“I can take any space and call it a bare stage,” Peter Brook wrote in his seminal treatise “The Empty Space.” “A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
Actor and spectator have been for Brook the constructing blocks of this artwork type. American avant-gardist Richard Foreman, who died Jan. 4 at age 87, took Brook’s proposition a step additional, envisioning a theater that didn’t even require the presence of a performer.
“To make theater, all you need is a defined space and things that enter and leave that space,” he wrote in “Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater.” “You could even make a play without an actor. A jar could be thrown out into an empty space, and a minute later a stick from offstage could push that jar one inch forward. That would function as theater.”
Foreman’s thought of theater, born in opposition to the mainstream, was an acquired style that a few of the most rigorously creative sensibilities couldn’t get sufficient of. Together with the Wooster Group, Robert Wilson and Mabou Mines, Foreman prolonged the unconventional traditions of the Residing Theater and the Sixties collectives that adopted. He grew to become one of many pillars of New York’s downtown theater scene, an elder statesman within the Nineties and 2000s who remained miles forward of these youthful innovators galvanized by his instance.
“Theater in the past has used language to build: What follows what?” he wrote in an early manifesto. He got down to destroy the logical underpinnings of the artwork type by remodeling drama right into a carnivalesque collage that found shock not by way of suspense however by way of stasis. The corporate he based was known as the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and the identify tells you almost every part it is advisable learn about a theatrical trailblazer who discovered manic inspiration within the metaphysics of being.
Richard Foreman, decrease proper, with composer Michael Gordon, engaged on the theatrical opera “What to Wear” in 2006, mirrored within the mirror held by members of the ensemble.
(Lawrence Ok. Ho / Los Angeles Occasions)
In his e book “American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History,” Arnold Aronson classes Foreman and Wilson as “post-Einsteinian” artists confronting a universe “of uncertainty principles and chaos theory.” Their work, he writes, “challenged post-Renaissance (i.e. modern) understandings of time and space within theater; it disrupted the act of viewing by slowing down action to almost imperceptible movement, extending the length of performance beyond normal limits of concentration, and fragmenting both the viewing frame and the arc of the production, thereby forcing the spectators to re-examine their own notions of performance and their own perceptual process.”
Foreman’s biography doesn’t recommend a revolutionary path. He grew up within the prosperous New York suburb of Scarsdale, the place he found his ardour for theater in highschool. He was educated at Brown College and the Yale College of Drama, the place he acquired his MFA in playwriting. His credentials may have gained him instant entry into the institution elite, however he had little interest in perpetrating what he took to be an apparent fraud.
Foreman recognized the “resistance” to his work as a resistance to his existential worldview. “My work has always been very aggressive in maintaining that life as we know it (and as normal theater knows it and presents it) is an absolutely silly, childish (and understandable) avoidance of the emptiness at its center,” he wrote in “Ages of the Avant-Garde.”
What pissed off theatergoers most about his work, nonetheless, was that it pressured them to remain within the theatrical second. Yielding consideration might be painfully tough. Myriad are the methods we search to paraphrase artwork into digestible that means. The impulse to cultivate efficiency right into a understandable story was denied by the sensory bombardment of his productions.
In her epochal essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag concluded with a memorable flourish: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Foreman theater answered this name by creating dreamscapes that eluded our mind’s mania for management.
“How can I frustrate the spectator’s expectations, including his tendency to identify with the performance of a powerful actor?” he requested in “Foundations for a Theater.” “How can I frustrate the flow of the action within the play and prevent the inevitable drift into normal, narrative form. How can I frustrate the commonplace drive toward narrative understanding in the spectator that awakens in his consciousness a habitual identification with the goals, values, and mind-sets received from our social and cultural system?”
The purpose of all this frustration was to make us extra conscious of our perceptual shackles. “To frustrate habit is to uncover ways our impulses might be freed for use in more inventive behavior,” he wrote.
Attending a Foreman manufacturing on the St. Mark’s Theater within the East Village was a contradictory expertise. On the one hand, you knew you have been going to be bodily captive for an unbroken 70 or so minutes that might really feel like a unending marathon. However, your thoughts was free to make what you’ll of the unusual sights and sounds overloading your consciousness. In contrast to know-how firms that work to ensnare (and monetize) our consideration, Foreman entrapped our our bodies solely to liberate our minds. He shared his goals to impress our personal.
Foreman was a prolific playwright, however I think about him extra of an auteur than a dramatist. He gained popularity of his audacious productions of classics (“Threepenny Opera,” “Don Juan”) and will draw out the dynamism of recent work by different writers, as he did in Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Venus.” Nevertheless it was within the staging of his personal performs that he approached the Wagnerian splendid of the Gesamtkunstwerk or built-in art work.
But he wasn’t tyrannical in regards to the afterlife of those dramatic curios. In a notice to “Bad Boy Nietzsche! and Other Plays,” he writes, “I suggest that each director re-conceive these texts and create a staging that elaborates on his or her own private vision of whatever world these texts seem to suggest.” Samuel Beckett, a stickler for faithfulness, didn’t share this laissez-faire angle towards his stage instructions, which he anticipated to be punctiliously noticed by others.
When the Wooster Group got here to REDCAT final fall with a brand new manufacturing of “Symphony of Rats,” it was clear that Foreman’s play was being filtered by way of the Wooster Group’s distinct sensibility. These two giants of New York’s efficiency avant-garde have a great deal of historical past in frequent, however what distinguished Foreman’s work — and what I’m so grateful to have skilled repeatedly within the Nineties and early 2000s — was the exploratory consciousness playfully probing the enjoyable home of sentient existence.
Foreman urged that theater may happen with out performers, however his theatrical canvases deployed actors of unforgettable individuality. Their eccentricities helped outline the mise-en-scène of his productions as a lot as any facet of the design that Foreman meticulously presided over. David Patrick Kelly, Kate Manheim (his second spouse), Henry Stram, Tony Torn, James Urbaniak and Juliana Frances Kelly, amongst quite a few sensible others, formed Foreman’s work and have been formed by it, guaranteeing the legacy of an American unique, whose cryptic, frisky like we will not see once more.
