Happy New Year. As an experiment in
better living and to give more time to creative pursuits, Pavol and
Kelly are only checking and answering their email two days a week in
2013, on Mondays and Thursdays.
If you need a response immediately,
please call us at...
We also get text messages at either of
these two numbers.
Please understand we are not doing this
to be difficult, but just want to find a way to shift priorities for
ourselves and our work and get back to a more productive and happier
life. We wish you the same in the new year.
This was the first correspondence I
received from Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, artistic directors of
Nature Theater of Oklahoma. It made me love them immediately.
*
I go to meet Kelly and Pavol at their
home in Queens weighed down with guilt: someone else pitched this
interview to the Guardian, but it came to me instead; soon after
waking up that morning I got a phone call from my son's nursery,
asking me to take him home because he's vomited; and if I'm so
terrified of contributing to climate change, what the hell am I doing
flying to New York instead of talking to them on Skype? When I sit
down to start the interview, I'm even more unnerved, because before I
can get a word in, this happens:
Pavol: So what's
your story?
Me: That feels
like a dangerous question!
Pavol is brilliant. He greets me at the
door to their apartment wearing a baby-blue Adidas tracksuit trimmed
with ruffles, the kind of thing someone might have worn on Sesame
Street, round face defined by his thin waxed moustache. Before I
leave, he demonstrates his favourite thing about the apartment he and
Kelly share: it's not only big enough to rehearse there, but for him
to stretch himself out full-length on the floor and
rooooooooooooooll. It's an open-plan space, with the kitchen in one
corner, books in another, and a green sofa in a third, where their
two garrulous grey cats nest in a makeshift cave constructed of
blankets. Windows fold around this corner, through which you can see
the entire Manhattan skyline, buildings glinting in the cold winter
sun. I have to stop myself from staring adoringly at Kelly: she has
sparkly glasses and such beautiful hair, the burnished colour of
autumn leaves, piled around her pale angular face. Both of them wear
T-shirts emblazoned with the word Oklahoma: a theatre company with
merchandise, just like a band.
P: It's what we wear now.
K: I used to be a flashy dresser but
this has been it [for a few years now]. It makes travelling a lot
simpler, too.
P: I pack 10 of these, 10 underwear, 10
socks, 2 pants, that it's. The rest is audio equipment, that's all I
care about –
K: – I told him we're not going to
bring any more suitcases –
P: – having the equipment to make
work, so even though we're going for four months, it's always 10,
10...
K: It's filled with microphones,
recorders, cameras,
P: tripods, cables.
K: Little by little, we're
having to do more and more laundry.
*
I'm here because Pavol and Kelly are
soon to make their UK debut (not counting the part they played in
Cadavre
Exquis at Sadler's Wells last year), at the
Norwich and Norfolk festival with their multi-play extravaganza Life
and Times. I'm not seeing the show until the following day, and I've
tried to read just enough about it that I know what questions to ask,
but not so much that I spoil anything for myself. I know, for
instance, that it's very long: starts at 2pm, finishes about
midnight. I know it's based on a 10-part, 16-hour phone conversation
with one of the company members, Kristin Worrall. And I've read a
really
beautiful interview with them by another
theatre-maker, Young
Jean Lee, so I've picked up some biography:
they met as students at Dartmouth College (a lecture course on Dada
performance; there's a fun Village Voice interview in which Pavol
says: “We started fucking right away”), not long after Pavol
moved to the US from Slovakia – I'll come back to that bit. They
made theatre for a few years after graduating, then abandoned the
stage – I'll come back to that, too. And neither of them wanted to
have kids, which is self-explanatory. That's pretty much it.
P: You're excited about seeing the
show?
M: REALLY excited.
P: It's probably best to be less
excited though, because it's hard to work with excitement for us. …
It's like a resistance. It's never taken into account in terms of the
audience, whereas we take it into account with the performers: how do
you create resistance for a performer to do a better job?
K: You don't want overstimulated
performers.
P: That's our number one job, always to
look for resistance. What are you playing against, what are you
pushing against? It's very rare that we do that with an audience, and
that the audience actually comes expecting that or wanting that,
because we always try to coddle the audience and make sure that
they're comfortable. Whereas you will never hear me say to the
actors, 'Make sure you're comfortable' or 'Let's work on what makes
you feel uncomfortable.' I'm sure the RSC [he has a dry little
chuckle to himself] trains their actors to be comfortable: 'How can
you be comfortable with stage fright?' Whereas we [say], 'Oh, you
have stage fright? Excellent, let's celebrate that –
K: – that means you know what's going
on, that means you know you're on stage –
P: – and show that.' But I wonder how
to do that with an audience, and make them appreciate it. I don't
want to go to the theatre and be comfortable, never have wanted to. …
[But] how do you make it OK for the experience to be complex and
difficult and challenging? I've always been accused [of] not selling
[shows] well: it's not for sale! Come on, I'm not trying to sell it –
but I know what I would buy, I would buy a radical,
all-life-transforming experience. What would you choose if you had a
choice? Would you choose the most radical, transformative aesthetic
experience, or the most entertaining experience?
M: But even by using those words you're
creating expectation, so then someone goes in saying: OK, transform
me. That's a really bad way to go into the show as well.
P: Exactly: you put the responsibility
on them as well. It's like telling people how long the show is: if
you say it's 10 and a half hours, there's no way I can feel
responsible for entertaining you for 10 and a half hours. I hope you
understand – you, the audience member – there is just no way that
I am going to be able to keep it up. At some point you will have to
jump in and supply your own excitement – unless you have absolutely
no excitement whatever within you: then we can't work together.
K: We always assume that within that 10
and a half hours there's some room for you and you're going to take
it upon yourself to claim that space. It's not all the time the actor
giving you something, at a certain point you'll give back, even to
yourself.
P: Do you go to therapy? Have you ever?
See, you get therapy, regardless of whether the therapist is good or
bad. A lot of my friends who go to therapy say, 'Oh, my therapist
sucks, I hate it, he's stupid or she's stupid and it sucks and I'm
switching.' Whereas when I went to therapy, I didn't think my
therapist was particularly smart or even a good fit for me, but it
was just the act of going. It's what I put into it, not so much what
she was able to give me.
K: You carve out a regular period of
time to deal with your issues.
P: For me, it's the same with the
performance: if you're not willing to put anything into it, you're
not going to get anything out of it. If you're hungry for
life-transforming experience, you will more likely than not get it;
if you're really not hungry for it, you won't get it. It's just what
mindset do you put yourself in.
Pavol sits at one end of the table,
Kelly at the other, and me on the long side between them, so the
physical sensation of talking to them is that of watching tennis;
although their relationship as speakers is probably more that of
footballers, one person weaving the ball through the field, the other
grabbing it for a moment, the first snatching it back to shoot the
goal. At first I have the impression that Pavol's dry, booming, droll
voice dominates, but soon recognise how balanced they are, and how
sweetly they do that thing of developing each other's sentences,
riffing on each other's jokes. It's gorgeous just to sit within such
unity of vision.
P: It's like people who don't like
Christmas: the Christmas presents will never be enough. [You have]
the anticipation of Christmas and after you realise I was looking
forward to Christmas and I thought it was going to be this really
powerful experience and I would be so happy and satisfied with all
the presents and now all the presents are open and that feeling of
emptiness is there again. … You should definitely write about that:
we do promise Christmas and we do bring Christmas presents, but you
have to have some type of appreciation, you can't be ungrateful.
Christmas for me is like heaven, even if I get one little present.
K: But it's something that I've heard
people say recently: we either live in the past or the future now, we
never really live in the present. With all the hyperstimulation and
the social media, you're so plugged in to information and it's always
in this state of anticipation or fond recollection. [So] you're never
really fully in the present. I think what we're asking for is an
inordinate amount of present time, for people to be in the same room,
actually having the experience right there with the actors at the
same time. It's a selfish, it's an ambitious thing to ask people for
now, to give you that much time.
P: It's not selfish –
K: No.
P: – it may be slightly arrogant
because you're putting demands, undue, unreasonable demands, and I
have to accept that, I have to accept that criticism, like, who do
you think you are?
K: It's unreasonable, maybe, more than
arrogant: unreasonable to ask people to spend this much time for a
dubious subject matter.
P: But always there is a kind of a
missionary zeal to it: … we're taking up a lot of your time and we
know we're taking up a lot of your time, [but] for the life of us we
just could not edit it down.
*
The Public
Theater by Astor Place is big and bright and looks much smarter than
I'd expected. The capacity, at a guess, is 200 and the room is full.
Sitting just behind me are a group of fairly elderly people whose
patience is sorely tested by Life and Times Part 1, which alone lasts
a good three hours. To their credit, they don't leave during the
interval – but they do mutter darkly about not liking music that is
repetitive, not liking the music of John Cage and Ravi Shankar, and
wanting their hotdogs. At the start of Part 2, they're nowhere to be
seen.
I wasn't
surprised they'd had enough: Part 1 is undoubtedly an endurance test.
The music is naive, the staging jittery, the text entirely mundane.
And it's relentless, a barrage of words and unconnected movements,
going on and on and on. But Part 1 is also a work of
honest-to-goodness genius. It takes everything you think you know
about theatre and tilts it, bends it, plays ball with it and lets the
dog chew on it. And it holds you, feeds you the energy you need to
remain interested – more than that: riveted. I've seen quite a lot
of work these past few months that thinks about narrative, the way
people tell stories, and the effect of technology and particularly
the internet and social media on the modern mind (notably Anthony
Neilson's Narrative and Forced Entertainment's The Coming Storm), but
none of it did so as hilariously, bizarrely, eloquently or
perspicaciously as Life and Times does.
It starts with
three female performers dressed in utilitarian girl-guide outfits and
plimsolls, singing in fragile unschooled voices that sometimes quaver
in the direction of mid-20th-century musical theatre, sometimes reach
for the high melodrama of 19th-century opera, their faltering
melodies set to a relatively simple, dancing folk music played on
piano, ukulele and flute. They stand in a line, their bodies enacting
a series of unrelated, geometric movements, not a sequence they've
remembered but generated in response to prompt cards flashed up in
random order by another performer sitting with the band at the front
of the stage. It took me a while to realise she wasn't prompting but
surprising them: that's the resistance, the difficulty Kelly and
Pavol introduce to stop the actors feeling settled or complacent, to
keep them always present and thinking on their toes. About an hour
in, three male actors leap on stage, each one a giant bear with a
bushy beard, similarly dressed like boy scouts. They bring with them
a bushel of cheekiness: like the moment when “Kristin” talks
about getting her first report card, and how upsetting it is to have
someone observe you, and one of the men looks over his shoulder to
stare at the audience, assessing us. Or when “Kristin” talks
about having a crush on her teacher, the same man looks at the actual
Kristin, sitting playing flute within the band, and blows her a kiss.
I didn't realise
she was Kristin until overhearing people talk about her at the
interval; it disturbed me, because there were moments when the
audience collectively were uncontrollably laughing and I couldn't
quite tell if we were laughing with her or at her. But I say
“Kristin” because there are ways in which this narrative feels
dissociated from her now, a separation you can read in Kristin's
insouciant expression. Each of the performers sings in the first
person, as though this is their story, substituting their name for
Kristin's wherever required, including the men. But it's more than
that: the narrative, in its very banality, feels peculiarly familiar.
Part 1 runs roughly from birth (baby photographers, the family's
hand-me-down memories) to third grade (eight/nine years old), and the
stories Kristin tells of lying to her parents and teachers and other
kids, wetting herself in public, arguing with her sibling, reminded
me not only of myself at those ages and in those relationships, but
made me think about myself as a parent, with children going through
these experiences right now. Every now and then, Kristin remarks,
“This must be so boring for you!” but you would have to be
entirely uninterested in people to find Part 1 boring: entirely
uninterested in the ways we learn about or discover shame and
injustice, compromise and empathy; entirely uninterested in the
myriad subtle ways people puzzle out their place in the world through
the instruction of their elders, the tangled suggestions of their
peers, and quietly on their own. And again, there is more to Part 1
than emotional resonance. Throughout you're aware of the weird way we
tell stories, particularly about our own pasts: the glut of
unnecessary detail, the hop-skip through time, the way memory unfolds
from the heart of memory, stories opening up to other stories,
emerging with a peculiar, non-sequential logic. “We go on
tangents,” Kristin muses towards the end of Part 1, a simple moment
of self-awareness that encapsulates just what a mystery our own
brains are.
K: It [started
with] a series of 10 phone calls that Pavol made with a friend of
ours, a company member; he asked her: 'Can you tell me your life
story?' At the end of the first phone call she wasn't done so they
scheduled another time to call back and she kept going...
M: You didn't ask
any leading questions?
P: No … For
this project, I really tried to eliminate my own voice; instead of
guide it, I wanted to find out: what is the actual structure of a
story and how does one shape it, without me guiding it and
manipulating it? Of course I asked questions, there were
introductions, the start of the phone call, end of the phone call; if
I knew I wasn't going to understand what she said on the recording I
asked her to repeat it, but I really wanted to stay away. I wanted
the breakdown of language, I wanted her to have trouble, I was really
listening for the times when she couldn't remember, not the sections
that she remembered fluently and fluidly. I wanted to find out how
she generates language and how language is going to come out of the
brain when it's in a crisis, when it's uncomfortable, when it doesn't
know what to say.
K: It ends up
being a portrait of a particular moment in time: these phone
conversations are now five, almost six years old, she does of course
feel a distance from them and she realises she told some of these
things incorrectly, but we take it as it is. It just reminds me that
your life story is in continuous evolution and that you have
different relationships to past events at different times in your
life: things seem closer or more distant. Of course she didn't know
what we were going to do, we didn't either. Pavol's original plan was
to call many people and it just so happened she was the first one he
called and it took 16 hours. It was an incredibly generous response,
one that we weren't expecting. Both of us knew we wanted to use that
in its entirety and just were waiting for the opportunity to work on
that to figure out what it would be. …
M: Did she choose
for herself how much detail to include, and whether to tell it
chronologically?
P: She doesn't do
it chronologically. Again, if you tell the audience it's
chronological they will relax and not worry about it. [But] if you
really analyse it, you know that she's talking about third grade, and
then oh, that made me remember something from kindergarten, let me go
back to that... So it goes back and forth. … I always encouraged
her to take her time, to go on tangents, to get lost in it. I wasn't
really interested in a straightforward [story], I was open to it all
of a sudden becoming a philosophical conversation; if it became about
scientific experiments, that would have been fine. Whatever that
question produced, I was fine with that.
K: A lot of it
includes stories about other people, because we kind of define
ourselves as we go in relation to all of these other people who are
in our life. Although the structure of this thing is incredibly
abstract and spider-webbed and tangential, the audience knows the
logic of regular speech – we're just not always aware of how
fractured it is, both in its sentence construction and in its
narrative construction.
P: The most
important thing when I was talking to Kristin was for me to make sure
that she did not know she was making art. My number one job was to
not let her slip into trying to be good. That was the biggest
discovery years ago we have made, is that we produce the best
results, we make the best art, when we're not making art. How do you
get the audience to be at the same – will they perceive the best
when they don't think they are perceiving art? So if they're coming
like we're just making dinner, you're coming to be fed. … If you
somehow distract them [from], 'I want to see theatre, and if it's not
Shakespeare, Chekhov or Ibsen or whatever, then it doesn't belong',
if you trick them into not using those standards, maybe they'll be
more open, because I know that process helps us as makers.
M: How much are
you aware of what in Britain gets called verbatim theatre?
K: I'm aware of
this, here sometimes it's called documentary theatre: I think where
we differ from at least some of the companies that do that kind of
work in the US is that it's not for us a journalistic project. It's
more that the material exists as a kind of restriction and it offers
us a resistance: I can't rewrite this. We're not out to tell the
story of Kristin, down to even not representing her on stage. It's
something else.
P: Also we're not
interested in the 'poetry of the everyday'. People do take that away,
that's fine, but there's no romanticism in [it]. It's very easy to
do, it's easy to record. It's not that it's better than anything
else: we started as playwrights, so we used to write plays and it
took a year and a half to do, of pain and agony and suffering and
self-doubt –
K: – [in a tone
of disgust] self-expression –
P: – and
insecurity and trying to express yourself. Then we realised you can
just turn on the recorder and it takes you an hour to write a play
and it's like, ah, cool, this is easy. The text is never the primary
form of what we try to put out there, even though people do notice
that the most because there is still the supremacy of language in the
theatre, unless you completely take it away. It's just a found object
and it's an easy source. People talk a lot about the language even
though it's the thing that took the least amount of time in these
productions. People say, 'Oh, wow, 16 hours' – nobody says: 'Oh,
only 16 hours'.
K: Nobody says,
'Four years.' It's taken four years [to get halfway through]: 16
hours was the smallest part of it. And actually, one of the reasons
that we did it initially is because we both felt like theatre can be
an incredibly hermetic experience: you're writing these plays and
you're doing your little private work and then at a certain point you
open it up to the world. We were interested in how we [could] stay
attached to the world; I mean, it was a way of making our work more
permeable to and inviting the world into the work. You just grow
tired of this art as self-expression all the time: theatre is a
social event and it's a social art form and it's an oral art form, so
can we stay entirely in this social and oral if that's what it does
and that's its essence? Also for me what I liked about working with
that material is you drop a kind of pretending and you can work
easily and quickly. When we first worked with it we were working with
the original audio source in ear to the actors so you could take it
home, re-edit it on the audio editor, plug it back in to the actors
and you could hear it the next day, so it's a way of working quickly
and making many discoveries very quickly – and cheaply, because
everybody at that point had an iPod to work from, and the editing
again came for free on most computers.
P: It never came
from, 'Wow, the spoken language is so great and we want to promote
it.' It came from a kind stylised impulse more than a humanist
impulse: can we find something that doesn't belong? This kind of
language does not belong in the theatre: it doesn't have drama, it
doesn't have eloquence, it doesn't have conclusions about human
nature, so let's use it because it's wrong.
*
Between Parts 1 and 2 there's dinner;
the queue for hot dogs and knishes snakes down the stairs, across the
foyer and around the corner to butt against the queue for the
toilets. I head out for a bit, head buzzing, and when I return Pavol
is in the foyer, wearing another Adidas tracksuit, this one black
with a white skeleton printed on it. It's his first costume change of
the night: earlier he welcomed us wearing an Adidas tracksuit in
orange and yellow with fringing, like a child's cowboy outfit. The
baby blue ruffles get an outing later. I watch him weave his way
through the crowd and accost people with a microphone, then huddle in
conversation with them. I want to play too, but when our paths
eventually cross he says he can't talk to me, he knows me already.
P: I use the theatre as an excuse to
communicate with people and to ask questions. I do get terrified of
audiences but I wonder why: these people are coming to see my work,
why don't I talk to them? Every artist we talk to on OK Radio has the
same thing, they're terrified of the audience, they hide from them.
I'm the same but I also look at myself from the outside, like what
the hell is this? And just this curiosity about, why do people come?
Because they do come and there must be a reason. I always try to put
myself into a kind of alien mind that looks at things as if I came
from outer space on to this planet, and to me theatre is the most
weird and abstract behaviour. It's not natural for people to come to
a building to watch other people dress up and do stuff and talk
funny, it's not natural and I never want to take it for granted. It's
much more natural to paint something and put it on your wall and ah,
it doesn't feel so empty, I can live here; or to put music on: ah,
great, I can listen to music while cleaning; or I can watch TV
because it relaxes me, or I can read a book, it creates a quiet
space. But theatre's weird, it's like the least natural form of
behaviour that we humans engage in. That's why I'm curious about it:
everything else is kind of easy to understand and it's nice but
theatre is awkward, it's weird, it's dirty, it's grounded –
K: – you're sitting next to other
people who smell funny –
P: – it's the opposite of heaven,
it's like theatre is hell and is a very interesting place to be.
K: Or at least purgatory or limbo. It's
a liminal state.
P: It's hell. Theatre is heavy, it's
material, it's all materialistic –
K: – it takes money to make it, it
takes money to bring it anywhere –
P: – it takes space, it's heavy –
K: – people can only experience it
for a brief moment, a window in time, and if they're in the same
city. … I think we're constantly trying to discover why [we do it]:
some days I do it because it feels good to me and it amuses me;
equally there's some days when it does not make any sense to me at
all why somebody would be bringing 15 doofuses around the world to
put up a little fake thing and do it for you. There are days when I'm
embarrassed that somebody pays as much money as they do.
*
They say that, but it pains
me that Nature Theater of Oklahoma are so little seen in the UK. I
found the days running up to their week at the Norwich and Norfolk
festival really sad, as people I follow on twitter one by one started
revealing that although they had bought a ticket for the marathon,
they couldn't afford the travel or the accommodation or the time and
weren't going to be able to go. Although I love that the NN festival
was brave enough to programme them, it makes no sense to me that they
should have been leading not following. While I was in New York I
also interviewed the Team about Mission Drift and the contrast
between the companies is extraordinary: since bringing their first
shows to the Edinburgh festival, the Team have become integral to our
theatre landscape, frequently travelling from Edinburgh to London,
most recently for an extraordinary, life-affirming stint at the
National Theatre with Mission Drift in the Shed. So
come on RSC, come on Shakespeare's Globe, come on the National, I
double triple dare you: bring over Nature Theater of Oklahoma's
version of Romeo and Juliet. It sounds terrific: a haphazard,
tragi-comic, scintillatingly smart reconstruction of the play from
Kelly and Pavol's friends' and relations' vague, frequently wrong,
memories of it, full of invented events and interpolated speeches,
telling us as much about our relationship with culture and knowledge
as it does about storytelling and Shakespeare's teenagers. And it's
exactly the kind of irreverent approach to Shakespeare that we need
to see.
P: I don't understand subtlety in the
theatre. I understand subtlety in other art forms, where I can pore
over things and take my time, [but theatre] has to be
athletic,whether it's athletic speaking, athletic moving – even
stillness has to somehow be athletic and unsubtle.
K: When you dig far enough back in
theatre history, all of it was pretty dirty: even William Shakespeare
in his own time was much more rabble than refined. When we were
touring No Dice in Europe, we were making peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches for the audience –
P: – we feed people here, too –
K: – we feed people here, too, but I
didn't realise that to make sandwiches in some of these very refined
theatres of Europe, people were suspicious of it as an activity that
would be done in a theatre, there was some resistance that we met
with and some people who talked about us being very American, I had
never heard that as a definition applied to myself.
P: For you maybe the interesting thing
to answer or try to answer at least is why have we not been in Great
Britain?
K: Because it's weird.
P: We have had people from there see
our work, presenters, but it never occurred to them that it would
work. We have been all over the world, we have been 50 countries or
whatever –
K: – [Life and Times] is the first
time we've been in America in three years, and the first time we
haven't had to use subtitles because people speak the language –
P: – because there are a lot of
American companies who tour wildly and widely in Great Britain, we
have never been invited: we always say, well, it's the language
barrier.
K: But we're curious about it.
P: We go to Japan, we go to Singapore,
K: we've been to Serbia, Korea,
P: Germany, France,
K: Croatia,
P: everywhere, right? Everywhere except
where people could actually understand what we're saying. Maybe you
guys are just really weird, I always think that British people are
really weird whenever I go there, like I don't understand you people
–
K: Well, the accent for you is a lot to
get through.
P: – I mean I understand, but it's
maybe because I just deep down come from really low class of a low
class country, so not only a low class but also a low-down country.
Somehow I don't belong, whoever I am or whoever I project myself to
be, somehow it never belongs. … It's probably not helpful for the
British people to think we find them weird.
K: Or think that they find us weird.
M: Where are you from; when and why did
you leave?
P: Slovakia. I was 18 when I left to go
to make a better life for myself [that was 1991; he's 39 now].
M: What was it in the idea of America
[that made you move here]?
P: The fact that I can define myself
not based on where I come from, not based on what I have or what has
been given to me from birth or by my parents. It's a cliche but that
cliche is probably what got me.
K: Clean slate.
P: Clean slate, yeah. It's like a
criminal: you want to go to a country where they won't check your
background, so you can invent your own.
M: You went to Oklahoma first?
P: Yeah, and that's where I saw my
first play. I'd never been to the theatre before. It was The Tempest,
two days after I arrived; all I remember was the storm where they're
just yelling and talking gibberish and making sounds, that's all I
really cared about. If I ever do The Tempest I would just do a really
long extended storm, that would be the show.
M: How soon after that did you start
thinking you wanted to make theatre?
P: I started thinking about that when I
was in Slovakia still, when we had the Velvet Revolution in 89 [when
Pavol was 16], which was organised by theatre people – but they had
to stop making theatre to do the revolution, so I was more interested
in the stopping to make art in order for things to actually happen. I
wasn't intrigued or invited into it by the work itself, I was invited
into theatre by stopping the work itself, because then a playwright
became president, actors became ambassadors, directors became part of
the cabinet. That's what interested me, not theatre itself, because I
never really saw theatre.
K: He's probably the first person to
come to theatre going, 'Wow, those theatre people can really get
stuff done.'
P: I'm all for all the theatre people
stopping to make work to get stuff done. I'm always advocating: let's
all take a year off, let's all stop making theatre and see where we
get, and see if anybody misses it. Just one year, that's all I'm
asking, we can go back to it – but is anything going to be better,
worse, no difference at all? I'm curious to find out.
M: Kelly, what got you started?
K: My father was on the radio, he had a
four-hour show and he would go off with his bag of sound effects and
bring home all sorts of suspicious characters who did cartoon voices
and magic tricks, so I grew up thinking this was maybe something that
I might be good at as well. … Pavol and I have only been talking
about [this] recently, but my first toy was a tape recorder and his
first experience of theatre was a recorded audio tape, because that's
how the dissidents used to share plays back and forth, there were no
performances – and now of course most of our work over the past
five years has been made [using recorders]; even when we weren't
making work this way, a lot of the shows that we were making were
sound-heavy, we were still taking our tape recorders on vacations and
collecting sounds of seagulls and putting them somehow in the work.
So I feel like for most of our lives a set of ears has been
essential.
P: I never associated theatre with a
space and a theatre, I always associated it with either an audio tape
or revolution and some kind of change in society.
*
The Adidas tracksuits are out in force
for Part 2; none as comically decorated as Pavol's, but all in
different bright colours so the singers look like cheap gems in a
bead shop, the synthetic sheen of the fabric glittering in the light.
These are the gawky pre- and early teen years, roughly aged nine to
15; the synth-pop soundtrack gestures towards disco and nascent
hip-hop but with interruptions of jangly indie guitar; the projected
mood is first school disco, excruciating embarrassment papered over
with a determination to have fun. The story is familiar from a
thousand teen movies: kids alienated from their parents, kids
experiencing their first kiss. Kids shaping themselves through the
culture that surrounds them, Ghostbusters and Molly Ringwald in
Sixteen Candles and Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. I wonder
to what extent these reference points and signifiers are recognisable
to Pavol. Is what he finds fascinating in this story its strangeness?
Part 2 lasts a mere (ha!) two hours,
but it feels much more exhausting than Part 1. This is where it
really starts to feel relentless: but isn't that what makes it so
true? Life itself is relentless, day piling on day, experience on
experience, encounter on encounter; and even when you attempt to
retreat always there is the incessant churning of thoughts in your
mind. (You can tell I've never found meditation.) Just as my energy
and attention are flagging, though, something brilliant happens: a
crowd of people spill on to the stage like pearls from a broken
necklace, a radiant rainbow chorus whose voices swell and surge and
carry me on. And as Kristin's story darts back and forth in time, one
thing in particular strikes me: her regret that she wasted so much
time worrying about what other people thought.
K: The actors in a way can't agree too
much that we're in a musical; if the form that you've chosen is not
in itself offering any resistance to the actors then there's a
problem. In a way, we sing to the audience too much: there's a time
at which it's entertaining, and then a time at which it's like, 'Oh
my god, are they going to keep singing?'
P: It's like eating too much ice cream:
'You like ice cream? Here's a big tub of it – but you have to eat
it, no little bits.'
K: But we do talk about how it
shouldn't be a totally hermetic world: there should be a door in
there for my mother, and for people who are not carrying within them
the entire history of [the] avant garde; there's something different
for those people, but there's no door shut to your mum coming in, and
maybe she gets something out of it that's entirely more profound than
you would. It's been nice to have people that I don't normally see at
avant-garde theatre, who happen to have come because it sounded like
something that they might like. At the same time there's people who
come to see musical theatre, who are I think in distress that our
actors don't seem like they know how to sing. I feel like the actors
are at a level now where they don't get this as much, but at the
beginning they'd have some of the audience [she mimes putting their
hands over their ears while cringing] – and we leave the lights on,
so actors have to deal with that. 'You're not offering me the
virtuosic singing experience I've come to expect from my musical
theatre' – so what are you going to do about it, are you gong to
leave or hang in there with it?
M: Does there come a point where
they've been performing it for so long, and get so good at it, that
all those resistances are gone?
P: No.
K: I feel like we never get there
completely, no. There's some people who always say a Hail Mary before
they do a harmony – but it's great that it still continues to offer
a challenge to them and it's always going to be something that they
have to work on, because I think the work they're doing is honest
work in the present moment. They're not offering something that they
worked on in the past [and] here, now you appreciate it. [We're]
working on something same as you're working on something, and we
share that I think that.
P: And it's always on the verge of
falling apart.
K: Yeah, if the audience doesn't feel
like they have to say a little prayer to help out then we haven't
done our job. You should feel like you have to hold it together as
well: that's when I enjoy the evening most.
M: Are you there for all the
performances?
K: Yes: I run titles for One, Pavol
runs audio for One and Two –
P: – we communicate with the actors
too, I talk to them in their ear –
K: – we control the speed of it. So
we're there every night and we're also watching it every night,
taking notes, which is important because there are elements of it
every night which are chance-generated, so people need the feedback.
M: Do you say stuff deliberately to
wrong-foot them?
P: Of course – that's why they'll
never be good at it. But they understand the game, it's not –
K: – it's not set up to make them
fail.
P: In one of the podcasts we talk about
[this]: I have some friends that are really in the Broadway world and
Hollywood and acting with Leonardo Di Caprio and Al Pacino, and I
always wonder: would Al Pacino or someone like that be willing to
have a director talk to him in his ear during the performance? I find
it strange that people would not welcome that challenge. It's a game:
I take my responsibility to the world seriously but I don't take my
responsibility as a director seriously and I don't want my actor to
take his responsibility as an actor seriously. I want him or her to
take his or her responsibility as a human being seriously but I don't
want them to be invested in being an actor, just as I'm not invested
in being a director. I play a director, I play with the fact that I
tell you what to do, but we agree that that's the game we're going to
play: I'm going to tell you what to do in front of an audience to
throw you off or to play with the fact that this is happening right
now. I think that's at the core of the work: subverting the ego
investment in your particular role in the theatrical process.
K: Ultimately we were invested as
playwrights and we chose to be totally out of control of the textual
material: it's like, this is it, we can edit it but we can't rewrite
it. So we're looking for what offers us resistance as well as the
actors, and how does this not just become a form of exhibitionism or
virtuosity.
P: Narcissism.
K: Yeah. As an audience, I don't want
you to feel comfortable with having spent money to get something
that's – you shouldn't feel like you can just watch the actors as
objects, it should be a more complicated relationship for them as
well. You paid money but what you're getting is hopefully something
more than what you've paid for – maybe more than you wanted.
P: You paid money to do a workout, not
watch a workout. If I go to the gym and I pay my fee at the gym, I'm
not gonna just watch somebody else work out –
K: – it's not going to be like, 'Do
it to me, make me thin' –
P: – that's not what we do, you pay
money to do a workout.
K: There's some people for whom the
words 'participatory theatre' conjure up all sorts of like mimes
coming out to touch them and mess their hair up.
P: We don't do that.
K: But you can talk to the actors, the
actors will talk to you. And there are lights on the audience: they
can see you, you bear some responsibility when you do this, you have
to deal with the consequences on stage.
P: Are you scared now?
*
One thing I do
know about Pavol and Kelly before I speak to them is that for many
years they rejected theatre, and I'm interested in that because for a
period so did I. And in the same way that taking a break has made me
fundamentally question how I want to write about theatre (is my
ambition really to write a 400-word review with star rating of Life
and Times? What happens when I write about the show in 1500 words?
Several months later? Interweaving thoughts on the show with the
interview? What if I used the interview verbatim, refusing to
eliminate the repetitons, the slightly less pertinent bits, how would
that reflect or communicate the form of the show? What if I chopped
it up, making it even less linear? What if, in chopping it up, I more
or less consciously impose a linearity of thought that wasn't there?
What if I didn't write about Life and Times at all, but spent the
next 10 years telling people about the show, almost certainly
reaching the same number of people, but creating an oral body of
criticism that responds to the oral source of the show?), so too
Pavol and Kelly emerged from their enforced separation from theatre
with a renewed desire to experiment and challenge their form. Their
work as Nature Theater of Oklahoma is now all-encompassing and
multi-disciplinary: apart from the shows, they make animated films,
funny little cartoons of people eating dinner or using the toilet or
dancing in the park; they also make brilliant, hyper-dramatic
trailers, and once a week or so they issue a podcast on OK Radio, a
dauntingly lengthy but engrossing and illuminating conversation with
an artist they know or have arranged to meet in whichever city they
happen to be stationed at the time. Leaving theatre, they were able
also to leave its conventions, everything one does because that's the
way it's done. Even though they set out as graduates to experiment
with form, to shift and nudge and change theatre, still they
initially existed within conservative conventions of process or
making, whose inexorable force on them was debilitating, yet
somehow invisible. It wasn't until they rejected theatre wholesale
that they were able to see those conventions, that conservatism,
clearly enough to reject or at least subvert them.
K: [Using telephone conversations as
source material] came from a point of desperation for us, you know,
really questioning again why we were doing theatre. At a certain
point you realise how difficult theatre is to make, how much people,
resources, space it needs, and you're forced to ask the hard
questions about what is it about this art form that I'm interested in
and can we deal with just those things? Because if it's about
writing, why not a novel, why not poetry? There's so many better ways
to be a writer or a visual artist or – all of those art forms were
ones that we had spent some serious time in. I mean, we gave up
theatre for a period and explored other forms of art-making,
including video, visual art, writing, and quite frankly a lot of them
are easier, so why theatre?
M: Why did you give it up?
P: It just seemed like a very stale art
form, and the issues and the problems that we were dealing with, 80%,
even 90% of the challenges that we were facing in making theatre had
nothing to do with art: it had to do with money, it had to do with
the social situation, with real estate, with social dynamics, with
egos, and it just wasn't interesting. So that's why we say: let's get
out of here. That's not what I wanted my life to be: I wanted to be
an artist, I wanted to participate in society and be a useful
contributor.
M: Were you making similar work?
P: No, completely different: we were
writing plays and spending all our money on it.
K: Most of the time, one or the other
of us or both had full-time employment and we were saving money to
pay actors, not paying ourselves, spending money on stuff, you'd end
up with a lot of costumes and things. So when we went back to making
theatre it was like: let's embrace the actual economic and social
conditions of making the work, and if we can't do that then let's
call it quits.
P: And make it about that: if I'm gonna
be having arguments with actors, at least let me record it and use it
in a show. I don't want to get a heart attack for nothing, I'm not
gonna have an argument with you and then try to pretend we're making
a show about Cymbeline or something, something that has nothing to do
with the experience we're having in life.
K: One of the first shows that we made
with this kind of recorded material, we were given space for three
months in the summer so we had space and time to work quickly, and
everybdoy had an iPod, so it was again working with what we had, and
most of the actors were working day jobs but some of them were at
desks with telephones, so Pavol would call them at work. We talked
about it was our first paid art-making, it was corporate-sponsored
without them really knowing it. Most of the ways that we've been able
to be successful with it this time around, not just economically but
artistically, has been really scamming the system. [In] that show, No
Dice, we gave Diet Cokes and Dr Peppers to the audience – it wasn't
a big audience [about 30] – and the sodas came from somebody's day
job because they were allowed all the free soda that they could
drink. So it's just, how can you scam out of what you've got? … One
guy had a baby while he was working with us on No Dice and he had to
go home at intermission, because it was a long show and he had a kid
at home, so that character just disappeared from the show at
intermission. It was another way of embracing, if people have got to
go home at a certain time, that's when that character goes home.
M: I love your company.
P: Wait till tomorrow, we will
disappoint. We're bound to disappoint you.
M: What made you think, no, actually,
it is theatre.
K: I don't know. Pavol was the first
one to go back to it, and then he just seduced me.
P: A couple of friends asked me to make
a play with them and I said I don't do that. Then I was walking home
and it just seemed like, sure, I'll do something. [But] I said I'll
do it only if I never have to worry about the rehearsal space, if I
don't have to worry about money, and I don't have to worry about you
coming to rehearsals, and we can just do this, and the moment it
stops giving me any type of pleasure I will stop. I had nothing to
lose and nothing invested. Then I became curious again and it's like,
OK, it's possible only if you continuously remind yourself you have
nothing to lose: this is not the end of the world and you don't have
to make theatre if it doesn't feel right.
K: That show was pretty much done in
underwear with folding chairs.
P: But more than the material aspect is
the artistic: do I feel like I'm able to work on ideas that are not
sabotaged by egos and petty social dynamics? Those came into play but
I was able to ignore them enough. And then I said: OK, I'm back in
this art form and I know nothing about it and I'm OK with that. I
start from zero and everything I knew before I can erase and approach
it with a curiosity – not with love and passion of the art but with
curiosity. And neither with hate: it was a neutral feeling. I still
try to retain that neutral attitude towards it. I'm not out there
defending the art form of theatre. I'm not defending the live
experience with other people, I'm not defending the ephemerality of
theatre, you will never hear me romanticising any of that, but I'm
curious about it, it's something I know how to do, and it's just as
good as any other outlet to work on these ideas. I don't feel like we
came back for the love of it; we do have love in our life and we do
have love of ideas and we do have love of other people, but I always
have to retain a kind of attitude that I have nothing to lose, this
could be the last show. But I don't want it to seem like if this is
the last show we will perish, it's not that, which doesn't mean that
we don't work passionately and robustly and lean into it and really
go all out, we certainly do – but having nothing to lose allows you
to actually go full speed ahead and take risks. …
K: I think that's something that, over
the years, having had more of the privilege to work in places where
theatre artists are awarded [public subsidy] … I've come to
appreciate what you have working here in the US with nothing and
having that thing in mind of: I don't have to make this, I'm not
obligated to make this, I stop making this tomorrow the world will go
on. What that forces you to do is define really clearly for yourself
why you do it, where the pleasure is. I think we've been better this
time about following where the pleasure is in making the work, and
coming to it with a kind of curiosity.
*
There's another
long break, during which they serve obscenely good chocolate brownies
liberally sprinkled with crystals of sea salt, I try to eavesdrop on
a conversation one of the actors from Elevator Repair Service's Gatz
is having at the bar and am as surreptitiously as possible mesmerised
by Bjork. Then it's back for Parts 3 and 4. The set for this is
hilarious, a creaky, gaudy drawing-room whose chintz and
wood-panelling and leaden atmosphere are instantly redolent of 1950s
British repertory theatre – or at least, my inherited and most
derogatory ideas of 1950s British repertory theatre. The performers
are stiff in suits and tweed, and move as though this were a
third-rate Agatha Christie adaptation playing to two sleeping
pensioners and a lonely tourist. The style is declamatory, with big
silent-movie gestures that reflect some of the company's recent
animations, little black-and-white films of absurdly exaggerated
facial expressions. Every choice they make in this section is rooted
in Kristin's narrative: references to soap operas, to religion and a
mysterious event earlier in her teens that continues to haunt her
that I didn't quite grasp but appeared to be about somebody perhaps
drowning; the funny olde-English formality spins off from a
description of a trip to Chester, where she admired the independence
of British teens. But the slowness, the staidness, play havoc with my
attention; the closer we move to midnight, the less physically able I
am to concentrate. I'm aware of poignant things happening, as when
Kristin talks about learning the flute, the instrument she was
playing in the band in Part 1; and I'm aware of mind-boggling things
happening, not least when the stage is flooded with green light and
Pavol's voice booms through the speakers from the back of the room.
But by now I'm drifting in and out of consciousness and not even an
alien invasion is enough to jolt me into being fully present again.
I have a problem
with every succeeding show after Episode 1 and I have a sense that
the audience has the same experience, is that Episode 1 is this
radical proposal and then it's just so much harder to get into the
following episodes because that one stupid audacious idea, you've
gotten it out of the way. And then Episode 2, Episode 3, they're
still good shows, but I have a feeling that Episode 1 is always going
to be people's favourite, even though I feel like Episode 3 and 4,
Episode 5, are more radical, are more interesting. But I understand
why people really enjoy Episode 1, and it almost then feels like
everything after is a let down – whereas I'm working harder and
harder, but it's harder and harder to satisfy myself.
Pavol on OK
Radio, talking to John Collins of Elevator Repair Service
K: By the time we
started work on it, the one thing we hadn't done with this type of
language was to sing it. We had an opportunity to work at the Berg
theatre in Vienna and that was also an opportunity that we had never
had before to work at a scale that was not commensurate with the
actual life story. This is a very uneventful, common life story, so
then the challenge became: can we give it a scale and a frame that is
bigger than it would normally merit? …
P: All this work was generated in
Vienna, originally they asked us to be more ambitious than we have a
right to – generally people ask us to be less ambitious, generally
people come to us and say: 'Do you have a smaller piece?' I want to
work with people who ask us for more, not for less. I want people to
challenge me: it's like, if you want to work with me, ask me for
more. That's been our modus operandi in these past years: an
insistence on being unreasonable, asking unreasonable demands of the
art form and asking unreasonable demands of the audience and above
all asking unreasonable demands of ourselves. It's not practical in
today's economic arts crisis.
K: There's not people who will ask you
to make a show longer. [But] a lot of times I really feel like the
artistic directors of these spaces are underestimating their
audience. We talked to people and said we should do the marathon
here, and they were thinking that the individual evenings would sell;
instead what happened was the marathons immediately sold out. So it
was nice to be vindicated in that way. People are hungry for
something that's a different experience and a challenging experience,
they're not looking for less.
P: … It's the same thing as I was
[saying] at the beginning: I have nothing to lose in this art form,
therefore I can take these great risks. I can say I'm going to make
the longest show ever, with the most people: I don't relish the
expense but I do relish the ambition and probably if the money was
all cut off I know all 15 of us that are involved in this project
would do it for free, we would continue to make it ambitious.
K: The venues we've ended up working
with have been the presenters that asked us to be ambitious; in a way
it's the same proposal we make to the actors: it's not an ordinary
actor who's like, can I please work for 11 hours straight and make
the audience food? … They're looking for you to challenge them.
When we started out with this group of people, only one of them had
sung, had any professional singing experience, so they're looking to
be challenged, they're looking for things they haven't done before.
In the process they've learned how to have a singing voice and how to
do harmonies and how to also protect their voice somewhat. It's been
a process.
P: But there is a
recklessness, there is a recklessness in the performance I mean, and
there is a recklessness in the direction, in all the aspects there is
a recklessness, which I feel is healthy. Without it we're all working
on Wall Street or in a bank or in an office.
*
It's snowing when I finally leave the
theatre, mouth stinging from overly diluted hot chocolate. I want to talk to
everyone in the room, but I also feel shy, as though I already know
too much about them and them about me. Outside a light dusting of
snow covers the ground like icing sugar. What I don't realise as I
race for the warmth of my hotel room is that I will spend the weeks
and months after Life and Times noticing the way my own memory works,
how often I tell stories wrongly or misrepresent the past, not
deliberately or maliciously, but through simple carelessness, a lack
of thought that betrays all sorts of things about me that I don't
like (a strain of innate conservatism, the influence of media
narratives, my readiness to be absorbed within a privileged class). I
have no anticipation of the jolt I will feel two months later, when I
start reading Everybody's Autobiography by Gertrude Stein and feel
that she and Pavol and Kelly are engaged in the same endeavour. Three
months later I'm at the Young Vic in London watching My Perfect Mind, a beautiful
collaboration between Told by an Idiot's Paul Hunter, Edward
Petherbridge and Kathryn Hunter, that tenderly attempts to
figure out what the fuck is going on in our brains. “Where does
memory end and imagination begin?” Paul asks. I don't
know. But in that liminal space lives Life and Times, mundane and
mysterious and crazy and adorable.
M: I can't think of anything else to
ask you.
P: Nothing. It was exhaustive, and
exhausting.
K: All the cats have gone to sleep.
M: Do you ever feel over-committed to
Life and Times, or tethered by it?
P: Not at all. We made a musical
because we wanted to make a musical, we made a book because we wanted
to make a book [that's Part 5, shown in Norwich], we made an animated
film because we wanted to make an animated film [Part 4.5, ditto],
we're making a radio show because we wanted to make a radio show
[Part 6, which they're now working on in Berlin]. Episode 7, if I
want to make a sci-fi, I'll make a sci-fi; [for] Episode 9 and 10,
we're thinking about making a TV show. I love watching TV, I love
reality TV, can I somehow write this material into it being like Big
Brother or something? It could be a great premise.
K: I think the thing is, we do love a
lot of different things, but rather than say we only do theatre, we
try to incorporate as much of what we love and are interested in into
the work. I feel like we didn't know when we started doing the
podcasts that we would maybe want to make radio part of this show,
but it's worked out that way. The podcast is separate but of course
it feeds in: you open yourself up to try these different things and
next thing you know, they're part of the show.
P: I think all the work – the shows,
the animations, all this – the one thing they have in common is
that we take care of every single moment. If the animations are using
human beings, even if it's an ordinary movement, we take it apart.
How does somebody grab a cup and put it to their mouth? I understand
that I can just turn on the camera and film picking up the cup, and
it'll take me half a second to do that – or I can take five hours
to animate it and it'll look more awkward. It's like, how do we
create a vast amount of effort to do absolutely nothing? Why do we
take four hours to cross a room and film it and invest all our energy
in making it great and perfect? [We take the] meaninglessness of
other activities that we do in life and equate it to this: it makes
no sense really, but neither does going to work on Wall Street. It's
all about breaking apart reality and then putting it back together.
It's like you have a motorcycle, and I know that if you love
motorcycles you probably just enjoy taking it into the garage, taking
it completely apart and then putting it back together so that you
know it. We do the same thing: I want to know what it takes to pick
up a cup. That's my motorcycle reality and life is my motorcycle that
I love to take apart into the minutest detail so that I can see. It's
about just taking everything apart and putting it back together, it's
about taking the phone call that I made with Kristin and taking it
apart and scoring every moment and putting it to music and every
single word – it's not a joke you know, it's not a joke for us,
let's take this stupid language and let's make a song for people to
laugh at it. That's not what we're interested in. We're interested in
taking this language and taking this amount of time and sculpting it
– because when you make music you have to sculpt it. There's no
improvisation, it's not just free-form.
*
And identity is funny being yourself is
funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember
yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. That is
really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course you do
not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very
well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you
cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound
right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.
You are of course never yourself.
It is a funny thing about addresses
where you live. When you live there you know it so well it is like
identity a thing that is so much a thing that it could not ever be
any other thing and then you live somewhere else and years later, the
address that was so much an address that it was a name like your name
and you said it as if was not an address but something that was
living and then years afer you do not know what the address was and
when you say it it is not a name any more but something you cannot
remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists
but something you do or do not remember.
Identity always worries me and memory
and eternity.
Gertrude Stein, Everybody's
Autobiography
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