Meaning Schmeaning

As I read over Tom Lubbock's interesting piece in today's UK Independent newspaper about society's obsession with explaining works of art, I couldn't help but be reminded of my own recent attempts to impose meaning on an approach to a theatre production which I don't fully understand.

I'm currently involved in what's being billed as a "fusion" production of Hildegard von Bingen's 12th century musical drama Ordo Virtutum. My vocal ensemble, San Francisco Renaissance Voices, is performing the work in the original Germanized Latin chant. But the director has imposed an Asian flavor on the 12th century piece by dressing us up in Indian dance outfits (long colorful skirts, matching embroidered or sequinned tops and flowing scarves) and introducing Kathak dance steps. We'll also be accompanied by a bansuri (Indian flute player) and a harpist.

Perhaps it's the overly-analytical theatre critic in me, but as soon as I found out that we'd be mixing traditions, I felt a pressing need to know why.

When the director wasn't able to give me a truly satisfactory explanation, my mind started spinning like car wheels stuck in a ditch. Without even doing it consciously, I started to look for all kinds of rationales for why we might be doing Hildegard this way. Suddenly, clues for the meaning haphazardly started to emerge for me. I gleaned insights from the text (eg Hildegard refers to "garments" a lot in the piece so having the performers all dress in really bright and atypical clothes is a way of drawing attention to this idea.) I found myself thinking about the basis for Hildegard's story - about the battle between the devil and the virtues for the soul - as having echoes in Indian mythology. I even went as far as to consider the link from a musical/physical perspective: chant opens up the body in the same way as saying "om" or some other mantra in yoga, which has its roots in Indian culture.

You'll probably think that this is all a bit over the top. Maybe so. But the point I'm trying to make is this: Art need not justify itself by having to mean something. But we cannot help but search for it anyway. If my director chooses to create a fusion production of Ordo for the simple reasons that he happens to know a bansuri player, has a few sarees from a friend who recently moved to Asia lying about his office, and thinks it might be cool to explore some of the vaguely universal ideas in the work, then at some level that's OK. I, however, personally have to find more tangible to connect with the work I am about to perform. Some of these ways are intellectual and some are more visceral, physical and emotional, as the above examples suggest.

Many of us cannot avoid mining for meanings in art because we are sentient human beings and we naturally look for ways to understand the world we live in. Art provides one way of getting to grips with the essential incomprehensibility of the universe, but great art makes no claim to provide the answers. One of the great joys of experiencing art, in my opinion, is the playfulness it inspires in the audience. I can spend hours just mulling over alternate and contradictory meanings in a work of art, or equally, just turn my attention to how it cause vibrations to course through my body or makes me want to rush out of the room in horror.

Outside of academia, I can't see a drive to find a work of art's meaning trumping the basic experience of interacting with the work itself. And for anyone who's tired of having art explained to them, the solution is simple: Just ignore the program notes and the artist's statement on the gallery wall and walk around before and afterwards with earphones in one's ears to avoid listening to other peoples' reactions. Live in a cocoon. It's as easy as that.