Rant of the Week

Origins of Opera

 

I'll bet that the real origin of drama and music in human culture was in the need for society to recognize the complete absurdity of a particular repetitive dynamic and thus to ritualize and formalize it as a substitute for the real thing in order to diminish the destructive consequences of it's enactment.

So we have the G8 meeting in Germany.  The protestors march in.  The police march in.  The organizers put up huge fences; the protestors block the streets.  The police fire water cannons, the protestors flee, and try to return through open fields, only to be driven back again, and so on. 

This has been going on for twenty years or so now.  The leaders of the G8 don't do anything that the protestors want, and the protestors don't get anywhere near the leaders.   This cries out to be made into a ballet, in which the tragic lovers, (G8 leaders and protestors) finally do meet and embrace and hurl each other across the stage in frenzied adulation until, exhausted and bruised, they fall into each other's arms and die.

 

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