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.
It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
As an actor you become that lighting rod between the person who made the play and the audience.
A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.
The role of an orchestra in the 21st century isn't just playing, it's about developing future audiences and performers.
At Vienna, one of the audience affirmed publicly that my performance was not surprising, for he had distinctly seen, while I was playing my variations, the devil at my elbow, directing my arm and guiding my bow. My resemblance to the devil was a proof of my origin.
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