Meeting Nature Theater of Oklahoma

While in Paris for the French premiere of “Life & Times” (see parisvoice.com review; also review of “No Dice” on this blog, March 29, 2010), Nature Theater of Oklahoma co-directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska spoke with me for a very interesting hour of conversation on topics ranging from their influences (Duchamp, Warhol, Rivette, Malevich) to their specific interests in the theater art form. The company was informally founded after Copper and Liska met at Dartmouth University, but took its name, which comes from Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika, in 2004. Since then, and with six shows and an Obie to its credit, the company has been hailed as “the most buzzed-about new troupe on the New York avant-garde scene” (New York Times) and “one of the top alternative companies in New York” (Village Voice). Nature Theater of Oklahoma is becoming a regular visitor to Europe, with frequent invitations to Belgium and Austria (where Copper and Liska won the Young Directors Award at the Salzburg Festspiele in 2008) and multiple appearances in the Paris area over the last two years, from Aubervilliers and Bobigny, to Gennevilliers and now the Théâtre de la Ville. The following transcription presents only the highlights of what they told me…

Molly Grogan: Can you describe what you do or yourselves as a company?

Pavol Liska: Every show is a different challenge. I would say in the past 4-5 years, we have been exploring the mundane, but it’s not the only thing that we’re interested in. We’re always interested in subverting the expectations, even from ourselves: whatever we feel is expected of us or what we expect from ourselves. We do what we don’t know how to do. Of course, there are similarities in vision or in picture-making between “No Dice” and “Life & Times,” even though we said ”Oh, that’s a new challenge.” But it’s still part of our world, it has our sense of humor, so, as much as we may not like that, there is a style, there is a limitation to what we can do and what we do. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get away from that as we keep going and that the last show we make will be completely different from the first show we made, but you can’t really escape yourself radically all the time. I probably don’t want to make a traditional Molière. It’s probably not going to look like that, in 2 years. Maybe in 5. Maybe in 10 years, we’ll be working at the Comédie Française!

Kelly Copper: We always try to throw ourselves off with every show. The first show we made together [“Poetics: A Ballet Brut”] had no language in it at all, and the next show was “No Dice”, which was 4 hours of non-stop talking.

PL: “People who booked “No Dice” […] came because they saw a one-hour long show with no talking, and they’re like “Ah! Those are the people who don’t talk and we’re just going to have fun,” and then we talked for 4 hours.

KC [laughing]: It’s not actually the best business sense to do something completely different.

PL: And then we used a lot of video [“Rambo Solo”], and we’d never used video before. Then we dealt with “Romeo and Juliet” because people thought, “Oh, these guys just deal with trash subjects.”’ So, lets take on hard culture. It’s always like that. We’ve written descriptions about what we do for grant applications, but we don’t necessarily subscribe to them.

MG: In “Life & Times,” then, what are you working on? You added music, you say, as a challenge, and then there is a very codified series of gestures, and, of course, there is the American language. Are you particularly interested in the American idiom, the way people talk, or are these conversations more of a tool to build a show around?

PL: In many ways, it’s a tool. It’s a way to keep time, and it’s a way to keep attention from the audience and then how we can sneak in other interests we have, like abstraction or the function of abstraction in life and how abstraction can open up reality, and that’s contained inside that language. It’s also for me, the archeology of the brain and how, I can, by a simple question, like, “Tell me your life story,” conspire or trigger human creativity inside the brain to produce language and how you create a history. What we’re doing is not biography, we’re not interested in biography or even storytelling, I’m purely interested in what the brain does when it’s asked a question and how the mouth makes language, makes words. So I asked something that someone knows. It’s almost in some ways a psychoanalytical project. I’m more interested in the Lacanian idea of truth being revealed in the breakdowns of language, not necessarily in the fluent sections. When language breaks down, that’s where I’m most interested. The rest of it is for the audience: “Oh! We’re being told a story. Ok, I’m safe. It’s ok.” I’m much more interested in the crashes and the accidents.

MG: That’s where all that sort of filler comes in, the “likes” and the “ohs” and the “ums”. Which is what for me at least, because I don’t hear that kind of American English so much, really hits me, the number of times that those expressions are used.

KC: Yeah, and you should have seen some of the email back and forth about the translations [for the subtitles]: “What is the difference between ‘um’ and ‘uh’? Must there be a difference? We can spell it differently in the French language, but we don’t have an ‘uh’ and an ‘um’.”

[laughter]

Me: And how did they translate them? I wasn’t watching the subtitles.

KC: It was “euh” or “heu”. But I’ve never been asked [that]; that’s not something you spend a lot of time thinking about, even as an American English speaker: what is the difference between “um” and “uh”? But, there is some kind of… you know…I guess …

[laughter from everyone]

KC: Those kinds of obscure questions!

PL: Even subconsciously, that caused the biggest - not problem - but that was the discourse around it.

KC: That that can be an issue.

MC: Was it a bigger issue for your French translator that your German translator?

PL: Yeah, German translators never brought it up.

MG: You mentioned abstraction. Can you talk more about that? I’m just guessing, and you’ll tell me I’m wrong maybe, that there is a relationship between that idea and what the gestures are doing and the use of the rings and the squares [as intermittent props in “Life & Times”].

PL: It’s related to the way we live. For me, as we keep going, I realize more and more that really all our behavior is abstract. We don’t see it as abstract only because of habit, because we’ve done it for so long. We sit down on these objects that are like this [indicating a chair] but they could have another shape and we could get used to that, over centuries. And so, when you grow up - and it kind of fits with the project because you have childhood, from birth to age 8 - in Kindergarten, you deal with geometrical shapes that are abstract. You start with the very clear triangles, circles, squares, and you’re dealing with these very basic shapes that are abstract, and the child has no problem with that. And all of a sudden, as we keep moving, we don’t deal with those shapes anymore. You still deal with them in geometry in high school, but then you move away. For me, life has become abstract; everything is abstract to me. And abstraction is very real at the same time. It’s just finding a way to creating alternatives. Episode 2 does not have those; it has a much more baroque movement vocabulary, not such a basic one [as Episode 1]. And Episode 3 will keep evolving, in the same way that James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man starts with a very basic, child-like language and ends in a much more complicated language in his journal, and then leads into Ulysses and then leads into Finnegan’s Wake. I think that’ll probably be the journey that the whole project will take: moving from very strict, basic geometry into something that’s much more intricate.

MG: The abstract language is a reinforcement of the world of the narrator, the child’s world, what she sees, how she perceives her world?

PL: Yeah… It’s also a development of our aesthetics. The red square [the actors wear like a badge on their costumes] comes from Malevich, Suprematism [art movement founded in Russia by Kazimir Malevich, 1915-1916], and the red square represents revolution in the arts. So we’re trying to start there. Episode 2 has a black square. Each episode will probably have its own color square. For us, we always want to reinvent ourselves.

KC: Also the blank white backdrop means…

PL: The blank page.

KC: … blank page, clean slate. Same thing with the geometric shapes for us… We’re really into Malevich and the Suprematist art which was the kind of last utopian push, all these artists getting together at the beginning of Communism to make an art that’s more a part of everyday life. They designed textiles, they designed plates and napkins, and they were interested in making art a useful thing. And so we have that connection to it, but also it can mean basic geometric shapes of childhood, basic colors of childhood or the tabula rasa of childhood. As you go, you find reasons for including this stuff, but maybe you start with a more personal reason. You’re talking about a lot of abstract gesture and graphics, but I think it’s also been an outgrowth of how, anytime you deal with this kind of language [the show is based on a recorded monologue of a company member remembering her life] recorded closely enough, you realize how abstract it is. When you look at it on a page, it looks more like Gertrude Stein.

MG: I was going to ask you!

KC: Yeah, and you realize we only appear to make sense. We translate really for each other. You listen to me, but you don’t hear every single word, and how much it doesn’t link together and how much I don’t finish my sentences, because you translate me into something that makes sense. And I think that as experimental artists, we are always asked by the audiences in talk-backs, “What’s the story?” Or, “Why don’t you guys just have a narrative?” [laughter] And so part of our obsession with storytelling and narrative was just trying to get at why that was so important and why people needed it. And when you start getting back to this basic language and basic storytelling, you realize there’s nothing basic about it. When you record this kind of speech, it actually doesn’t make sense. It’s actually way more abstract than we think it is.

MG: Yes, it’s very cubist or very Steinian. You get the story but there is no linear flow. [laughter] It’s about memory too; you were talking about your interest in how the brain reacts to a question. Stein was very interested in memory and the idea that what we know is how we remember we came to know it. You see that in the show. The story begins with a baby picture. But that’s only one way of starting the story. I would have started my story somewhere else. And for me there were big holes in the story. [The narrator] talked about certain things, about friends and their houses, whereas her family and house were not clear to me, and then she seemed to talk more about her aunts and uncles than her siblings, for example. It’s very cubist in that sense: we get a picture of the whole from a selection of its parts, some of which are insisted upon more than others.

KC: When you get down to transcribing all that material and looking at it very closely, what’s funny to me is how much it actually mirrors the Freudian stages of development. In the early childhood, it really is all me-centered, peoples’ relationships to me. Strangely, whenever she describes her family, its all about the legs, the mom’s legs; it’s all at a child’s level. And then it gradually branches out, so that at the end of Act I, she sees her mom resting and to realize somehow that the parents are separate and they have separate needs and that it might be good to give them some alone time in their bathroom, Mom might need some private time to die her hair. Even though she is telling it as an adult person, it does go back to that early childhood way of seeing the world. That’s all there.

MG: I read somewhere that you wanted to find the least common denominator of theater. Have you answered that question?

PL: Yeah, a mask of comedy and tragedy makes theater. [laughter] Or an accent makes theater. Or makeup or… What are the framing devices? We always feel the need to situate the audience in a context that they feel familiar with before we can change it. And if we don’t, like with “Rambo Solo”, which does not look like a theater when you come into it, then we put the actor in front when the audience is coming in to greet them and to set the context. What are they coming into? They’re coming into somebody’s social context.

MG: Was it performed in someone’s house?

PL: No, but the video takes place in his house, so the audience gets to know his house very intimately. We shot all of it in his apartment. But there is always a reduction. We always ask what is absolutely necessary for theater to exist or be called theater. And those things could be very absurd things. It's like when [in “Life & Times”], the actor comes on in a rabbit costume. It’s not because we are trying to illustrate Easter, but it’s because, around this time in a performance, something like this would happen. [laughter] Same with “No Dice”: around this time, a new character would be introduced in the traditional dramaturgy. Even though we’re using non-dramatic text and it does not subscribe to that shape, we feel like we want to give that so that the audience has these touch points where they can stay with us, where it doesn’t veer off into something... Maybe it's because we are American show-business people, we do feel the obligation, because we have invited these people to our “house”, to somehow tend to that, and the work is never just about the work. Whatever happens on stage is almost always secondary to what the overall event is about.

KC: I was thinking that it’s a little bit like disguising a pill in a piece of meat for a dog... I remember when we first started dealing with the music [for “Life & Times”, which is sung and accompanied by live music throughout], looking at what do people do when they sing on stage: they bounce, they sway, sometimes they go like this [she raises her arms]. Just taking the shapes of all of those things, almost to say to the audience, “This is exactly like what you’ve seen before.”

MG: But it isn’t! [laughter]

KC: What little trick can you play in order to get them to go along with it just long enough to have it become something else.

MG: Those little tricks are necessary?

PL: We do think about the audience. We quit theater before and we didn’t make any theater for five years, and the reason we came back is because we were interested in the audience, not because we were interested in the art form. We could do a film, a video, and we still do, and photography, but the main thing that interested us in coming back was the social context and the social situation.

KC: And how do you get the audience not to hold it out at arm’s length? How do you get them to put their defenses down? That “this is not some strange piece of avant-garde art that I’m supposed to watch, this is not a painting that I’m looking at, but it involves me. Somehow I’m necessary for this event and it’s not ok for me to just watch it as an aesthetic object. I’m not here to look at anyone being a virtuoso. I’m not here to observe, I’m not here to pass judgment; I’m here to engage with it.”

PL: Which is nothing new: Molière and Shakespeare had prologues. There was always a welcoming. We may do that when we do longer presentations of “Life & Times.” That’s what I like about “No Dice,” when Kelly and I come out and thank people for coming; just that act of acknowledging, a little kind of stand-up comedy routine. I just hate the feeling of: “Its 8 o’clock; let’s all quiet down.” I want people to talk; no need to be so serious about this yet. The expectations: we like to break them up in the beginning. We don’t do it enough in “Life & Times” yet, but it’s an evolving project that’s going to have ten episodes so we’re learning as we go and learning slowly, and it’s going to take years to really find the right context and the right shape for the total revolution in the arts.

[laughter]

MG: That’s what you’re promising us?

PL: Yeah!

MG: One last question. Your company name comes from Kafka’s Amerika, the theater company that purports to offer a utopia in the final chapter of the novel, and then you mentioned the utopian vision of the Suprematist artists. Is finding a utopia in what you do a preoccupation for you?

PL: Yeah!

KC: I want to find a way… the way that art is useful and somehow a part of everyday life. I guess that’s the utopia. That it’s not somehow something that’s so separate. And I think all of these current projects were made out of a desire to always be in the arms of art or always be making art as a part of everyday life.

PL: It used to be more about ready-mades, about “let's find this” and then leave it. For me, right now, it’s much more about making as much as possible, creating something to add more art to the world, more and more and more: an overabundance to balance out the stasis. So, I’m losing interest in the mundane. As the project goes on, “Life & Times”, the language will stay the same but gradually I’ll probably forget about the language, just let it sit there as a way for it to keep that interest for the audience, as an excuse. Once I get the audience in the house, I can do whatever I want with them. But it’s just about getting them there, making them feel like they know what they’re going to see. So, in “Life & Times”, people are going to want to see the next installment. You know: “Oh, I wonder what happened to Cheryl or Mr. Winters!” We’ve set that up, that’s fine; that machinery is in process, and the audience can do whatever they want with that story. I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to keep working on other things. That’s the utopia: how do you make something useful and how do you make it appreciated in a way that’s useful to people, not just other artists, but that somehow people who would never think of possibly appreciating abstraction to actually like or be woken up by it. My hope is that, after 7 hours [of “Life & Times”, scheduled to run 24 hours in its full 10 episodes], they’ll be like, “F*** it! Ok, what else is going on?”