Loud music (thoughts, not conclusions)

Sometimes stories are worth telling because of how they're told, sometimes because of what they're telling.  For me, last night's "Cabaret Brecht" was worth telling because of how it was told. It was beautiful and loud filled with silhouettes, typewriters, flutes, short skirts, suspenders, smoke, and wooden chairs that guided us through Brecht's lifetime.

While talking to director Yuri Butusov last night one question was "Why do you play the music really loud?" or something along those lines.

"Because I like listening to loud music."

Yeah, that's it. I think this is an acceptable answer because I also like to massacre my eardrums with unnecessarily loud music. You can feel the essence of a sound. He thinks that it's bad that American theatre doesn't incorporate music from other languages. I think this is absolutely true. I've been thinking a lot about how in the USA we segment parts of theatre and parts of the arts unknowingly. The theatre is a place we go to talk and understand. Dance is where we move. Art is where we see.

Walking around St. Petersburg at 11pm (don't worry, not alone) it's dead quite. Compare this to the USA where there is honking, shouting, sizzling steam, wind, subway, blinking light, neon sign, gasoline, grease, clicks, whirrs, buzzes, slush, and it's all a flurry of activity. Maybe our lives are already attributed to being so involuntarily sensorial that we want to segment and control what we can, resulting in limiting ourselves in the arts. Oh you want movement in production? Let's go find a choreographer. Oh you don't understand the words of the song? Well, let's not use it then.

Butusov mentioned an exercise they did where they tried to devise a piece of theatre around a song. The immediate reaction would be to look at the lyrics and just go with the narrative they provided. I would already be segmenting how I sense things. If you used a song that wasn't in english or wasn't understandable, maybe you would be forced to base your piece of theatre on the essence of the song. Tastes, textures, smells, sounds, dialogue, color, all wrapped into one. I want to do this and try it out. Conveying the essence of something works against all the instincts we've created when it comes to creating theatre.