I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating and non-human in thinking with too much clarity. Nissim Nicholas Taleb
It has been observed that at the beginning of electronic music, some German studios claimed that they could make every sound a natural instrument could make – only better. Then they discovered that all their sounds were marked by a certain uniform sterility. So they analyzed the sounds made by clarinets, flutes, violins and found that each note contained a remarkably high proportion of plain noise: actual scraping or the mixture of heavy breathing with wind on wood: from a purist point of view this was just dirt, but the composers soon found themselves compelled to make synthetic dirt – to ‘humanize’ their compositions.
Returning from a show at one of Chennai’s most expensive theatres, I found myself agreeing with my co-passengers about how the piece did not work in that space at all … my mind kept returning to the numerous shows we gave as a dance company, in ships, ball-rooms, courtyards, open grasslands, moving barges, all too often with stained, torn sheets pinned across the space and battered screens to conceal the quick changes. It is true that a beautifully constructed space may never bring about an explosion of life, while a random corner might be a tremendous meeting place. Does this mean that as far as art and architecture is concerned, there can be no relationship between conscious, articulate design and good functioning? That it is not a matter of saying analytically what are the requirements, how best can they be organized. I let the thought hang in my head.
The next day in the studio, after the initial warm-ups I found myself looking at the methodical structures I had arranged for the day’s trials and discoveries. After an hour of work, I began feeling that this could go on endlessly, that perhaps my computer might have an advantage over me in this line of random sequencing. Why weren’t my chance procedures working? What did I have to do to keep a hold on the element of surprise and fulfilled expectation equally? How do I nurture the quality of my imagination and craft that go into making the process work?
Perhaps the answers must come from studying what is it that brings about the most vivid relationship between people and things – and is this best served by asymmetry, even disorder? If so, what can be the role of this disorder? Perhaps a music composer is better off thinking like a chef, an architect like a scene designer moving scraps of cardboard by intuition than building a model from a plan. Perhaps a dancer is better off thinking like a calligrapher where the outcome of movement is a brush stroke, a visible aspect of space.
It has been written that prisoners watching the play Waiting For Godot had no trouble at all in following what to regular theatre-goers was incomprehensible. A friend once said that the best Shakespeare he ever watched was an actor’s version of the action as observed by a child, in all its simplicity and directness. In both cases, an extraordinary homogeneity was achieved because of the absence of laborious artifice and rigid attitudes to what makes good art.
