:
“THE
MAN.
No.
Perhaps. Yes – now that I think back, especially to the old films –
I believe you.”
which
is one of the play's dreamy moments that may disconcert the audience
and
which points to the possibility that the excerpt is from a film and
that
THE
MAN & THE WOMAN
are
actors
Thomas
Oberender, who recently published a long four part interview with
Handke, finds parallels with
THE
ART OF ASKING
and
Handke is agreeable to his suggestion that
THE
WOMAN & MAN
could
be actors.1
Thus,
I think there are a few section that i would try to play as though
the audience were suddenly watching a film,
that
is, I would have
THE
MAN & THE WOMAN
play
as though they were being filmed – there's a reference later to
women being filmed!
That
kind of transposition of genres is one of the most powerful ways of
generating aesthetic renewel.
I
would cut where the woman says she only picks losers, muff divers as
accomplices - not specify at all, leave it to the audience's
imagination. that is not only lousy psychology but constitutes the
kind of vulnerable spot in the play that some smarty pants could
really go after.
That
is not my life experience of imperious women – all of whom, no
matter how imperious, were/ are however at the mercy of the wish for
love, but none of whom chose lovers to whom they condescended, not
even momentarily.
==============
This
is at least the third time that Handke uses a woman's personae.
First
time was
The
Left-Handed Woman
Second
time:
the
Bankieress of
Crossing
the Sierra del Gredos
In
the instance of
ARANJUEZ
it
is my feeling that
THE
WOMAN
is
being used to unload a rather large and contradictory load of freight
from the
“Handke
Warehouse of Opinions”
as
other characters
have
throughout,
a
moralizing tendency that enters with
the
NOVA character in
WALK
ABOUT THE VILLLAGES
who
does not necessarily serve the dramatic purposes well
e.g.
in
Preparations
for Immmortality
and
best as I can tell Handke is either ignorant or obtuse that e.g.
“Barbie Dolls”
are
not worth attacking once again
Handke,
in instances of that kind, reminds me of Norman Mailer
inveighing
against plastic.
Here
I happen to agree with
THE
WOMAN
when
she bemoans the fact
that
no women any more
stand
behind their man,
or
only the fewest
has
been my experience
that
numerous men are not worth standing behind is a matter that she,
surprisingly, fails to raise.
================
The
way that the "look" guides the audience to the vuelta
de espana ! but
I also notice that
certain speeches, the woman's, are talky!!! and need to be condensed.
Have marked up the final, and also combined all suggestion of mine
in a single
m.s.,
and everything i have picked up from the Handke's Oberender
interviews for Aranjuez
where
Handke
thinks that actors incarnate existence at its most complete, however
without necessarily needing to act. In his conversation with
Oberender, he and O. discuss this proposition using the example of
the protagonist of his novel DER GROSSE FALL/ THE GREAT FALL who is
meant to, is on his way to act the role of the AMOK RUNNER,
(something Handke himself has frequently expressed as wanting to
do, i.e. his ZORN/ RAGE @ existence). Thus A MAN & A WOMAN
in ARANJUEZ probably can be regarded as actors of that kind,
essential man and woman... although as of now I am not sure what that
adds to my understanding of these roles and the also very mysterious
interchange
in which they are engaged and pass each other bye...
between
crying/laughter!!! is a tone that Handke suggests for the text as a
whole!
That
state of mind occurrs at very critical and often tragic moments!
Perhaps
Klaus Kastberger who has writen on the subject & Klaus Peymann
who I think has directed it meanwhile, have a few observations that
they might want to share. I suppose so would Luc Bondy who directed
the German as well as Paris premiere.
======================
From
Oberender's conversation with Handke I gather that when Handke
reached the part in his novel DER GROSSE FALL where the
protagonist, in Paris,
happens
on
the woman with whom he has had an apparently wonderful
night, out at his suburban digs.
he
realized he wanted to/ would write something like ARANJUEZ, and I
don't think it was necessarily to be the pop song
'Oh
WHAT A NIGHT'
epicurean
as Handke calls himself in the Oberender conversation.
However,
DER GROSSE FALL reports, as best I recall, that the woman
“had
been good to him”
the
kind of night that makes one assume mutuality
and
our ACTOR is on his way to Paris for a repeat, as well as to
play AMOK RUNNER.
So
much for the original inspiration and
the
suggestion it provides.
I am not sure that what Oberender discusses with Peter about ARANJUEZ will be of much help to the actors. A tad to Z perhaps.
I am not sure that what Oberender discusses with Peter about ARANJUEZ will be of much help to the actors. A tad to Z perhaps.
- They agree that Aranjuez, the town, palace, the environs ought to exist as a premonition (as indicated in the text), don't give in to the powerful temptation to illustrate spectacularly in other words.
- How many indicae does windy frozen city avant garde audience need for its imagination to start to flutter?
- Then O. mentions and Peter happilly agrees that the two characters are really the two actors at the end of THE ART OF ASKING, and you briefly think you've got something to work with, but you don't. Peter says that actors, for him, are the closest to “people in full” that he knows – well, perhaps that tells us a bit about what he envisions these two to be.
- Handke's major relationships with women have been with very beautiful and sucessful actresses. The relationships have not lived up to the adjectives, until now, late in life that he's figured out not to live with a woman while he works, as when does he not work, on one project or another. He also mentions that it's perfectly all right with him to regard MAN & WOMAN as actors even if they are NOT acting! And he cites as an example his novel DER GROSSE FALL which tells the story of a very strange character who set out one morning outside Paris to go to Paris to act the part of THE AMOK RUNNER, something Peter himself has often admitted to have the urge to do. But we never see the actor of FALL acting. Something happens, intercedes. A great piece of writing, Scott and I addressed ourselves to it a few year back on line, without reaching anything really conclusiory; deeply mysterious, playful.
- My own guess as to what Handke means is that an actor is identical with him or herself (and that that is a great strength, he also mentions actors shynesses), represents her or hinself. An odd kind of identity that can fill another. The first time we have actors playing actors in a Handke play is RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE, they pretend think they are the great stars of 30/40 cinema, while searching for their identities. CONSTANCE is probably my favorite Handke play. It cleans your clock, as HOUR or course does too. These are works of pure genius.
- It occurred to me that if one were to write ARANJUEZ naturalistically one could go back, say, to 1980 downtown Manhattan and the restaurant where McInerny's BRIGHT LITHGTS BRIGHGT CITY opens, THE ODEON, and a girl who has been flirting outrageously with a guy goes up to him, and doesn't just say, “i'd like to go out with you” but asks
“what do you like to do in bed?”, - or vice versa.
- However in this instance there exists that agreement to which the MAN & THE WOMANkeep referring“that was the idea”that is, there is the game plan.
- there is a sequence in one of the poems ofNONSENESE & HAPPINESSwhich I translated where Handke recounts a lover publicly talking about fuckingthat is, our twosome here are engaged in apublic act of exhibitionismFormalizedas far as I am concernedthe play is aboutTHE PORNOGRAPHIC HEART OF THE WORLDwith porn being so profuse how do you seriously playfully broach the erotic on stage?This would seem to be at least one wayTHE WOMAN'S confessionshoweverseem to be a bit muchand THE MANkeeps withdrawing into DISPLACEMENSLawrentian flower language,and Handke in his conversation admits as much, to that withdrawal, so there is that movement back and forth fromthe gross to theif you willsublimatedwhich I like best in the description of all those fruit and veggies that have gone wild.That creates an extraordinary unresolved tension, but for the author then allowing outside noises to intrude into the permanent erotic state.In other words, this play is not a variation on Mueller's QUARTETT or on LIASON DANGEREUSE two piece that come to my mind in connectionaside the ones alluded to in the play itself, STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE & TALES FROM THE VIENNA WOODS, DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, CAT ON THE HOT TIN ROOFPerhaps Scott has one or the other thought.
- Michael Roloff March 2015
===========
CHICAGO REVIEWS
It is a summer dialogue which proceeds by way of interrogation-play, exploring the metaphysical heights and sensual depths of human desire encircled by the wild simplicity of nature itself. This latest of Handke’s plays is a sterling investigation of how and what we talk about when we talk about love.
==============================
=============================
==============================
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