Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!

We Have a Winner!

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:25:00 +0000

Last week, Foreman fans were challenged to compete for the title of Best Mr. Sleepy Face, and Avery Hudson won! He will receive a pair of tickets to opening night, this Thursday, the 18th.

CONTEST!!! CONTEST!!! CONTEST!!!

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 01:58:00 +0000

Around rehearsal, we've been hard-pressed to duplicate the wise, already-disappointed face of young Mr. Sleepy. If you have a better mug to share, email to info@ontological.com with "contest" in the subject line. On Monday, January 15th, we'll post our favorite and the winner will receive a pair of tickets to opening night!

Please include your name and phone number.

Entry #14

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 01:44:00 +0000

Stefanie Neukirch, foreground

AN INSIDER’S EXPERIENCE OF MR. SLEEPY:
THE DAY IT ALL TURNED EVIL

Just like the summer sky suddenly turning grey and threatening (THREAT=THE ART=THEATRE), so this play once about lonely airplanes, suddenly drops its curtains to reveal a shade of red that human eyes have never seen before.
Schachspiel. Lonely players have deserted and an empty table was left behind. A game. Predestined. Condena eterna. Children might cry out:
- But there were no guidelines!
This is true. Like Christians without Bibles. Plain unfair. (“Life is unfair”). The sin of ignorance. The sin of impulse. That or its opposite: self-flagellation, punishment, yes punishment,
-but where did we go astray? , asks the human sheep.

WRONG AGAIN, SWEETIE. Ah, it’s set up that way. The System. (Brava! Or: Just take your cocaine) Not knowing turns us into blind mice who run against paper coated walls of meaning – it’s all such a joke! (Cheese!) (Who are we entertaining?) All part of an experiment. Steinbeck said: Of Mice and Men. Foreman, I suggest, says: Of Mice in Men. Like playing dolls. Like building a house out of wooden sticks. When the truth is: We are being experimented with! Scientific research. “Where are the Barbarians of the 20th century?”, asks Nietzsche. Where are the Mice of the 21st century? We are the Mice of the 21st century. Gottlos.
I feel sympathy for them left-behind mice. Them blind worms (PROPHECY) who intertwine with each other, helpless, in great pain, with no space (subway), no air (ambulance), no hope – frantic worms knotted with each other and kept in deep chasmic containers: all will be thrown into a big frying pan once sold, and they shall burn in hot oil. The unworsenable void?
(But do them worms suffer? Or is that only the assumption of the beholder? The feeling of no feeling, that deep feeling. Perhaps they are even ignorant of the fact that they will fry shortly! And so they might masturbate to pass the time, or engage in orgies before the Unavoidable Appointment) IGNORANCE.

This is not the world. Alice in Nightmareland. BE ALARMED. Better pass the time looking for clues God must have left somewhere before He died (Haensel und Gretel verliefen sich im Wald…) Looking in hiding places. Looking with anguish

as if this was our Ueberneed.
Tic tac.
Solve the riddle
before he whom we entertain
solves it for us.

Ach wie grau, ach wie grau
grauer Himmel
graue Kuehe
hinterm Kirschenbaum.

Stefanie Neukirch (actor)

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 20:41:00 +0000

Entry #13

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 20:19:00 +0000

INTERVIEW BETWEEN DAVID CHIKHLADZE, A CURRENT INTERN, AND RICHARD FOREMAN

David Chikhladze: In your stage productions, the spectator can clearly feel the presence of old world theater - lights and mis-en-scene cues, sounds of actors' steps and props, music emphasizing or enhancing emotions, narration, even recreation of a cozy sense of theatergoer's experience. Is it that the avant-garde theater simply cannot be completely disconnected from Stanislavsky or Brecht, or is it your personal tool to add an academic contrast to the very contemporary nature of your theater world--and in this way to keep it always alive and distinguished from some other plain contemporaries? Or maybe it is just a sentiment of your remote background, which brings a hidden dimension to your abstract and conceptual aesthetics--a dimension of lyricism?

Richard Foreman: It’s a very relevant question because my whole life has been a struggle between gravitating intellectually to the most advanced, austere 20th century art, yet knowing that deep inside me there is a romantic self who finds it difficult to separate from the high modernist tradition and even the romantic tradition. Back in the later 60’s when minimalist art came into America I remember feeling “Oh at last I understand. At last there are artists who I feel close to.” And I thought of myself as a minimalist and it didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t in fact really a minimalist.

DC: How was that expressed in the theater world?

RF: It wasn’t. It wasn’t. I thought I was going to express it. And indeed my early plays were much more minimalist. Now I used non-actors and I used none of the big theatrical effects I use now. They were much more minimalist. And I am sure there are people who think that is the best stuff I ever did. In a funny way I do and every year I think I am going to go back to that, but then it just bores me after a while and I need more old fashioned gratification. Now most of that art that my art makes reference to is stuff that bores me very quickly, but just ravishing snippets of it give me a thrill. And that is what I think I build my work out of, just snippets of all kinds of things that within the narrative structures in which they originally occurred I have no use for. But I feel very torn about it. This play when we started rehearsing it was much quieter, had much less effects and I thought wow I’m going to do it, this is going to be like that. Then after weeks of rehearsal I just find myself having a need to put in more and more fancy stuff that I am ambivalent about. And just two days ago I was saying to Shannon [Sindelar] “Ugh god you know I have given up, I think the theater is vulgar after all and has to be vulgar. And I know that somebody like Beckett makes a very austere theater, but I don’t like sitting there watching Beckett. Even though aesthetically and intellectually I approve and I think that is what should be done.

DC: I tried once, it was 60 minutes…

RF: Yeah. Well, that’s my continual thought. I am continually torn between wanting the circusy aspect of the theater and wanting to identify with much more stringent minimalist art, it’s in film also that I approve but I sort of get bored after a while. But I think it is that pull in both of those directions, that struggle that is at the center of my work really.

DC: So it looks like the spectacle always wants to get to some narration…

RF: It’s not narration that I get pulled to. It’s just circus. It’s just the richness of manipulative music, sound, light and so forth.

DC. Let me shift to another question…I have a strange expectation that as we move towards the opening of your production you will relieve the actors from their mouth bandages, which you had put on them sometime a month ago. Why did you want to hide their faces? Not to allow them to disturb you by talking during the working process?

RF: I end up very often putting a lot of stuff on the actors to sort of mask them. From the very beginning people accused me of tending to turn my actors into übermarionettes and I denied it completely because I was interested in the idiosyncratic natures of individual people. But as the years go by I think maybe I am sort of interested in that. Especially now that I am using the film, it’s a matter of wanting to keep the focus enough in the film, the real people in a way are in the film and I just am bothered by some aspect of the actors’ presence. I am not sure what. Partially it’s because people in the theater here are so close to the actors, that’s why there has always been string, plastic walls between the actors and audience. It’s a matter of aesthetic distance. And just as there are various techniques for creating aesthetic distance formally in all the arts, it’s almost as if I want to create an aesthetic distance between the audience and the performer, for whom they usually have empathy. I want to get in the way of that.

DC: Unconscious, your theme word for Mr. Sleepy, should suggest emotion vs. rationale of consciousness. But the show's tools are of intellectual and very conceptual language. Is this a set of self-reflective problematics where you look for solutions, or is this where your artistic motivation comes from?

RF: Well, I’m trying to chart the twitches that I think are essentially mental sparks that are the way the unconscious operates. I don’t think of the unconscious as being particularly related to emotional reality. I think of the unconscious in a Freudian or Lacanian sense, as being a particular method by which the mind operates behind our back, and that’s not necessarily emotional. Now after it operates you can have emotional reactions to some of the configurations that are produced in it, but the actual production of the materials that is performed by the unconscious is a matter of structure, as I see it, as a matter of structure…

DC: Kind of symbols...

RF: Symbols less than a kind of structural reprocessing, always recycling of material, in unexpected ways. So it is a mental activity basically.

DC: So you say it excludes the emotional side?

RF: Yes. Yes. Now I think that there are plenty of emotions in my theater, but they are things that result from this rather dry cerebral operation of the mind, both consciously and unconsciously.

DC: Is humor or sexuality a part of it...

RF: Oh but that just surfaces automatically all the time. Yeah, I think usually my plays--this play maybe is less funny than some--but I think of myself as close to Moliere, much more than Shakespeare. And I think that humor and sexuality are the bedrock of the theater. Humor to me means, laughing at how stupid everything is. I am stupid, everybody I see is stupid; [laughs] that’s funny.

DC: Do you dedicate every play to Kate Manheim, as a protector spirit of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater?

RF: Oh, well, I used to dedicate some plays to her, now just…I don’t anymore. I guess I should. Well Kate made my theater what it is in a sense because when I was starting out and doing very minimalist plays that bored everybody out of their skull, Kate came into the plays as a performer and Kate had no patience with that and kept pushing me to do more sexy, funny, lively things and that changed my life, because I started doing plays that started getting a lot more attention. And I approve. And as I’m going back, I think I’m going back now each year when I start a play, but I can’t go back. So these plays certainly are created in an arena that is my consciousness colliding with the reality of Kate.

DC: Is this play, in regards to the video screens and the plot, corresponding to the previous play, Zomboid (judging also by their related titles)? Do you consider these as a cycle? Is this new production ending the cycle? What will you work on next?

RF: I don’t know. I’m trying to decide. I’m really trying to decide. Because in the back of my mind I wonder if I really don’t want to just use this film that I have, this material that I am filming all around the world, as film, and whether I am cheating myself by doing something more radical by setting it within a play that pulls the more minimalist film back into the surface of the theater. So next year, I can’t decide, I haven’t decided yet, whether the material from Germany which is what I think I want to work on, should be used in a performance which would be the third in this series--and I have specific ideas for how I would do it--or if I should say “You know Richard, be courageous. You really want to make film, make it as a film and in your theater go back to some kind of play that doesn’t use the film.” So I haven’t decided yet, but I’m really struggling with that problem now.

Entry #12

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 01:05:00 +0000

Stefanie Neukirch in rehearsal; Patricia Leal on screen
Photo by Paula Court

Entry #11

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 19:18:00 +0000

By Chris Mirto, actor in Wake Up Mr. Sleepy

In an attempt to get to know the Richard Foreman behind Richard Foreman, I am conducting
quirky interviews with the Maestro throughout our rehearsal process. I must say that he is quite
a trooper! And behind all the sighs and eye rolling, I think he secretly gets a kick out of it.

What am I learning?
That Richard is really funny. And a lot of fun. And you should hear him when he gets going
telling a good story. (And even better, is making him laugh!)

Enjoy Richard's random choosing of words below and check back
for the next round of fun.

MAD LIBS: A NEW BROADWAY SHOW
Mediator: Chris Mirto
Filler of the Blanks: Richard Foreman
(answers are in caps)

A New Broadway Show
Come see the FRIGHTENING show DOGS SWIMMING about! MICE! The story stars the main character RICHARD, played by ARNOLD SCHOENBURG, who is a HOPEFUL STATUE in search of COLUMNS. On RICHARD 's journey through PARIS, RICHARD falls LONELY in love with the UGLY DONALD, played by GUSTAVE MOREAU. RICHARD then runs into the GREEN MAN named JACK JONES, played by THOMAS EDISON. The audience RUNS as RICHARD and DONALD sing and WALK across the stage. 7 KNIVES join DONALD on stage for the MUDDY song called "BROWN HOUSE." PM says, "Wow! This show is DANK ! I give it 7 3/4 TEETH DOWN!" SLEEP CAREFULLY and buy YOUR tickets for MICE today!

Entry #10

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 20:52:00 +0000

RICHARD FOREMAN INTERVIEWED BY STEPHEN MOSBLECH, INTERN, 11.2.06

STEPHEN MOSBLECH. Your unedited notebooks are available on the Ontological site, to be used by writers and directors to generate theater pieces of their own. These texts can be unrestrictedly cut. Also your more recent plays are archived on Ubuweb along with sound files from Now that Communism is Dead… and your film Strong Medicine. Is this an important project to have your plays available online for free?

RICHARD FOREMAN. I’ve always made the plays free to any group, unless it’s a big theater that can really afford to pay a royalty. That doesn’t happen very often—it’s happened once or twice, but other theaters, they’re just free to use them.

SM. How will the recent “theatrical scores” from Zomboid and Mr. Sleepy plug into this?

RF. I have no idea. It’s a problem and I don’t know if it will ever work. The only way I can see it working is with a lot of photographs, like a photograph on one page and then all these other individual aphoristic lines on the other page as a kind of collage. I haven’t given it that much thought because I felt probably these plays can’t be published. It could be published that way if some publisher had the money and wanted to do it. But just to publish the text, I would be perfectly happy if they would just publish the aphorisms, that’s fine. I mean, we do have scripts we use in rehearsal, so I guess that could be published but I’m not sure what people would make of it. You know the publishers insisted after my second book or something that I write in a lot of stage directions which I have mixed feelings about; in Unbalancing Acts it was the scripts without any stage directions as a kind of open field poem and in many ways I preferred that and I would be perfectly happy to publish these texts also, just with all the things that are said as kind of an open field poem. Just statement after statement, both onscreen and live and then people make of it what they will. But I don’t know if anyone would actually be interested in that.

SM. But in regard to the actual video itself, would you be open to other directors or theatrical conductors using the video either in its complete form or re-edited?

RF. I don’t see why not. It’s a little more problematic, I mean I’m not going to go into the business of making videos for people, so I don’t see exactly how it would work, but in principle I have no objection.

SM. We talked briefly, I think it was last week, about the fact that Bresson’s movie Au Hasard Balthazar, to an extent, conditioned the use of donkey props in Zomboid.

RF. Yeah. I wouldn’t say it conditioned it very much. It’s just obviously I was reminded that that was a great movie and it had donkeys in it. Other than that I’m not sure how much it conditioned it. When I began making theater Bresson was one of the people I thought about a lot of course, especially his use of actors.

SM. Are there any filmic precedents that, in any way, are seeding your use of the airplanes in Mr. Sleepy?

RF. No. I don’t think so. You mentioned Come and See, but I certainly wasn’t thinking of that. I have used the image before, in Egyptology; the play opens with Kate. Kate Manheim was playing the lead. She sort of tumbled on stage as if she had just been thrown out of an airplane that crashed. Other than that…I mean I have used airplanes before, in Maria Del Bosco there was an airplane the actors carried around, a little baby wrote on it and so forth, so you know it’s one of those archetypal images like so many others that I’ve used. But I can’t think of any other particular, specific big airplane things in a play before. The image relates a little to me, to something that I haven’t used but I was always very impressed with—you know there is the famous photograph of the big steam engine crashing through the Gare Montparnasse. There is a big picture of the steam engine falling out of the station and down into the street. I’ve always been interested in that image. Maybe that had something to do with it.

SM. My next question pertains somewhat concretely to the film-stage performance in Mr. Sleepy. In a way I’d say, it has to do with a unique moment in the current staging, where to my mind it seems that two separate tracks are “running parallel” for a molecular length of time. It happens approximately eight minutes into the film, where one actor is standing and two rows of actors are arranged behind her. All of a sudden the actors stand up and start to disperse, out of the frame of the camera. At this point we here a voice, in the film, calling them to “come back, come back, come back”. This is actually your voice. It is unique because it is the only example of your voice we hear in the film. Also it is the only instance when the onstage actors repeat a statement made by the actors on film. So it seemed to me as if at this moment, for this molecular space of time, there is an oozing perhaps across this “spark gap” that you refer to, as this sort of absent dimension, that there is something maybe temporarily resembling a completeness happening in the film-stage performance? I don’t know. It’s a very striking moment for me.

RF. Well, I am happy that you say that it’s striking; I see what you mean. You have to understand that when I am making things, I am not thinking intellectually about anything. I am just trying different things that seem to reverberate in some way that seems interesting. So I have no theory, I have no theoretical reason for that happening at that point. What can I say, I just wait to get ideas, wait to try different things matched against different other things; most of them are lousy which is why we rehearse so long and I keep changing things. Who knows, by the time this play opens that may or may not be there.
There’s not much I can say about it. I would say, but to return to the airplane of course, as the play sort of mentions, it is an image from a dream I had when I was a teenager of an airplane flying over me as I climbed up from a pit, and I saw people in the airplane staring at me and dotted lines came from their eyes into my eyes, so I think that’s why the airplane is here, and what its relationship to the unconscious is I don’t know, it’s that image of things breaking through the walls, as if something broke through from your unconscious. I suppose that’s why I am using the airplane and flight and any implications of that, but flight vis-à-vis the people getting up and leaving the screen and I say come back come back, somehow that has reverberations with this whole notion of things that might arise out of your unconscious but you can’t keep them because they vanish almost before they arise, or like a dream image that you can’t hold on to the next day so it’s like come back come back. Even making art is an attempt maybe to re-evoke those quick silver things that flitter through you but you can’t hold on to in normal life, so to make a work of art is to say come back come back to things that are escaping you all the time, that seem to be profound things on some level, but you can’t hold on to them.

SM. I wonder if this gesture of saying “come back” to this molecular field of impressions which you called art, if that isn’t an intrusion of a subject that then imprisons that field, these objects.

RF. Well you should be able to let go. I’m not saying it’s good to say come back, come back, maybe you should let everything pass through you and go, that’s certainly a spiritual position that basically I approve of. Most of my moments I don’t have the enlightenment to be able to let them just pass through me, and I want them to stay and I want to imprison them, and I don’t find that to be particularly noble or even desirable. But that’s part of the tension out of the contradictions and the human contradictions that I try to make my art—you are always saying come back, come back when you know you should let go. And indeed they don’t come back do they?

SM. No.

RF. The screen wipes.

SM. Yeah it cuts.

RF. Yes.

SM. It wipes, cuts.

RF. So you can start again but they don’t come back.

Entry #9

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 21:01:00 +0000

RIC GARCIA, A CURRENT FOREMAN INTERN, INTERVIEWS RICHARD ABOUT THE VIDEO IN THE CURRENT WORK:

Ric Garcia- So I’m wondering what one of your memorable movie making experiences is?

Richard Foreman- A memorable movie making experience for the piece in this project?

Garcia- Yes

Foreman- Sophie was going around patting everyone on the back telling everyone what a good job they were doing in some sense and I had this real realization all of a sudden. It was out doors and I was sitting in the grass and I realized that, you know in 1930 cartoons where a little cat would be chugging down the street happily and all the houses would smile at him and the trees would bend over and smile at him, and I suddenly realized that’s not what I wanted at all. At least for me, to reach that place where you can make real art, like all of a sudden the trees and houses turn away from you and you’re alone, it’s the exact opposite in the energy I felt when I was watching her film. It was a slight momentary revelation--Yes. What I was interested in, in my remaining days, was pursuing what happens, what comes through when you feel that everything turns away from you.

Garcia- Where did you collect the footage for this piece?

Foreman- This piece was filmed in Lisbon Portugal, at a mental hospital. This hospital is still active. It has a panopticon, which is not used anymore—it was a big round circular building with big trees and grass in a middle circular place. The middle circle is about 70 feet across and then little cells line that building and that’s where we filmed, in the cells. There were two larger rooms with blue tile but they’re pretty small rooms, maybe 40 by 40. I was also very excited about filming there because one of my favorite filmmakers is this Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro, and two of his films had scenes filmed in this same panopticon. So I thought well, filming where Monteiro filmed…

Garcia- Were there mental patients on the exterior?

Foreman- Yes, well there were mental patients in buildings next door. They didn’t come into the building where we were shooting but we passed through them everyday when we were coming to work.

Garcia- How many minutes of footage would you say was collected--or hours?

Foreman- I shot for three days and in that time I probably got somewhere between an hour-and-a-half to two hours and what I’m using adds up to just a little over an hour, so I’m using a great deal of it. It’s what I want to do—I want to film stuff in its raw documentary form that I edit, obviously fairly simply, but I like all the mistakes, I like all the roughness.

Garcia- What are you looking for when you turn the camera on?

Foreman- Well, I see… Okay I don’t actually turn it on myself, but I’m trying to set up the poses, these formal things almost as if you’re posing for your photograph. I’m looking for something that is full of the kind of tension you can feel hovering in the air; something, something might emerge any moment. Not from what you are filming but from behind it… Somehow something might suddenly manifest in the screen that’s another energy, another level that creates that kind of tension and manifestation in each of the takes, each of which lasts five to ten minutes.

Garcia- Do you have a top five list of movie directors?

Foreman- Oh, these days. Yeah, it changed over the years but I’d say Rossellini, Manoel de Oliveira (another Portuguese filmmaker), Monteiro, Angelopoulos. Some of Godard’s films. I find Godard very provocative but I don’t like all of his films. Jacques Tati.

Garcia- Can you comment on cinéma vérité?

Foreman- It never meant that much to me… I used to be interested in films that had a lot of razzle dazzle. You see cutting, a lot of complicated traveling shots. Now I’m interested in directors that tend to have fixed long takes and nothing much happening.

Garcia- What is the visual relationship between objects when you put them on the screen?

Foreman- What I film doesn’t have as many objects as my theatre does. My plays obviously have many, many objects, but film is not about composing people in terms of minimal furniture. I’m trying to create (in everything that I do) the kind of hovering tension, waiting for this something to be real, that’s never been real.

Garcia- One final question: how do you feel the effects of dreaming have on a person’s waking consciousness?

Foreman- According to studies that I read we’re sort of dreaming all the time, even though when we’re awake we’re not aware of it because our waking consciousness has taken over. So I think dreaming is a response to impulses of something that is always going on within our system. I don’t write out of dreams; I know people say my bodies are dreamlike. I don’t particularly think about that, because I am immersed trying always to be somewhere else. I am not interested in stories that talk about how to navigate conscious daily life, to me that is banal, boring. I am interested in trying to reach some other level.

Entry #8

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:27:00 +0000

FULYA PEKER, intern, responds to rehearsal:

Maybe…Continue. . .
Anything can change anytime, because anything can change anytime. The whisper of unconscious mind echoes in the resonance of conscious mind. Trembling, naked and endless momentum, circulating in our blindfolded heads, struggles with stillness. Even when one is perfectly still, there is the movement of existence in the body, expressing itself as a mild turbulence. Does the mind ever rest?

Like the thoughts of “young children,” cognition shifts from one object to the other, perception dances in and out of time and space. After a while senses become wide open, without questioning the surrounding disorder, without the side effects of explanations or indications. One understands, one learns without restrictions, like “young children” who are the great observers, who are ready to inhale whatever there is, without perplexity. Were we not also young children once?
The “flowers” exist, so much so that they do not worry about fitting into our rational definitions. You do not know what the hell you are doing, so much so that you finally overcome the idea of finding a reason for every other act you perform. Even this very statement is an act of reasoning itself for me. This is a conversation in-between sleeping and awakening without the screams of reason. Is it possible to pause reason for a second?

This is not a dream anymore, although the staccato siren of awakening is not serving our hunger of aesthetic harmony, the harmony that can be forgone only in dreams. There is nothing beautiful about it. It is complex, because it is simple, more than the sub-conscious mind can handle. Is this sleeping without a dream or a dream without sleeping?
. Everything is incomplete, that is why it is hard to bear. Everything that needs focus and deep involvement happens all at the same time. Lights, music, effects, projectors, actors, costumes, props, tea, delivery man, colors, dust, anxiety, excitement, curiosity, etc. As if while we listen an intense Wagnerian non-explosive melody, all theatrical devices delicately come together and the implications of all objects “twitch.” It is not boring, because there is no gap that one can fill with boredom. There is no time for an emotional arousal either, just “moving on,” without “holding on.”

Even now, these long, so-called complicated sentences I have written need to be put on the tip of a screw gun, and engraved from the beginning. Mr. Sleepy and all his neighbors are yet asleep, but can a screw gun work without noise? Instead of saying “we have a happy life” why not say “we have a life like an airplane on a plate, no forks but broken heads.” While my brain was recording these unconscious lines as sparks of consciousness, my fingers were recording these as light cue 105. Now, so, the unconscious mind is dead…and it is dead, unconsciously…

Continue…Maybe…

Entry #7

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:39:00 +0000

A SILLY BUT ENLIGHTENING INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD FOREMAN
BY CHRIS MIRTO, PERFORMER

BIO
FULL NAME? Richard Albert Foreman
DATE OF BIRTH? June 10, 1937
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN? Gemini
PARENTS' NAMES? Albert and Clare
SIBLINGS? 1 sister
PETS? None at the moment
FAVORITE COLOR? Brown
LUCKY NUMBER? I don’t really have one. Maybe 3 or 7
EYE COLOR? Brown
HAIR COLOR? Brown
HEIGHT? 5’7 1/2”
PEIRCINGS? none
TATTOOS? none

MOVIES/MUSIC
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE? French Can-Can. (later he changed his answer to Miracle in Milan)
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE TYPE OF MOVIE? Art films and Foreign
HAPPY ENDINGS OR ENDINGS WITH A TWIST? Endings with a twist
IF YOU WERE AN ACTOR, WHO WOULD YOU BE? Paul Muni
NOW, WHICH ACTOR DO YOU MOST LOOK LIKE? (laughs, then says Gregory Peck
WHAT GENRE OF MOVIE DOES YOUR LIFE REFLECT? Psychological Drama

WHAT TYPE OF MUSIC DOES YOUR LIFE REFLECT? Stockhausen
IF YOU COULD SING A DUET WITH SOMEONE, WHO WOULD IT BE? Jean Paul Sartre
WHAT SONG WOULD IT BE? Roll Out the Barrel
GIVE US A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE SPEECH FOR THE GRAMMYS: “You all suck.”

IF YOU WERE A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT, WHAT WOULD YOU BE AND WHY? Piano, because it has so many keys.
WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT FAVORITE SONG ON THE RADIO? Air America
WHAT SONG GETS YOU GOING? Anything from Mahagonney

FOOD/DRINK
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE GUILTY PLEASURE FOOD? Confit
WHAT ARE THREE FOODS YOU REFUSE TO TOUCH? Snails, oysters, and clams

WHAT ARE THREE FOODS YOU CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT? Bread, chocolate … (after much thought) Bread

FAVORITE MIDNIGHT SNACK? Potato chips
IF YOU WERE A FOOD, WHAT WOULD YOU BE? Baklava

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DRINK (NON-ALCOHOLIC)? Coffee
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DRINK (ALCOHOLIC)? Wine
ARE YOU LACTOSE-INTOLERANT? Yes
WHICH ONE--PEPSI-COLA OR COCA-COLA? I can’t tell the difference.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN DRUNK? Yes
IF YOU WERE A DRINK, WHAT WOULD YOU BE? Pernod

CHILDHOOD
WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE TOY? A koala bear.
YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE? Bambi
DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST WORD? I started to speak much later than normal kids. I’m told that I was pointing at a toy. When it was finally brought to me my first words were “No, that one!”
WHAT IS ONE MEMORY YOU HAVE FROM CHILDHOOD? Hiding my head in the baby carriage when asked to play with the other boys.

SCHOOL
WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE TEACHER'S NAME? Juan, my Comp Lit teacher at Brown.
BEST SUBJECT? English
WORST SUBJECT? French
WHAT WERE YOU KNOWN AS IN SCHOOL (NICKNAMES, LABELS, ETC)? Dick
CLUBS/ORGANIZATIONS? Oh lots. Drama club. Lit magazine.

WHO WAS YOUR BEST FRIEND IN SCHOOL? Ken Rich
ARE YOU STILL FRIENDS? No

FRIENDS
WHO IS YOUR BEST FRIEND? Kate (his wife)
WHO DO YOU GO TO FOR ADVICE? No one.
WHO IS THE GUY/GIRL YOU LIKE SPENDING THE MOST TIME WITH? Kate.
WHERE DO YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS LIKE TO HAVE A GOOD TIME? Restaurants.
DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO IS INTERVIEWING YOU? (Laughs and smiles, then says) Hmmm….

ABOUT YOU
ARE YOU MORE LIKELY TO JUMP OUT OF A PLANE OR WATCH FROM THE GROUND? Watch.
IF YOU HAD THREE WISHES, WHAT WOULD THEY BE? 1. To become enlightened; 2. To have my mind opened; 3. To see the closest thing to God that human beings can see.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? Chevrolet.

WHERE WAS YOUR LAST VACATION? Cape Cod.
WHERE IS YOUR DREAM VACATION? Corsica

WHAT IS YOUR BEST FEATURE (PHYSICAL)? Eyes.
WHAT IS YOUR BEST FEATURE (NON-PHYSICAL)? Creativity.

DATING
ARE YOU DATING? SINGLE? TALKING? Married.
HOW IS THAT? Good.

WHAT ARE THREE CHARACTERISTICS YOU LIKE ABOUT A GIRL? Eyes, face, hair.

WHAT ARE YOUR MAJOR TURN OFFS? Stupidity, arrogance, and over-sweetness.
ARE YOU MARRIAGE-MATERIAL? Yes.

HOLIDAYS
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE HOLIDAY? Tuesday. (this is when we begin rehearsals)
WHAT IS YOUR LEAST FAVORITE HOLIDAY? Sunday. (this is our last rehearsal of each week)

DO YOU BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS? (with a sigh) No.
THE EASTER BUNNY? No
THE TOOTH FAIRY? No

HAVE YOU EVER PLANTED A TREE ON ARBOR DAY? No.
WHAT WAS YOUR BEST COSTUME FOR HALLOWEEN? Night of the Bath. (His mom wrapped him up in towels one year)

WORK
WHERE DO YOU WORK? Ontological-Hysteric Theater
DO YOU ENJOY YOUR JOB? Sometimes.
WHAT IS YOUR DREAM JOB? To continue.

RELIGION
WHAT RELIGION ARE YOU? Jewish.

DO YOU PRACTICE YOUR SET RELIGION? No.
WHAT DO YOU NOT BELIEVE IN? That America is always right.

FAVORITES
THE OCEAN OR ON THE RIVER? Lakes.
CHOCOLATE OR VANILLA? Chocolate.
CHRISTMAS OR BIRTHDAY? Birthday.
DOGS OR CATS? Dogs.
DVD OR VHS? DVD.
TANNING BED OR BEACH? Beach. But I have some problems with the beach.
SNOW OR RAIN? Snow.
TOO HOT OR TOO COLD? Too cold.
KISSES OR HUGS? From who? What kind?
PLAYS OR MOVIES? Movies.
TOOTHPASTE? Crest.

Entry #6

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 03:43:00 +0000

Meghan Buchanan, OHT's Props/Costume Engineer:

It’s quite possible that I have the messiest desk in all of New York. Most days I have about one square foot of workspace on my four-foot by nine-foot desk. It is an amazing wonderland though. There you can find foam core boards, a paint kit, an assortment of hats, a sewing kit, a small supply of insulation foam, a few automated hands, at least half a dozen dowel rods, several white masks, a few yards of rope, a handful of fake fruit, and a wide variety of adhesives.
I realize these items might seem a little atypical for a desk, but if you have ever set foot in the Ontological-Hysteric Theater you would completely understand. I must admit, I never know how all of the supplies might go to use, but that’s what makes my job interesting. I walk into the theatre everyday with butterflies in my stomach wondering what exactly Richard might have conjured up for me to create that day. Oh…I’m the props and costumes engineer, to put it simply; I make things. And, I try as hard as I can to interpret Richard's direction into something tangible.
For example, we have a platter of fruit with an airplane on top (obviously), and I was given the note to make the fruit look more glorious and like a renaissance painting. When asked to put more babies in the plane hanging from the ceiling, we were told to cut it so it looks like a horrendous mutation. And, when describing how he wanted Stephanie Silver’s costume to look, he told me that he wanted her be dressed in a kind of 1940’s film noir, cocktail dress, but also look like she did last year… a beautifully feathered ballerina.
With directions like these, it’s easy to interpret a project completely different than how it might have been intended. Sometimes, I have no idea if I am making what Richard has envisioned, or if I am even getting close. But, I go into every new project open minded, and hope that these hands can whip up something that lives in the world that Richard is trying to create.

Entry #5

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:23:00 +0000

Chris Mirto, Stephanie Silver, Jamie Peterson and Stefanie Neukirch on a mission

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:21:00 +0000

A digital missive from Jamie Peterson, one of the actors in Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!

El Generalisimo of his theater, I am one of Richard Foreman's soldiers. More specifically I am a fighter pilot. The problem is that I don't have a plane. So instead I deliver things. I bring the main performers the property they need to wake up Mr. Sleepy (and he is such a sound sleeper).

I feel as though we're chasing after something. What we're chasing is a feeling, and Richard has the binoculars. He can see it running in the distance and it's our job to go out and get it. Now when we bring it back, it may not be what he wanted after all, so we sortie yet again to go get something new. Maybe after we bring enough feelings back, we can cut them up and sew the pieces back together in different combinations. Frankenfeeling, AHA!

But then again, I just got that all wrong. It's not really that we're hunting "feelings" for him, because that implies some level of surface psychological content. We're performing actions onstage, and when we perform we try not to act. Acting falsely induces the feeling of content. There is content but it's not from us acting, it potentially derives from the audience. Our actions, not acting, activate a part of your (the audience's) brain that you're probably not using right now reading this nonsense. Therein lies the content.

At least that's what I think, but what do I really know? I'm just as asleep as anybody.

Entry #4

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:34:00 +0000

Interview between Richard Foreman and Christine Vartoughian, intern on Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!

Christine Vartoughian: Who or what is Mr. Sleepy?

Richard Foreman: That's every human being, including myself, who are asleep. I've always been concerned with trying to make a theatre that woke people up to what energies are really operating in the unconscious or other places that we don't normally perceive. Wake up is the message of every one of my plays. It used to be in the early days that you start a nice dance or something like that and then it would stop and I remember a friend of mine from France at one point saying 'Richard, Richard, you start all these very enjoyable things going and then you stop them, and I said 'Yes, because we all start to be seduced by that, myself included. I want to slap you in the face and say wait a minute, wake up, do you realize what's happening to you? You're being seduced.

CV: So seduction is one of the things we succumb to?

RF: Sure, seduction is everything that we use as an escape, that we like, be it chocolate cake, sex, entertainment, wealth, it's all seductive, it all takes us away from the real task which is trying to see things at each moment as they really are.

CV: What qualities do actors that you like to work with posses?

RF: I like actors that are not saying at every moment to the audience, on one level or another, love me, love me. Even when I was a young man I always disliked what I perceived as being the real content of performances which was 'I may be suffering, I may be playing an evil person, but I want you to love me'. Obviously an actor wants to be liked. I want people who don't, or I want to teach people how not to use that, how to have an inner laser-like intensity, that's all inner directed, not going out so much towards the audience. One thing I've always told actors is that they have to think that everything they say is the most intelligent thing in the world (though they're not saying anything in this play). They have to do it, it's a secret that they have to assume that only one person in the audience is going to understand and they are not offering it on a silver platter for everybody. It's a secret, so that when you're sitting in the audience you can think Ahh I'm the one person that gets that, the other people aren't smart enough to get it. That's a delight, to think that it is not stated in a vulgar, general way, but you are sitting there with your partner in the theater and you poke him in the ribs and say 'Hey did you realize what he's saying?!' You've got to have that feeling. I want a secretive kind of performance- performers that have secrets, and actually I think that gets me in trouble sometimes because I know certain people have said 'Oh, I didn't like the show because everybody seemed to be acting as if they had some secret and I didn't get it.' To me, that's the only thing that turns me on because I do these shows to turn myself on, which would be a form of seduction, which I just said I don't want to use. However, these are the contradictions that make up everything.

CV: What do you say to those people who say 'I didn't get the secret'?

RF: There is not much I can say, because to me, to meet people who seem to have a secret is fascinating, and again wakes me up. Confronted with something like that, I want to know what the secret is, and of course, generally, in real life when we learn the secret, eh, then you lose interest.

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 02:51:00 +0000

Entry #3

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 02:51:00 +0000

Here's something that should provide some insight into Richard's rehearsal process: the stage management book.

Richard's rehearsals begin with full tech. That means costumes, sound, props, a full set and lights on day one. For three-and-a-half months, these elements will be revised, reworked, and re-envisioned.

The script itself, as it exists now, is based off of the video. What is spoken by the actors in the video and what is seen onscreen appears in print; the handwriting is the stage manager's notation of the movement of the live actors.

That's fairly straightforward. But now we get into Foremanland: the colored stickers are a way of notating the 215+ audio tapes that are available to Stage Manager Brendan Regimbal. The white numbered stickers refer to the current lighting cues in place. The stars indicate the use of flashpots, the fly system and motors for the propellers on the airplane. A lot to track, quick someone buy this kid a drink.

Entry #2

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:01:00 +0000

My task is to make something on stage into which you can project--And yet you are not bored because there is no “narrative or psychological (vis a vis characters) involvement”. Boredom is avoided because two levels go on at once—film and stage--
Yet neither is complete. And you oscillate between the two—-there is a “spark gap” which your consciousness jumps—and this keeps you awake.

Neither level is complete—(which is always the problem with both theater and film, in which all levels—language, image, movement in 3-dimensional space fill in all levels of perceptual experience) as opposed to other art forms which leave at least one level empty.

(And this relates to Gertrude Stein saying that in theater she was always either behind or ahead of the transpiring play—so she wrote ”landscapes” through which consciousness could wander.)

Why can I return to a painting, a poem, aphorisms, music—? Yet to see a play or film more than once is usually unbearably boring? Because these other forms elude one by leaving out at least one level of perceptual experience. So a play must discover how to “leave out” a level—yet, a play with no dialogue for instance, isn’t necessarily interesting; it’s simply another full world but composed of people “not talking”—it’s not a world (like dance) which is strangely “lacking” in a particular dimension.

But splitting focus between film and stage, the way I do it—-that lacks a dimension, which is the dimension of “making the connection” between these modes. Yet it’s not simply “2 separate tracks running parallel” --which would be the case if any old film were just shown while the play transpired. No—-the static tableaus I employ “imply” a potential relation (symbolic) — while the fact of live performers occasionally reacting to the screen imply a different kind of relation (dynamic and psychological)—-but the dimension in which this could indeed happen must be left out-—just as, for instance, the visual is ‘left out’ of a poem, or language is ‘left out’ of music that nevertheless seems to copy the fluctuations of consciousness that seem to surface automatically in speech.

No—-we seek a form that forces the perceiving mind to “jump” like a spark from one level of “potential content” (film) to another (on-stage performance)—-which means that normal “tracking consciousness” is bypassed while the new field created between spectator and the “in between” space manifest on-stage in a field of total alertness --without a subject! (The minute you have a subject, you have a prison created by that subject—and the deep content of this art is freedom)

This object
Is about itself.
That is to say
It is about impulse
Occurring against the backdrop
Of an event horizon
That changes slowly (the film)(slow seems permanent)
And that impulse—-
Pokes holes (void) in the on-going film
(generating gaps—-non-definable)
creating a space between impulse and event horizon
where truth arises

(my life story, desire to be ‘good boy’ and hated success of that as ‘killing’ self, so I sneak in proof (circus) I don’t want to kill audience. . .
Cut sound (shock!)

Don’t write clever phrases,
Just register

No to complexity

No, to seductiveness
(philosophical) of “write to make exception to system, a statement that generates its own disappearance:”
perhaps
this is achieved by the REGISTER of film tableau,
and statement

and “thrown” (impulse) action
the combination of which is “real” (truth)

Non-narrative

Problem is always—there are bits that seize one
And others that don’t

(narrative—in and out
stein- landscape (vs before or behind)
but how to deal with in-out
of landscape
(stein— normally you are not in control as you watch, so there is relief, not completion)
but—is between screen and stage? A way of control?
(in between, minimal space
like in between first row and stage

museum is solution, as is 3-ring circus
screen and stage—3 ring circus

you are in control if you FOCUS?
Every human face
Is a double
Accident

Reaching into the future
To simulate
Human beings

Listening to oneself
Becoming
Infallible

The next moment
Is a miscalculation

Collapsible furniture
‘beckons’

Intelligence means
No way out

Wait for the bus
It smiles
On your favorite
Endeavor

Never
participate
hopeful
one automatically
capitulates

specific motives
confuse heroes

The dog
Wept
Without thinking

Scissors
to build
a real world

Intense feelings
But empty

A subliminal exercise
Gone wrong

When the reality of the world
Comes under investigation
Then

What do the next few moments--
hold

What maneuver
And style of playfulness
Will surface between us

Living in a world where the un-manifest part—the greatest part—is being denied

“in some sense”
“so to speak”

(suppose I “WERE”....... that tense)

Dear Richard
There are things that can’t be known. Your task is to find them.

In between. In between

Be afraid. The unconscious may be dying.

Away with bad objects

This is the only way
Of traveling
Towards the future.
Smile.
Smile.

To read part two of the complete notes click here

Entry #1

noreply@blogger.com (the OHT) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:04:00 +0000

This begins our new "Wake up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!" blog. The first posting consists of pages of notes I've written to myself during the months in which I was planning the production, which will feature material filmed in Portugal last Spring that will be projected throughout the performance and against which the play with live actors will be staged.

A new entry will be made four times a week-- sometimes my own comments on the rehearsals or answering questions posed by our interns about the process and relevant background material-- but there will also be contributions consisting of ideas and impressions of those now working on the play in rehearsal, as well as anecdotes and reminiscences posted by many who have worked on my Ontological-Hysteric productions in past years.

Hopefully, the blog will evolve in directions not yet known-- let's find out!

Richard Foreman

NOTES

(MR SLEEPY):
What I do is really quite straight-forward.

Most theater depicts people navigating the currents of every-day life. I admit I find this suffocating and non-revelatory.

Instead, I am passionately interested in what throbs behind normal “social” life— a hypnotic yet inaccessible influence from levels both above and below that common life within which the impulsive twitches of the conditioned mind and body dance their every-day dance.

For me, the true JOY in art is to display such behavioral lurching in counterpoint against a more formal, non-human backdrop that is both literal (projected film tableaux) and symbolic (a relatively abstract grid of words and sounds) which combine to create contrapuntal complex patterns into which the human mind inevitably projects visions of the transcendence that haunts all non-human “empty space”-- that void that exists between everything from atomic particles, to mental concepts, to human beings, or individual moments of pulsating consciousness.

What I do in my theater is simply to layer different self contained ‘realms of being’ (image, sound, idea, or movement) over one another in ways that allow such overlapping layers to bleed through each other and create thereby, maps of new mental territory in which heightened sensibility re-energizes the internal mechanism we all share in common.

So—nothing to be afraid of or to anticipate as “hard to understand” in my plays, because one should not try to laboriously translate them into what they are not. They are NOT pictures of the “outer” world. They are NOT even pictures of the “inner” world. They simply use left over pieces of both inner and outer worlds to build a PARADISE where the mind and feelings dance as if the world were in fact—total music. (And perhaps it secretly is!)

----------

NOTE:

True-- there is no real story, but there is always a ‘theme”—sometimes from the beginning of the play’s conception, and other times only emerging in the weeks of rehearsal.

But! -- my task as an artist is always to fold that ‘theme’
into many other levels of meaning and materials. Mixed and dispersed so that the energetic twitchings of the ‘whole world at once’ transforming any central and therefore one dimensional theme into the network of “all meanings at once”-- reflecting and feeding off all other meanings”.

This, I do find, EXHILARATING!

----------

4 KEYS I OFFER:
WHICH OPEN DOORS I HOPE TO OPEN

1) The universe of the penetrating look. Frightened by the look. When you are LOOKED at, with intensity, does the level of ‘personality’ become befuddled, and the deep self—stripped naked, wake up at last?

2) The frozen image. When the presented image suggests neither intention nor “involving action”, then the field of the image starts to tremble with intimations of “elsewhere”

3) Each on stage item as provocation. Provoke, like the mysterious seductive one who withdraws into silence, and beckons-- like a door to another world. . .

4) Language as the impenetrable mystery. Statements that turn upon themselves, Ouroborus -like (the snake eating its own tail)—and by emptying out normal, every-day ‘meanings’-- knock down the walls of the everyday
behavioral prison, opening (Zen-like) to new levels of mental organization

I.E. “MENTAL SHOCKS”. Tiny MENTAL SHOCKS to reprogram the nervous system so the mind can start dancing a new kind of brain dance!

----------

I suggest there are two kinds of theater.

One kind ‘talks about’ things and suggests at least a possible ‘resolution’ to the issues raised.

The second kind EMBODIES in its style and structure the often agitated ebb and flow that consciousness experiences in its collisions with life-- understanding that nothing is ever ‘resolved’, but rather that all things change into other things before there is any possible ‘resolution’.

So this second—which is my theater, of course—is about “nothing” that can be discussed, but deeply about the
moment to moment experience of the flux of the real—i.e. impulse giving way to new impulse giving way to new impulse.

To read part one of the full notes click here