“I like putting really long silences into my plays. Crazy stuff happens during silences at the theater. The audience suddenly becomes aware of itself, and a little weirded out and uncomfortable, and maybe someone coughs and whispers, but if the silence goes on long enough eventually people adjust to it and get kind of comfortable and zen and find their own way back into the reality of the play. And that moment—when an entire audience is relaxed and breathless together in a silence, when time slows down and then starts to speed up again—is very magical to me.”
Annie Baker’s Author’s Note for her play BODY AWARENESS
Some Sontag:
“So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has
with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that
ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art,
with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric” Silence is the artist’s ultimate
other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which
appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.”
(…)
“Committed to the idea that the power of art is located in its power to negate, the
ultimate weapon in the artist’s inconsistent war with his audience is to verge closer and closer
to silence. The sensory or conceptual gap between the artist and his audience, the space of the
missing or ruptured dialogue, can also constitute the grounds for an ascetic affirmation.
Samuel Beckett speaks of “my dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and
too proud for the farce of giving and receiving.” But there is no abolishing a minimal
transaction, a minimal exchange of gifts, just as there is no talented and rigorous asceticism
that doesn’t produce a gain (rather than a loss) in the capacity for pleasure.”
“Silence is a prophecy, one which the artist’s actions can be understood as attempting
to fulfill and to reverse.”
