Schechner.interview

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The Drama Review 46, 2 (T174), Summer 2002. Copyright � 2002New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“We Still Have toDance and Sing”

An Interview with Richard Foreman

Richard Schechner

Richard Foreman is an incessant author and highly focused director. Since1992, at St. Mark’s Church on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan, Foreman has directed11 of his own plays. The most recent, Maria del Bosco, opened on 27 December2001. Over the years, with his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, founded in 1968,Foreman has directed more than 50 of his own plays—and there are more playsstill unproduced. Foreman also has frequently directed the works of others.Among my favorite Foreman productions are Brecht’s Threepenny Opera at Lin-coln Center in 1976, Moliere’s Don Juan at the Guthrie Theatre in 1982, andSuzan-Lori Parks’s Venus at the Public Theatre in New York in 1996. Foremanhas often been in the pages of TDR, starting with his “Ontologic-Hysteric Man-ifesto II” in 1974 (18:3, T63) up to the program notes for Pearls for Pigs in 1998(42:2, T158). Foreman’s plays have been collected in a number of books, fromPlays and Manifestos (New York University Press, 1976) to the most recent, Par-adise Hotel and Other Plays (Overlook Press, 2001).

SCHECHNER: I want to focus on post–September 11th. Your play, Now ThatCommunism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty [2001], was to some degree about en-tering a new historic era. But now [November 2001] it appears that the U.S.government, either by intention or accident, has found a way to continue theCold War under different auspices. Once again we are immersed in an unending,anxiety-raising situation that allows the Defense Department to expand its opera-tions, strangle civil liberties, and so on and so forth. In this light, I’m interestedin your reaction to this and how it will, or not, affect your work.

FOREMAN: I’m prepared to answer your question because already three otherplaces have said, “We’re gonna ask you about what happened on September11th—so think up a response.” I agree with you that, though the event itself washorrible and tragic, of course we’re culpable. [Laughs] “Why do all these peoplehate us so much?”

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1. Juliana Francis in the ti-tle role of Maria del Boscoby Richard Foreman(2001). (Photo by PaulaCourt)

SCHECHNER: Right.

FOREMAN: It’s not just because they’re evil people, even though some of themmay be fanatics; if you met one of them in a nightclub, you might think, “What’swrong with that guy?” But obviously, we caused the situation to a large extent.Could we avoid causing the situation? Probably not. You know, the history ofthe world is: as empires grow they get corrupt and exploit other people. It’s allin the normal course of things. When September 11th happened, I was veryshocked with myself for the first 24 hours because I noticed that I was feeling,“God damn it, let’s bomb them off the earth.” [Laughs]

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SCHECHNER: [Laughing too] If they didn’t already live in Afghanistan.

FOREMAN: Yeah. And then next, the shock of wondering, “Well, isn’t anybodysaying anything in opposition to the government?” So using the good old Internetwithin a few hours I found some alternative voices. I sort of regained my sanityand my balance. What I realized this morning is that it isn’t the end of history.So Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty in a sense was wrong. Inthat play I bought into the idea that history was over—there was late-capitalisticglobal domination of the world, and that was that. But at this moment, when wehave just started bombing, I’m very suspicious about the United States’ ability tofunction efficiently and know what the hell it’s doing. The Gulf War was a totalcharade because, thank God, the situation was such that we could act like Su-permen. I doubt that it will be the same this time. I imagine we might get stuckin the same kind of morass as we were in Vietnam. I also imagine that [Osama]Bin Laden, as many commentators now are already saying, is very happy aboutwhat’s happening. He will gain many adherents in the Arab world. What’s gonnahappen if they topple all those nice governments that are beholden to us that thepeople hate? [Laughs] Then we have no more oil. But shock of shocks, supposethe United States succeeds in doing what it wants to do?

SCHECHNER: Right.

FOREMAN: Who knows?

SCHECHNER: OK, Bin Laden’s happy, but what about the generals in thePentagon? Are they happy too?

FOREMAN: Oh, of course. Can anybody doubt that?

SCHECHNER: This gives them a raison d’etre.

FOREMAN: Sure, of course. Obviously this is going to strengthen the hand ofall those people who are the worst in America. On the other hand, if you are inpower, what the hell are you gonna do? You can’t do anything.

SCHECHNER: A moment ago you were saying, “that’s the way empires are,this is the way it happens.” That’s not very Brechtian; more like the inevitabilityof history. Let me spin this out a little. Where I live I have a clear view of theTrade Towers. I heard a thud and rushed out to my terrace and saw it all live,firsthand, the second plane crashing, the south tower crumbling, then the north,the smoke and fire, World Trade Center Five imploding. Throughout it all, Ikept checking the news on television—kind of ratifying what I was seeing andalso giving me a more global picture—the Pentagon, the plane in Pennsylvania,the airlifting of Bush to keep him out of harm’s way... Throughout all of this Iwas conscious of being a spectator at a “historical moment,” a watershed, anevent that was really changing things. It was live theatre of a very particular kind.It reminded me of so many Godzilla-type movies, terrified people running downthe streets just barely ahead of catastrophe; others crushed in the onrushing ho-locaust. At the same time I knew that this was no movie, that people were reallydying right in front of my eyes and that more would die in the American response,the revenge. But that didn’t stop me from thrilling in the drama of the moment.I felt personally safe, I wasn’t running, I didn’t think I knew anyone who wastrapped... I was “free” to be a spectator. Very ugly, but that’s the way it was.

FOREMAN: Right.

SCHECHNER: Very soon I felt humiliated for being so captured by the media.But I am not the only prisoner of the media. Long before the fires were under

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control, the networks had titled events, packaging history as known spectacularnarratives. “America Under Attack” soon morphed into “America’s New War,”“America Fights Back,” and “America Strikes Back.” Right out of Star Wars. Ifthey don’t get Bin Laden, or if some other representative of the “dark side”succeeds him, we are in for “Return of the Jihad.” After all, we paid for andtrained these guys—the terrorism and the war are to a large degree an Americanproduction.

FOREMAN: Well, first of all, I think I do believe in destiny. Rather than Brecht’spoint of view, I take [Herbert] Marcuse’s, which is that what we artists are in-volved with is trying to keep alive and sustain an alternative reality. At this point,there isn’t much hope that an alternative reality will come to fruition. September11th happened in the context of something that’s been going on with me for thelast year. About a year ago, I was asked to go to Holland to work at Ritsaert tenCate’s new school, Des Artes.

He said he wanted me to come and talk on the subject of the month, whichwas money. [Laughs] I thought, “My God, what the hell do I know about theartist’s relation to money, about all the implications of the global economy, cor-porate takeovers, and so forth.” So, I spent a month really immersing myself ineverything that I could read about where the economy is going, about differentpro and con visionaries, about the implications of the Internet, what it was doingto human consciousness as well as how it was restructuring life. And I felt veryadrift. My feeling that I just don’t know if I approve or disapprove intensified.

Now, you can’t approve or disapprove of history. What I mean is that I’m stillnot convinced that the Internet and globalization are producing something newand interesting; that they are not controlled by a mediocre mentality. Whyoughtn’t we lament the passing of the grand masters of the European tradition?Obviously, my commitment for most of my life has been to try and take the nextstep implied by these grand masters. Nevertheless, in the last eight months, I havefound that I can no longer draw on those resources with any zest, with any energyor sense of adventure.

One result is that the play that I’m doing now, that’s now in rehearsal, and thenext couple of plays that I project—

SCHECHNER: What’s its title?

FOREMAN: —Maria del Bosco. Its original title was Transcendental Race CarDrivers, but for various reasons I decided not to go with that. But that gives thetheme of the play because it is about fashion models in love with a hypothesizedracing car that turns into human consciousness or destiny carrying them into thefuture. To back up a little here, my initial impulse...when I started out makingtheatre I was under the influence of people like [Roland] Barthes, “writing degreezero,” trying to get back to the basic grammatical structure of rendering physicalsensations. And then I started developing a more complex literary style. At acertain point I wanted to prove to people that I really could write. Because atthe beginning, people said, “He can direct, but those texts, they’re crazy.” So Itried to prove to myself and to the world that I could write. And then I startedto get prizes as a writer, so I felt I’d proven myself as a writer.

Then, about seven months ago, I began to think, “I’m sick of this writingbusiness.” You know, there is so much great literature that is essentially doingwhat I would like to do—which is to create that electric spark of ideas jumpinga gap, jumping a canyon, and landing on the other side, and twisting as it doesso, in some way, so that it reflects a flash of sunlight—that I don’t know if I cancontinue in that vein.

So I thought, Well, this world that we’re moving into is corrupt, but obviously


you have to find some way to mine what is going on. I thought, I’ll just do aplay made of sound bites. I’ll just take little phrases—little aphoristic phrases—tape record them, alter them a little, and they will take on a kind of oracularimpenetrability, and also exude a kind of stimulating quality.

SCHECHNER: Not your own writing?

FOREMAN: Oh, no, no, my own writing, but just very simple basic buildingblocks of language. So the play now has about 40 or 50 sentences, which are ontape. And my original idea was that I would record the text spoken by me as ifI were a mentally challenged person. So it would be, you can’t reproduce this inprint, but [in a slow, garbled “retarded” voice], “He..re c..omes.. th..e ra..cing ca..r.”It was beautiful, and also it made me have a different relationship to the noise ofwhat was being produced. But I dropped that idea because it’s just too maddeningto listen to that all night long, though there are echoes of it occasionally.

Then this [September 11th] happens and I, like everybody else, am temporarilythrown for a loss. I’m rehearsing, and one part of me says, “Well, this doesn’tseem quite relevant any more,” because the play still has a kind of S&M eroticimagery that is prevalent in a lot of my work, and a kind of density of controlledhysteria and hostility. But then I remember that the artist’s task is to keep some-thing else alive somehow.

I recently read Morris Berman’s Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality[2000], very interesting. He wrote another book that’s a little more popular, TheTwilight of American Culture [2000]. I had problems when I read it because he talksabout how everything is falling apart in America. In the last part he says the DarkAges are coming. He says what intellectuals and artists must do in the Dark Agesis return to a kind of monkish mode keeping alive everything valuable in Westernsociety. I rejected that when I read it. But at this particular moment I almost feel

2. & 3. Now That Com-munism Is Dead My LifeFeels Empty by RichardForeman (2001). (Photos byPaula Court)

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that maybe that’s the only thing to do. But I don’t think I will continue to feelthat way as the months proceed.

SCHECHNER: Well, I think one of the real shocks for me is not the enormityof the event, I mean, there have been worse things that human beings have doneto human beings, but that it happened in New York City at that symbolic spotand that it seemed so easy to accomplish. We’re used to being attacked at theperiphery: the barracks in Beirut are demolished, the Cole docked in Yemen getsa hole punched in it, embassies in East Africa get bombed, etc. But the TradeTowers literally tumbling down—that was a special marker in a long process ofdecline. I know how long it took for Rome to fall—it was sacked and rebuilt anumber of times. But each time it lost some of itself. Each time it became a littlebit more like those who were attacking it. And who knows what the Goths andthe Huns thought of themselves? The Romans regarded them as barbarians. Butthey became, in time, modern Western civilization. And I think of the Romanswho retired to the hills outside of Rome because Rome was no longer livable.These people stopped being activists; they became spectators. This was a longtime before the Middle Ages. They weren’t monks, nor are we.

FOREMAN: But you have always been a more public person than I. I am arather private person. I marched a couple of times during the Vietnam War, butmostly I’ve watched what was happening in this society, which I never approvedof, even though it enabled me to do what I do and supported me. And certainlynow I feel, yes, I’m just a spectator. But how many times have people predictedthe fall of the West?

SCHECHNER: It took Rome 400 years to fall. And some of its most gloriousworks were made while it was falling.


FOREMAN: Yeah. Well, I hope that’s our case. [Pause] Of course, the thingabout the World Trade Center falling is that it reveals what was hidden: that ouradvanced civilization is built on this very fragile filigree of, well, computersamong other things. We had a preview of it with Y2K. That didn’t happen, butmy God, how vulnerable we are to total collapse very quickly if somebody reallyprobes in exactly the right places.

SCHECHNER: Do you ever think of leaving New York?

FOREMAN: Yes, certainly. But how can I make theatre not in New York?Another thing that struck me about the World Trade Center bombing was that

this event was probably seen directly by more artists than any similar event in thehistory of the world. Because artists live around there and they were all lookingout their windows and watching it happen.

SCHECHNER: In terms of the work you’re doing at this moment, does it affectyou, the way you work, the people you rehearse with?

FOREMAN: I try not to have it affect me. Yesterday, I came back from lunchand everybody was standing around the radio. “It’s started” [the bombing inAfghanistan]. And so for the rest of the lunch-hour everybody sat listening to theradio. Then I said, “Look, this is a very heavy thing, but we’re trying to do ourwork, so if you have to listen to the radio do it in the hall, in the lobby, orsomewhere. But we can’t sit on the set listening and then go into rehearsal.” Myfeeling always is that when you’re making a work of art, you disappear into it;you’re sort of cocooned once you actually start work. I don’t find it difficult toget lost in the work. One of the actresses said to me, “Thank you, Richard,because, you know, I can’t escape from this stuff, but you have a way of makingus go on and we forget.”

SCHECHNER: And at the same time I feel how soft and weak we are. Peopleactually lived in Beirut or Sarajevo or through the blitz in London.

FOREMAN: Of course. And you know in your heart of hearts that even thoughthese guys are fanatics to a quite considerable extent we created the situation.

SCHECHNER: Right.

FOREMAN: That aspect of us that created the situation is that aspect that peoplelike us have always been fighting, and always been complaining about. But a bigdifference is that in the Second World War Churchill or Roosevelt could lead usbut now we have to be led by Bush—this oil man who belongs to the group ofpeople who created this horrible situation in the first place.

SCHECHNER: So what will be the outcome artistically?

FOREMAN: First of all—and I don’t mean to sound like an evil, nasty person—but I can imagine that there’s going to be some pretty awful art produced inresponse to this. I don’t mean just right-wing, chest-beating Americanism. I meanappeals to humanity, stuff like, “Oh, human beings are beautiful and we shouldlove rather than hate.” That sentiment is not going to produce good art.

SCHECHNER: Have you done any new writing?

FOREMAN: Like everybody else I feel a little woozy. I haven’t recovered mybalance. So as I told you, I write little fragments, and while it’s true that I’mdealing with the present, I’ve always dealt with the present as something that’sprocessed by some very interior impulse. It’s very hard to take on things at thismoment. But the one area I can still pay attention to is music.

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4. “Fred” ( Jay Smith) and“Freddie” (Tony Torn)from Now That Commu-nism Is Dead My LifeFeels Empty by RichardForeman (2001). (Photo byPaula Court)

SCHECHNER: Pop music?

FOREMAN: No. New music. I’m doing a project with Michael Gordon, oneof the guys who started the Bang on a Can festival. His music really interests me.I’ve been trying for years to figure out how to make that kind of sensibilityoperative in the theatre. I haven’t succeeded, really. It’s very difficult.

There are such pressures in the theatre because the theatre depends upon animmediate group response. Having a radical vision means that you’ll probablyclose before anybody gets to see it. Back when we were growing up in the theatre,there was this belief in the possibility of an alternative culture. So we dared to dothings. I remember when I was young, audiences used to walk out and that gave


me the energy to go on—I thought that proved it’s great. I don’t know if a youngperson could sustain that in this society, in this culture.

SCHECHNER: You know one of the things that the Web does is give peoplea sense of seamlessness. People feel connected to pop culture, Hollywood, bigmoney. What does the term “alternative” mean today? There was a time whenyou came to a cross in the road; you go this way or that. But now, every inter-section is multiple—leading everywhere and to the same “where.” Most of theyoung people I know want to move off into films or media or the university life.They want to make a living, and you can’t do that in the alternative theatre.

FOREMAN: But at the same time many people feel spiritually starving. Theproblem with the web is that all these alternatives are put there by consciousness.So you’re choosing among alternatives that are only bits and pieces of what hasconsciously been wrought. Previously, as far as I’m concerned, the most inter-esting art, the most interesting adventures of the human spirit, happened whenpeople encountered “blanks”: situations that couldn’t be talked about. Peoplewho project totally into the web are only dealing with “bits,” and each bit isdefined. And this leaves a great void in people’s lives. Have you ever heard ofHoward Bloom?

SCHECHNER: No.

FOREMAN: Howard Bloom is hailed by a lot of wild thinkers, post-punk in-tellectuals and so forth, as a great guru. He’s got bad chronic fatigue syndrome—he lives in bed out in Brooklyn surrounded by a lot of computers and things. Iwent out to visit him once or twice because I was very excited by one of hisbooks, The Global Brain [2000]. His theory is that the times are right, even inAmerica, for someone to seize that spiritual hunger and become a horrible leaderor a good leader. This new spiritual void is not going to be filled by any kind ofborn again, American-style, Christian revivalist. Obviously, we have resourcesinside of us that are now not being used. Even if you define people as beingswho have a “God tendency” built into the brain—just an accident of the wir-ing—there’s still something there that’s not being used.

SCHECHNER: It could be used by a jingoistic xenophobe.

FOREMAN: Yes, of course, that’s a tremendous danger.

SCHECHNER: Americans tend to bounce in that direction when we’re deeplythreatened. At present we’re at the flag-waving stage, but what happens if...

FOREMAN: You know, years ago when people were attacking me for not doingpolitical art, I said that I thought that the problem in America is that people wantto know what’s black, what’s white—should I go here, should I go there? AndI felt that the function of art was to explore [ John] Keats’s “negative capability”:teaching people to dance lucidly amidst all the gaps, all the uncertainties, all thedoubts—to learn how to dance with all that anguish. My task, as I see it, is notto erase from my work the horror, but to continue to use difficult material, findingways aesthetically to redeem the horror through a kind of music.

SCHECHNER: Right. But how can we perform clearly the confusion we’reexperiencing?

FOREMAN: Who knows what will happen? The day after this happened wewere rehearsing our play and it happened that one of the props I had asked forwas a big model airplane. And on our set, as it happens there are scattered aroundthe stage, three square pillars going up to the ceiling, and there’s a big windowin between two of them, and the window was open and I said, “Why don’t we

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5. Maria del Bosco byRichard Foreman, with Ju-liana Francis in the title role(2001). (Photo by PaulaCourt)

try flying that airplane between those pillars toward the window.” And then Isaid, “Oh no, we can’t do that.” It’s not in the play now. Did I lose courage?

SCHECHNER: I think you should fly your plane through the window. I wastalking to a child psychiatrist who told me that a lot of kids, boys especially, buildthe Trade Towers of blocks and then bomb them. Of course, that’s a classic wayof mastering anxiety. Nowadays, instead of imaginary Godzillas, we have planesactually crashing into the Trade Towers.

FOREMAN: About two days after, I was trying to think of a way to joke aboutit with friends. And I came up with: Some Arabs were complaining, “Everybody


says we’re stupid. We’re not stupid. We can do everything Americans can do. Wecan build things. We can fly planes. Tell you what, to prove it we’re gonna fly acouple of big airplanes right between the Twin Towers.” [Laughs]

SCHECHNER: [Laughs] I don’t think we’ll put that in TDR.

FOREMAN: No, put it in, because it’s horrible. It is not healthy if people don’tdeal with the reality of what comes up in the unconscious.

History is very strange. Who knows what’s going to happen? But just project—I hope it doesn’t happen, but just project—let’s say Bin Laden succeeds in doingwhat he’s dreaming of doing, and let’s say that a lot of the world comes to believein his kind of Muslim spirituality. Two hundred years from now he could belooked upon as a Messiah who ended the rule of evil world capitalism. I’m notsaying I hope for that, I certainly don’t. I personally would suffer tremendouslyif that happens. And what about Holy War and Holy Conflict as a spiritualconflict? It’s scary to say so, but that is an area of exploration. I’m thinking ofthat great artist who inspired so many of us, Jack Smith, who was deeply into allkinds of Islamic imagery.

SCHECHNER: Yes, very much. But did he know what he was doing or did hejust relish the imagery of it?

FOREMAN: I don’t know. But I do know that Jack was always about Arabs andIslam. It’s all over his work.

I remember years ago I was at some meeting. Norman Frisch, the WoosterGroup, and Anne Bogart were there. I forget how the subject came up, but Isaid that if a big rocket came from Russia and exploded over the city I’d want tosee that. I remember Norman saying, “Oh Richard, you’re sick, how could youeven think such a thought!” But it’s up to human beings to be able to entertain,

6. “Shy Ballerina” (FundaDuyal), “Maria del Bosco”( Juliana Francis), and“Long-legged Ballerina”(Okwui Okpokwasili) inRichard Foreman’s Mariadel Bosco (2001). (Photoby Paula Court)

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to admit to entertaining such thoughts. That’s part of what humanity is, and westill have to dance and sing, even knowing we have that in us.

Richard Schechner is TDR’s Editor. He is University Professor and Professor of Per-fomance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and Artistic Director of East CoastArtists. His most recent book is Performance Studies: An Introduction (Routledge,2002). His most recent stage production was Waiting for Godot at Cornell University,2002.

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