tom hughes @yestomhughesyes - Tumblr Blog

We were imagining it [the new album] as a piece of vinyl so it's structured that way. The problem with digital technology is that everything is limitless. It used to be that you could only do three takes of a song because you didn't want to spend too much money on tape. You'd have to use the best take. Now you can go on forever.

Neil Halstead

An observer to Castorf's Hamlet rehearsals asked Castorf why he let the actors play each scene like a video-clip, like a track removed from the context of the entire album. He said 'I am concerned with describing a relationship between continuity and discontinuity in human behaviour. On the one hand a human being does change when placed in different situations but not too much because their basic constellation remains similar. But on the other hand their character can be quite different when new situations arise and they have to get to grips with that new situation in a single moment. So every situation stands alone as a single completely to itself, it is self-contained but it is nevertheless a section from the total LP.'

from the Castorf anthology

#theatre #Castorf

The movement of history, which includes the history of violent transformations revolutions - revolutions and class struggles - seems to be lost. This is a part of our own complacency; we [in Germany, or in the West more generally] do not communicate processes which take place all over the world. We have excluded, for example, Africa, so that we don't have to communicate with it anymore. A whole continent is cut off from communication, because nobody can get to grips with it in medical, humanitarian, military or economic terms. We place it outside of our communication system/networks. The fact that we have not yet broken off contact with Belgrade or Iraq means that we have not given up hope there yet, that perhaps it is still possible to teach people the use of fork and knife.

Frank Castorf, 2004

#castorf #theatre

Too much literature is a model of the world's recognisability and controllability. For me, there is something ridiculous about explaining things. Clarity is crushing. Because it's a lie. That is why I am suspicious of traditional narrative structures, versus the clarity of history [unsure of this last part]. Therefore I very quickly pick up a screwdriver and saw. But we do not stop at the destruction. Something is put back together again, something is built up, in relation to the old but in a new construction. Suddenly, there is created a completely different, negating and irrational state.

Frank Castorf (1996)

#castorf #theatre

The problem is that hatred - this elemental, basic human feeling - is smothered by our dominant culture of consensus..... Could there not be an international organisation of hatred? Hate is a much stronger force than love... An international organisation of those who are excluded, with whom we no longer communicate.

Frank Castorf, 2016 - some of this is really edgy stuff and it’s difficult to detect tone - take with a pinch of salt.

#castorf #theatre

In the theatre, before the dog begins to bite, all possible and potential victims are signalled 'Caution, I'll bite!' When it begins, everyone is safe for a long time. I no longer find this to be truthful; there can be no comedy and no sadness because everything that happens on the stage has been calculated.

Frank Castorf 2004

#castorf #theatre

at the moment

doing some castorf research at the moment - just a bit of study between shows, getting myself some new artistic food - doing some rudimentary translations of interviews with him. expect more quotations. they’re not actually good translations - my basic comprehension of german and extensive use of google translate and dict.cc.

You have to go to the limits [of society, of the people we're aware of], so that you no longer know how it goes.

Frank Castorf

#castorf #theatre