Mischa Twitchin’s essay films engage with philosophical ideas through a carefully calibrated and playful combination of sound, pace, image, duration and text.
This essay-film performs the paradoxical simultaneities it addresses. As film-philosophy, its meaning depends on being watched several times. Or as Twitchin puts it, ‘we have to practice Brechtian watching of the other watchers’.
What happens in performance, above all to the characters, when an actor transforms them from their fictional existence on the page to their physical enactment on the stage?
As any student of semiotics knows, speaking in code is what we do — when we communicate. It’s normal. To speak directly is the exception rather than the rule. In the kind of work I’m involved in getting others to do what you think you want them to do is primarily an exercise in subtle influence, persuasion and suggestion, perhaps delivered as a “nudge” rather than an order. It’s the same in advertising. Only crude advertisers direct you to buy Weetabix — obviously, overtly, as a command.
Asked by an academic friend to name one book I would save if the world were to collapse in an apocalyptic climate change scenario, I thought: ‘it’s too hard’, but then started going though my mental library. ‘You wouldn’t want to save an academic book, would you,’ said my friend, ‘surely a novel, an artist’s book…’. But in those few seconds I had already settled in my head for Salvatore Settis’ The Future of the ‘Classical’ (Polity, 2006, translated by Allan Cameron). Why?
Mischa Twitchin’s essay films engage with philosophical ideas through a carefully calibrated and playful combination of sound, pace, image, duration and text.
This essay-film performs the paradoxical simultaneities it addresses. As film-philosophy, its meaning depends on being watched several times. Or as Twitchin puts it, ‘we have to practice Brechtian watching of the other watchers’.
What happens in performance, above all to the characters, when an actor transforms them from their fictional existence on the page to their physical enactment on the stage?
As any student of semiotics knows, speaking in code is what we do — when we communicate. It’s normal. To speak directly is the exception rather than the rule. In the kind of work I’m involved in getting others to do what you think you want them to do is primarily an exercise in subtle influence, persuasion and suggestion, perhaps delivered as a “nudge” rather than an order. It’s the same in advertising. Only crude advertisers direct you to buy Weetabix — obviously, overtly, as a command.
What insights about the idea of ‘translation’ might be gleaned from thinking about it not only in performance, but itself as a kind of performance? Nicholas Arnold, following last week’s ‘Re-’ Interdisciplinary Network symposium on ‘Translation as Performance’[1], was prompted to reflect on the multicultural and multilingual shows and audiences that have characterized international theatre festivals since the 1960s – including his own productions.
Say the Re- Editors:
Last week Tower Hamlet’s Council website crashed because of the volume of objections to a planning application by a New York hotel developer to convert the Whitechapel Bell Foundry into a luxury hotel. People are always lobbying to preserve an original building or object somewhere. This is different.
