Julian Mesri

I have spent the past week here at INTAR theater listening to lots of loud music over and over again. It’s a wonderful job working as a sound designer, particularly because it exposes to you to so many different kinds of sounds. For example, this particular piece, Tetralogy  (which opens tonight!) has a soundtrack that veers from Earth Wind and Fire, Native American chants, Rob Zombie, Siouxsie and the Banshees and everything in between (the playlist numbers over 20 songs). The piece itself is pretty fascinating to watch, a living mixture of biography, choreography and image-theatre rarely seen in NYC. Listening to so much music and such a diversity of it for extended periods of time reminds me of this exercise Richard Carrick did with us when I was in music school about selective hearing. This term is bandied about for people “with no taste” – but it’s actually a mechanism in the brain that allows us not just to filter our unwanted sounds, but easily categorize recognizable sounds. It’s one of the main reasons we can have language.

Here’s the exercise that we did: sound out the consonant F. Now, sound out “F” but put a tone in your voice (like a hum). Suddenly F turns into V. We don’t think of F and V as particularly similar, but because of selective hearing we’re able to put the tone and the sound of F into something completely and conceptually different.

It’s also the reason that the first time we hear something we’re suddenly drawn away from it, it sounds dissonant in our minds because it’s new information. Eventually we learn to recognize the formal qualities of what we’re experiencing and can appreciate it, even being able to distinguish what “works” and what doesn’t work within that particular style. Taste, in a lot of ways, just comes from the exposure to many different kinds of music – a capacity to tolerate those first dissonant moments in order to discover  a whole new world. Musical tastes can evolve – if we were to play Debussy to a newly brought-to-life Mozart he would ask us “what is this noise”? Of course, we who have been exposed to the “Arabesque” even from the sounds of a cell-phone would not have this problem – but try listening to Schoenberg the first time or even some more abstract forms of jazz.

I believe this analogy of taste does not just apply to sound. We are creatures of habit, and if we are not forced out of our shell, we miss out on expanding and learning and building on our formal experiences. The secret to a diverse art will be a heterogeneity of form. Let us imagine our judgments of taste (whether or not something is “beautiful” in an aesthetic sense) to be the outcome of some kind of relationship between universals and particulars – between identity and difference. When I say universal, let us call this the standard concepts we associate with our world (the elements of the classic tragedy are full of these “universals”), and particulars to be those new different things we can’t categorize yet (the noise, the dissonance, the avant-garde?). When we are familiar with something we can will it into “abstraction”, which is to say, we understand it, we categorize it and it becomes universal. When we are exposed to something for the first time that thing is presented to us firstly as difference – as a particular, as something uncategorizable, and until we learn its form or what its doing, we remain in a perplexed relationship with the object. The greatest works of art never let that perplexing relationship cease.

Theatre needs to embrace difference, in spite of its initial “dissonance”. We cling to our well-made plays because they sound familiar. While our brains are being introduced to new and quirky characters, or even pressing social matters, they are being simultaneously coddled and reassured by a form that lets them know that this is their world.  But you can’t always use a traditional form to talk about real problems, especially when those problems require formal evolutions and challenges. What I have always loved about APAP festivals such as Under the Radar is the diversity of voices they bring, not just different countries and cultures, but different, formal challenges. We see then in these international artists an ability to tackle a wider range of social commentary, where the commentary is itself embedded in the form, and the artist, committed to the problem, must bend and break the constraints put upon him by the form to wrench a new piece which is itself both art and the work it takes to make that art.

This need not come only from overseas -a wonderful production I saw last night from Everywhere Theatre Group (full disclosure: this is my girlfriends’ theatre company and I performed in an earlier incarnation of this piece at ars nova) – Flying Snakes in 3D, manages to address the difficulties and frustrations and class-struggles embedded in theatre by wrenching apart the structure of one of theater’s nemeses – film. In doing so the writers and actors literally break apart both their own lives and their own play all in view of an unforgiving – seemingly perfect film production behind them. This break in form does not mean that the piece is not accessible or wildly esoteric, it means that we, the audience are shouldered with the task of digesting theaters’ fate and our own class-guilt whilst being entertained.

My hope is we seek out the dissonance in order to learn and expose ourselves to the variety of artistic languages and poetics that are all around us. Let’s keep challenging ourselves to make and seek out work that doesn’t just ring true, but rings out differently.

- Julián

P.S. special thanks to @JoshuaConkel, @MelissaImpact and @BatfishLD for the Twitter-convo that inspired large portions of this post.