Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the multifaceted nature of drama and its role in fostering understanding through exposure and conflict.
Peter Brook emphasizes that drama encompasses various elements such as exposure, confrontation, and contradiction, which together facilitate deep analysis and understanding. This process ultimately leads to a greater recognition of truth and insight, suggesting that through engaging with drama, one can achieve a profound awakening in their comprehension of complex ideas and human experiences.
In practice
During a theater workshop, one could use this quote to inspire participants to embrace the challenges of performance.
The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are sudde nly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life ... The marvel of being one.
I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
The meaning of a theater event is that none of us could see something so clearly as with the new energy that is brought with the meeting of a theme, actors living it, and an audience gradually entering it to live it with them. At that moment, a certain light appears, revealing what we would never have thought of on our own.
It's easy to give up, and that's the one thing we cannot do. That's what gives me a reason for working: to leave people with a little more courage, with a little hope that has been nourished. Even if, of course, it's going to disappear, whatever touches one isn't lost forever.
Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.
Every form of theatre has something in common with a visit to the doctor. On the way out, one should always feel better than on the way in.
The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.
I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
If I make a movie in English, the money will come from Europe, so that I can keep my independence and freedom. The way they produce in Hollywood doesn't fit me.
I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.
The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.