The Ghost of the Age: Zeitgeist Fringe 08/04/2011 12:24pm

Editorial
Every now and then there’s a word that starts popping up here and there, and then suddenly it’s all over the place, or at least in places that like to be literary/artsy, New Yorker columns (forever announcing The Beginning/End of the/a Zeitgeist), Harper’s Index (identifying instances and ratios of zeitgeist), gallery openings (viz. “this is the zeitgeist”), and, perhaps more frequently than anywhere else, in editors' mouths. Cf., “Could you please write a book about, you know, something zeitgeist? Zeitgeisty? Whatever? It would really sell.” Or (recently, from the mouth of a MNPlaylist editor): “How about a blog on Fringe zeitgeist?” At a recent Playlist meeting, well after having agreed to this mad mission of zeitgeist-spotting, I had to ask a) how zeitgeist was pronounced, and b) what it meant. FYI: It’s ZYT-geist, and not, it turns out, ZEET-geist. No one knew what it meant. Everybody just sort of blinked. So I looked it up. And now I think I have the hang of what is meant by the word, though it’s very vague, and borders on pompous, when one could sort of just as easily say “trend” or “movement” or “pop cultural thing,” but honestly zeitgeist is more conceptually all-encompassing, and if one is to try to identify that which is zeitgeisty, one is destined to fail, because, I have a lurking suspicion, “the spirit of the age” is very hard to pinpoint during the age, and can only really be seen with any kind of insight after the age, but, it must be admitted, we are constantly trying to pinpoint what the hell’s going on, here, now, and I do believe that one of the ways in which we try to do that is by putting it on stage. Theater, dance, and the performing arts as a whole—especially in experimental forms—may be where we are most likely to try to express, reflect, and watch those movements that ripple through our now. This is where, too, we are most likely to succeed in capturing those movements, and where we are likeliest to fail. The risks of trying to capture the zeitgeist on stage are enormous—it may be too soon to comment on a given cultural moment, it may be commented upon without insight, and a work may fall short or go much too far in its attempt to say something new—but the possibilities are equally huge: a piece may go bone-deep and say something we knew but did not know we knew about who we are and how we live now. In fact this assignment is not totally mad. The Fringe does nothing if not try to speak newly; it gives venue and voice to those who have something to say that isn’t being said on other stages. In that sense and in others, the Fringe is doing what it sets out to do. It does it in ways that may be awful, brilliant, beautiful, ugly, ridiculous, absurd—but that is the nature of Fringe, and in those bone-deep moments when a show says something clear and true in a way that we can truly hear, we will also feel the zeitgeist—the ghost of the age—whispering by.