 First presentation was Richard this morning, and it will be photo at 10 o'clock with Marvin Coulson, who also is here, Mary Ellen is here, the WS Theater, Carlos and many others. So Paula, so thank you all for coming, and I think this is a real contribution to our field, and you're really Richard again. Thank you for taking the time and trusting us that we were able to do this. Thank you. Thank you. So I just want to say thank you to Brent and Sherry and the entire staff here. You've been marvelous, and win-loser draw we've already won. Now in terms of what I do, I'd like to have less light on me and more light on the audience. So that's exactly the way I work things. So let's bring the lights down a little bit over here. Well first of all, we're going to have to turn them out when we see the slides, and bring them up, because I don't believe that spectators should ever be in the dark. And it's not the kind of theater I've ever done, and it's not the kind of as you'll see, and it's not the kind of theater I want to do today. Secondly, the time with Marvin and I talking about my productions is two hours, not one hour, and it'll begin when Richard and I are finished. We'll take a little break and we'll begin. Since we're not running the railroads, and anyway the railroads are late, we'll probably not be exactly on time, but we'll try to adhere as much to this schedule as possible. With the out further ado, I want to introduce my colleague, Rishika. You have her bio in your programs, but she and I have worked together very closely for four years on the Rodney Lett project. Obviously Rishika is from South Asia, and so she is born to it, and I came to it through my second birth, probably, as Jaya Ganesh, an initiation that occurred in 1971 outside of Madras. That's another story, maybe I'll talk about it tonight. But at any rate, Rishika and I have worked for a long time together on the Ramleela, and I'm going to turn it over to her now, and she's going to talk a little bit and interrogate me, and we'll also have a little slideshow so you know what the Ramleela is. Okay, yes. First of all, Rishika and I are working on a book. It's on the contract by Yogi Publishers in India. It'll be a book that will feature some of the photographs that I've taken and that Rishika has curated the archive of, and she'll talk about that, but there are nearly 8,000 photographs that I've taken over the years. And one of the marvelous things about today for me is that it's the first attempt at me to integrate my work, at least in my mind, to some degree. I don't know how many of you have the fortitude to stay from now to eight o'clock tonight, but I've done work in many, many different things, so this is a chance to see how they connect or how they don't connect, because I'm very good at sustaining contradictions, as some of you have worked with me, know all too well. Ramleela of Ramnagar, one of the great founding stories, myths, beliefs of Hinduism is the story of Rama. Rama is his Sanskrit name, but Rama is what he's called in North India. He's the seventh incarnation, is it seventh? Yes, Vishnu, and he comes to dissent earth to rid the world of the ten-headed, glorious demon king, Ravana of Lanka. It's a story that is very cognate with the Indo-European myth of a great war fought to recover a stolen life. We know it from the Greek Iliad, and we know it from the Ramayana, and they're the same story told in different modes, and in my view they originate from the same mythopoetic base. The Ramleela of Ramnagar is a 31-day cycle play performed in Ramnagar, which is a town across the river from Benares, also called Varanasi, also called Kashi, a sacred, or the most sacred probably, city in India, on the Ganges, or Ganga river, as I will call it, as it's called in India. The 31 days is the longest of any Ramleela. There are thousands of Ramleelas performed in the autumn of each year, the month of Ashwin in North India, but the Ramlegar Ramleela is regarded by Indians themselves as preeminent. It is sponsored by the Maharaja of Benares. It's interesting because there is no legal Maharaja. 1947 ended the princely states, or rather the independence of India, and two years later the princely states were discontinued, but everyone in Benares calls him Maharaj, and he is a king. So the way I like to think of it is the Ramleela, the story of Rama is a leaning card, and it is supported by the Maharaja whose patronage gives this performance its identity. At the same time the Maharaja is supported by the existence of the Ramleela, which gives him a reason for continuing to have his ceremonial and ritual authority. He has other things that he also does, but this is his primary ceremonial duty. The 31-day play in a nutshell tells the story of Rama's incarnation to rid the world of Ravana, Rama's marriage to Sita, who is incarnation of Lakshmi, one of the principal goddesses of Hinduism. The interrupted coronation of Rama when he is sent into or agrees to go into exile for 14 years, and during that exile Ravana kidnaps Sita, takes her to Lanka, and it's the India we know. Here's India, that triangle, and off the coast of India, the southeast coast, is the country of Sri Lanka, called Lanka in those days, and Rama gathers a great army in pursuit of Sita. He doesn't cross the sea as Agamemnon and Menelaos do, but he crosses the sea of the great forest of India, down from Ayodhya, which is up near Banaras to some degree, across towards where Bombay is, down angled across to a place called Rameshwar and across into Lanka. He is aided by an army of monkeys and bears, the most well-known of which is Hanuman. He wages that great war, he slays Ravana, he recovers Sita, he returns to Ayodhya, his capital, he is installed as king and the golden age of Ramraj, the rule of Ram, begins. That's the story in a nutshell. If I don't know it, no one does. Ah, let's look at it. So, let's get the lights out here and let's very quickly look at it. I won't explain too much of it beyond saying what the slides are. So, there's the journey of Ram. You can see the green line is going through India to Sri Lanka at the bottom. There, the Ramayanis, which are 12 Hindu priests who chant the Ramshart Manas. There are layerings of texts and we'll talk about them later, but one of the texts is the 16th, 17th century Hindu, Hindi epic called Ramshart Manas, the reflections of the deeds of Ram, which is a retelling in a late medieval Hindi or early modern Hindi of the Sanskrit Ramayan by Valmiki. And this text, Ramshart Manas, is considered to be sacred in and of itself and every word of it is recited in the Ramlila. There's Ram and you can see how glorious he is. He is a boy of 12 or 13 before his voice has changed and he and his three brothers, Bharat, Lakshman and Shatruv are all pre-adolescent boys and Sita is also and there is Sita. Well, and here they are rehearsing. In this particular tape, I could show you how they rehearse, but it is not only a religious occurrence, but it is a theatrical event. It's truly theater. Lila means play or theater, so it's truly theater and it's truly ritual at the same time. As my friend Victor Turner was fond of saying, make belief gets transformed into make belief and it's not the willing suspension of disbelief, it's the active engagement of belief. Here is Ram's capital, Ayodhya and you see some elephants in the back there. I want to make sure you see what I'm seeing. Yes, you see some elephants in the back and that's where the Maharaja attends. He attends all but a few of the leaders. He does not watch Robin get killed. He does not watch King Dasarath of Ayodhya die. He says it's not proper for one king to witness the death of another. Here's where Ram goes into exile early on. Chitrakoot. All of these places are actual places in India and people can go visit them actually in India. They exist. They are pilgrimage centers but for the Ramlila, the small becomes the large. The Ramnagar becomes these places and many people come and take actual pilgrimage because if the boys, the Swarupas, as they are called, if they become gods and they are gods when they are in their proper costumes and wearing the crowns, then these places are the places they represent. So this is theater which does not give up its representational qualities but also has a numinous quality. It is what it is as well as being what it represents at the same time. You have to sustain that tremulous coexistence of theatrical and actual realities. In some ways it's parallel to the miracle of transubstantiation which the Roman Catholic Church proclaims during the Eucharist. Though I can say for sure I'm not a Catholic so I don't know how deeply believe this is by all people but I can say that in Ramlila the people believe very much that the boys are the gods. This is a view of Lanka, the capital of Robin. It's a huge place and the crowds that come there for the final battles and the slaying of Robin range from 50 to 80,000 when the weather is good and a few hundred drew a few thousand when the weather is bad. Like National Football League, the Ramlila pretty well goes on in all weather and the weather is sometimes rainy and stormy early on and then it gets better as it gets closer to the end of the 31 days. This is the Bharatnilat near the end of the exile. Ram has already slayed Ravan. He's come back and you can see the highway signs because this takes place right in the center of the town. So what happens this is environmental theater with vast scale where the entire town is transformed into various places in the Ramlila story. Janakpur where Sita is, Ayodhya where Ram's capital is, Lanka as I said, Chitrakoot. These are places inside the town. So the Milap takes place in the center. Here the boys, the Swarupas are illuminated by white flares. At the end of each Lila there's a ceremony called arti which is the temple ceremony. In the temple the arti, the camp of flame and the illumination is done to stone murtis. Here it's done to living murtis. They are the gods at this moment. People reach out to get prasad, to get their gifts from the gods. Tulsi leaves that they have touched and they reach very much to get a hold of them. When the Lila is not actually taking place or about to take place, people come and reverently wash or touch the feet of the Swarupas. Now this picture, black and white, was from the 1920s from the Maharaja's collection. I mean I took most of the pictures. My son took some and some I've gotten to archivaly. These old ones are archival. And at that point they used the real Ranganga river in the background for the crossing of the Ganga. But after the floods made it unreliable, they now use a local stream to represent or become the Ramanila, the Ganga at that time. Here you can see a little boy and his father coming to touch the feet of Rama and Lakshman and Sita. They are seated here in the Dharamshala. They just finished their rehearsals. They're in costume. They have the crowns on. So they are the gods they represent. But they have not been yet brought to the place where they're going to perform. They are here in their rehearsal place. You can see the little boy reaching to touch the feet. The black threads that they're worn across their gold crowns indicate that they are in exile. And we should see them in animal skins and the dress of a sannyasa, of a renouncer, of an ascetic in the forest, not in these fancy clothes. But again, they double reality because the gods are always resplendent no matter what they wear. And therefore we see them in their divine resplendence. And the thread reminds us that during the lila, during the play of it, they are just dressed in the simplest of garb, the loincloth, and almost naked. Here are sadhus who are holy people who come to attend the Ramanila each year. Hundreds of them in olden days, olden days from my point of view in the 70s when I first saw this, now fewer for reasons that we could discuss later. And the man on your left, the old man with his arm up, was called the 150-year-old Sadhu. I don't know how old he was, but he was very old. And he would attend each year. He's passed on now into his other existence. Of course, in the Indian cosmology, we don't die. As we die, we get recycled. Of course, physicists would agree that there's conservation of energy and conservation of matter just transformation. The argument is whether we have a self that also gets recycled and continues in some other mode. The Indian belief system would say, yes, the atheist belief system would say no. These sadhus sing and dance during Ramanila. Here's another one. And he is dressed as Hanuman. So sometimes with the red signifies Hanuman, the big war club is Hanuman. And the spectators, Neni, some of them are called who come very often. They listen and they listen to the Manas being chanted. They also listen to Sambad, which means dialogue. Because even the Manas is to modern Indian ears what Chaucer would be somewhere between Chaucer and Shakespeare to modern English speakers. So the Sambad is in contemporary, more or less contemporary Hindi from the late, middle to late 19th century. There's a whole story about the development of the Sambads and their relationship to Hindu nationalism. Again, I don't have time, you know, each of these hours could be a whole day as far as I'm concerned. Now here are people watching on elephants. And if you see, there's a white man to the right, that's me. And occasionally I was on an elephant. One of the funny stories is that the old Maharaja who you see there, the beauty Narayan Singh was told me one year I was too old to be on foot. I had to have an elephant. And I said, well, I'm more or less an anthropologist. I have to be with the people. He said, no, you have to have an elephant. You don't fight the king. So I rode one day. But then I said, I don't need the elephant after that. He says, no, the elephant will follow you. So the next day I went out on foot and the elephant kept after me. And of course that can't be anonymous with an elephant there. So I started to put children up on the elephant. And he got a little bit pissed. The Maharaja said, okay, I withdraw the elephant. Here is the Maharaja coming into the city of Banaras. One day he comes in to the neighborhood of Naughti Imli for the Bharatni Lot there in the afternoon. And that's the largest crowd. And it's not even the Ramnagar Ramnila. It's for one inside of Banaras. Upwards of 200,000 people come. Here are the Maharaja. I've been present for the rule of two Maharajas. This is Vibhuti Narayan Singh. Later on you'll see his son Anant Narayan Singh. And he's at the wedding of Ramansita. And you see the 150-year-old Sadhu sitting next to him. So we don't do that in our political system. We really don't include the renouncing beggars as part of our real political system. We sometimes kiss a baby here and there. But this man was very revered. And he's sitting in the honored seat to the right of the Maharaja himself. When the audience participates greatly, so during the exile of Ram, the beginning, I'm on this elephant. And you can see this long crowd following. So Ram is in front. He's going to exile. And the people go with him. And as they go, they pass through the streets and lanes of Ramnagar. And women and children and men come out and watch what's going on. So that this is an ambulatory environmental theater production. Here is Ravan on your left with his 10 heads and 20 arms. And he's doing battle with Hanuman on your right. At a certain point, Ram's brother Lakshman is wounded. And one of the most moving scenes in Ramlina is when Ram laments the wounding of his brother. But this mortal wound is healed when Hanuman brings back an herb from the Himalayan mountains that revives Lakshman. The great day of victory, Vijayadashmi, a Dasara day. It's also the day of Durga Pooja. It's a great celebratory day in North India. Occurs the 10th day of the month. It's kind of interesting to me because in the Jewish tradition, of course, Yom Kippur is the 10th day of the Day of Atonement. This 10th day in the fall. Again, I see a lot of confluence of myths, stories, calendars, and lunar cycles and so on. The Maharaja comes out and a great crowd assembles the largest crowd in Ramnagar to watch the final battle, the defeat of Ravan and his cremation. And there is Ravan's effigy. The living actor playing Ravan will die. And the effigy awaits. And there is the cremation. Talk about Burning Man, right? So he's cremated. And this cremation is his acceptance by Ram, by Vishnu. He surrenders at the end. And one of the great moments of Ramlila for me is when the Ravan is finally slain and it's an earlier scene, he comes over and touches Ram's feet and surrender. And then he turns and he starts for the applause. And the audience applaud. So at that point we have the demon defeated by the God, the man touching the God in worship and the performer, the theater person, leading applause at the climactic moment of the theater. And all of this coexist in Ramlila. This is the way it was in 1829 when James Princep, who was a traveler in Upper India, came to Benaras. So we know that they were doing, you can see to your far left, the tall figure with the arms, that's Ravan. They had huge effigies and many, many elephants. And Princep was a pretty accurate lithographer, so I don't think he was exaggerating. So this is when the Ramnagar identifies as his Ramnagar. Ramlila had great spectacle. The Sambha did not exist at this time. And we have no evidence that it was 31 days. But certainly this day the burning, the defeat of Ravan was a very big day back in 1829. This is the way the Bharat Milak looks close up. This is the Mahara, the beauty Narayan Singh. And then there's a ceremony that exists only in Ramlagar called Kothmadaai. And that means farewell. At that point, after the Ramlila is over, outside of the Ramchart Manas, outside of the Ramayana Sanskrit tradition, the boys, the Swaribs come to the Maharaja's palace. He arranges to have them fed. And then he performs the arti himself and says farewell to them. Back in Ayodhya, they come and the ordinary people come and touch their feet. And they'll have a final, what the Rishik and I call people's arti, the Maharajas out of it at that point. And they go back to Ayodhya and they have a final arti. And then, well, that's all I have. I was going to take you back to the Dharam Salam, but probably I've taken too much time anyway. But that gives some sense of what this magnificent performance is. Thank you. Oh, yes, please. Pretty good summary, I think. No, it's all right. I just think of, you know, I've never been under this kind of pressure to congeal myself. I usually am melted. And at this present moment, I'm trying to at least turn to Jell-O if not cement. Okay, you should just shoot. So what my association with his work has been, which spans from 1976, when we both went back to Ramila, about 40 years of continued interaction with the same performance, about seven visits, which includes three full 31 days of attending the Ramila every single day from 5 p.m., sometimes ending at midnight, sometimes going out the whole night. So people do 10,000 photographs, 200 hours of audio which were recordings, several interviews with the Royal Family, documents, maps, drawings of the environment. So within this huge span completes Ramila's life and the whole Ramila exists now on New York University's faculty digital archives and now it's sitting on our store. So for four years to sit with this material, span it out, identify each and every image and say, this is what is going on, has been a very tedious but a very exciting journey. So I'll quickly jump into what my association with this archive is, with Richard's life is. I want you to have it closer. Okay. And what the archive does in trying to really help both Richard and me and the scholars who wouldn't say this, identify or lay all these different ears, different performances on a single plane, on a way linear narrative which Richard just did in 10 minutes. So what Richard's archive is at the point trying to do is to help all of us engage with this continuous reenactment. What it does is that it's not an after-life of a performance, which mostly archives are. The performance is still going on. So what we can really do is interact with it while there's something happening every single year in Ramnagar. I look at this whole collection in three temporalities. One is Richard's own biography. As we see his first ever photograph taken in 1978, this is the first time he's ever crossing the river. We see the fort on the other side. To the last, to a picture from his last visit in 2013 of the fort. So already within two clicks, we have 40 years and 31 days. And Richard realized the magnitude of this performance, which is precisely manifested in the 10,000 photographs and two hours of recordings. And in spite of its vastness, we see how the archives is trying to thread together all these decades of his work. As I said, it's a biographical temporal relationship that we are all establishing with the archive. Exactly. Richard doesn't know what he has. And I'm trying to pull these pictures out to really take the director, Richard Schechner, in... That's Dionysus in 69. In 69. And that's the gods watching him. And it's so fascinating to see that in spite of Richard having already done a book on environmental theater, there are similarities of space and what his directorial work is already predicting what Ramlila would do. And onward is his own relation with an encounter with Banaras, with the time of India. These are his few letters that are in the archives before he goes after his first visit in 1976. He's writing to the Maharaja, seeking permission. This is his first visit in the Royal Fort, his first entry. He's talking to the secretary. And within the archive is also this other life of Banaras, the other life of the Maharaja. These are documents that the Maharaja is signing with the government of India. He's the shortest-lived Maharaja. He only rules from 11th July till 15th of October in 1947. It's the shortest-lived rule before India gains independence in 1947. But as Richard said, he continues to be the Maharaja. Beyond 1971, he's still called the Maharaja. He died. Vibhuti Narayan Singh passed away in 2000, and his son has taken over by a private ceremony. So Ramlila helps this other life of Banaras, this other life of India, which is already living its afterlife, continuously be performed within the 31 days. And all of this gets conflated on the map of Ramlila. This is a map from 1948 that on the left gives exactly what's happening for 31 days. So it's a full itinerary. And on the right is the full map. Richard, you want to talk about that? Yes. Well, here's the fort. You see that? Here's the Ganga river. And then we go down the road and we'll get way down here to Lanka at the bottom. You can see this is about, this is large. This is like 15 or 20 square kilometers. And you go down the road, you have Ayodhya, you have Robbog and Chitrakoot. Well, actually Robbog is up over here. And Chitrakoot is over here. And Janapur is here. So all of these are places that this is Hanuman bringing back the healing stuff. Here's Lakshman wounded. So the program is a map. It's an inherently environmental theater religious belief. So that this is the chronological 31 days. This is the visual, let me strouse you in terms, this is synchronic, excuse me, this is synchronic and this is diachronic. This goes through in time and this exists as a continuous present. So once this, the map of the monastime, as I said, of 14 years from not just Ram's birth, but the Ramnagaramlila actually begins with Ravan's birth. And until he's defeated and you see the little drawing of wounded Lakshman, till Ram Rajya is set up and Ram is coronated on the entire map of Ramnagar. So here's Ayodhya right next to the Maharaja's palace's Ram's palace. So with this Richard's temporality with the, with the, with the performance time and into the life of some performers. And I'll quickly talk about the one on the extreme right. He's, this is a photograph from 1978 of a performer who's playing a very normal role of a, of a villager in, in the Ramnagaramlila performance. I should say here that the four, five boys are selected by the Maharaja. They change each year. Sometimes you go from, for a couple of years, once your voice changes, you can't do that. But other roles, and there are a huge panoply of roles, Hanuman, Jambavan, which Richard is going to talk about. These are past, Ravan, passed down inside village families from generation to generation over dozens of years. The Ravan family has more than a hundred years. A Brahma, when I first saw him, he's the eldest god was played by a 96 year old man. When I asked him when you first played it, he said I was 27. So he started as a young man and ended as the old god that he was representing. So those roles are inscribed in the bodies of the villagers around Ramnagar. It's a certain kind of in-depth performance. And the roles of the Swarovs, of the gods, the most famous ones, they rotate and they roll themselves out. I mean, there's much theory to be made about that, about the temporary endurance of the character roles. In other words, these people die and the actual permanence of the rotating roles, the Swarovs never die because they're only there for a year. They're always young. They never grow old. So there's reality within reality. There's a profound performance theory enacted here. I'm spectacular to see that the five Swarovs never come from Ramnagar. They're always brought from other places. So there's this, again, this question of reality of not having any association with them as boys coming from Ramnagar. But they're these actors who are residents of Ramnagar and he's playing a villager off Ramnagar within the Ramnila space. That's a close above him. He doesn't look very happy in this minor role. But by the time we come to 1997, he's so proudly holding a very major role that he's going to grow into, which is of Jambawan, the only bear who, as you know, he sort of is diminished because as we know that Ram is supported by the monkey army, but then there's this bear who actually is one of the only characters who are set to be born in all of Vishnu's incarnations. So he's such an important character to have seen all of Vishnu's incarnations and to be in Ramnagar and to be in Ramnila. And he's the one who actually makes Hanuman realize his potential of being this really strong ally that he can be. So this is knowledge that he contains and it's so wonderful to see him so happy holding that mask in 1997 and that's his first role. He's in the center in black as the only bear watching Bali's defeat and the entire monkey army is going to agree to give support to Ram. That's Hanuman. There are 200 bears, Mila and Nara. This is Sugri, who has just had Ram's help in killing his brother Bali and there's Ram with his bow and arrow in his hand. And this is a good outside view. This is in the Kishkindha. No, yes it is Kishkindha. So and here this is the book called the Samvad book and in there are all the dialogues plus all the stage directions. This is Vyat. He's a priest. He's a stage director. And so you know a ready book would be very happy you know of holding the book with all the instructions and all the stage directions and all the dialogue and they actually in the Worcester group would be happy because they whispered the model dialogue into the ears of the performers. It's an in-ear performance but it's been an in-ear performance long before they were mechanically mirrored to make sure that you don't make any mistakes and there's 31 days so you don't have to memorize it. They whisper it and you can hear it and then they say it out loud. So that's coming back to Jambawan in 1997 straight to 2013 as an old actor still playing this role for almost 20 years and in 2013 that's him out of costume. Ram's been coronated. The new Maharaja is doing the loss the morning the early morning Arthi the final the final Arthi of the day where Ram's everything's over. He's he's being coronated. Not that Kogpeda yet. Yeah that'll be later. This is after his coronation. Right and so Ram Rajya has been established in Ram Nagar and Jambawan who's standing right in the back comes back as as a citizen both of Ram Rajya of Ram's rule and of Ram Nagar. So the sort of yeah so as a very proud citizen of Ram Nagar standing right behind the Maharaja one in the archive can see his journey as this very minor character in 1978 till 2013 a very prolonged association and this this growing old with Ram with Ramlila and with Richard watching him over the years something that he wasn't aware of in the 40 years but the archive actually pulls this relation out and and just not this question of temporality but I'll quickly go through the materials of Ram Nagar the effigies the effigy makers the role played by a man who who performs Sukhnaka the only time a woman comes in in this role within Ramlila is in 2006 as as Ravan's sister who wants to who who's very charmed by Ram wants to marry him he sends him to Lakshman she annoys Lakshman he chops off his nose and ears and she goes back to Ravan and drops off her nose and ears and she goes back to Ravan and tells him of the beauty of Sita and that's where Ravan comes to kidnap so this is a very crucial moment and this is transformed within minutes into her hideous form after being chopped off into her effigy after a few minutes and then the afterlife of the effigy of becoming this this you know transform from the space of the ritual of theatrical to to play where children poke with it now in the Ramlila Muslims play some significant role it's a Hindu play but they are the guiders of the elephants the Mahouts and they are the makers of all the effigies and the stage props and so when I asked them you know do you believe of course they don't believe and in Islam you're not supposed to make images anyway but it's a good job and they love the Ramlila right so if you go to Trinidad Ramlila and Ramlila has been exported all over the world there Muslims participate in a more believing way so you know this let's call this Wahhabist Islam is not the mainstream although we are kind of concerned about it and so here you know that's the brother of Ravan he's a big and well the largest effigies and exactly what Richard was saying is the only time you see Muslim families participating and yet the women are invisible they're not identified as as spectators but it's the only time women are actually seen at stage hands making the big effigy that we just saw also interesting is the way the props engage this is the this is the flying chariot that Pushpaka that brings Ram to Ayodhya back after his journey of exile and during the day it's so beautifully integrated into the life of Ramlila so within this this transformation of the life of not just the performers the researchers but also the material that that means so much to the archival putting together of this association and not just the photographs of the performance but this beautiful mala that sticks in one of the field notes some of my notebooks are out in the lobby there and not this particular one yeah but so this is this is from 21 September 1978 so it actually identifies the date and actually makes Richard present even in the notebook even in not a picture of the performance but a mala given to him you know it's withered away and a beautiful quote from one of the curators at MoMA who I really like who says that the objects don't need to be you know they even in their fragmentation even in the withering away they do tell a story and this photograph that you saw of of the brothers this end of war even if it's if it's abbreviated I don't know what happened in the in the scanning that happened way before I jumped into the archival collection but the light actually just falls beautifully on on the embrace and that just gets magnified and Richard and I and other scholars know who've been there that there are around 30,000 people surrounding this moment that happens at 11 p.m. they've waited from 5 p.m. for just this embrace to happen and yet in the archive is this very abbreviated probably technically broken image off of that embrace so in its spectacular putting together is coming back to what Richard understands of this performance of his own beings and the coming for 40 years and as a part of that remembering and forgetting is my own image that none of us were aware of of me in 2006 where I don't know Richard Schechner was there and a few years later I'm sitting here and this and just this this presence this is an evidence of Richard's remembering and forgetting and I would just automate it all between this ritual and play the 40 years of interpreting this magnificent now some of these pictures when I'm in them were taken by my son I will hear more about him tonight but I brought him to India for his first trip and he was my backpack bearer and sometimes photographer in what was it 1997 and obviously I'm here with the demon army and Ron's army and a little Hanuman and we're in Lanka and well that's me obviously thank you thank you now you have some questions I'm going to stand up because I like to answer questions because in terms of my active and I'll do this briefly because there are other things but my active participation in theater when I first saw Ramila I actually first saw it in 1976 I first saw the whole thing in 78 but I saw a few days in 76 I saw in Ramila a convergence between environmental theaters I practiced it and derived it largely from Grotowski and Meyerholtz and the European tradition and something already full-blown environmental theater realized in this make-belief make-belief performance in India and it was a thrill to see that kind of convergence I am certain that the Maharaja Banaras had not been studying a Kloppkopf and Meyerholtz and so on and so forth and Grotowski it's more likely that a Kloppkopf and Grotowski certainly made trips to India but to see these this convergence so I figured it was really a good thing to start with and also in terms of my scholarly adventure it's the longest arch of continuous coherent investigation of course I've been interested in theaters since I was in high school but but this is a particular thing that I return to again and again and again in 2013 is the last time most recent time but I'm sure I will be back again so how did it get so big the Ramila well the Ramila again I have to give these like telegraphic answers and we're working on our book together which will be primary documents photographs and interviews and notebook entries but I am also going to do a monograph where I'll explore the theoretical implications the telegraph answer is that the Kanga river bends at Banaras and in order to control trade and military operations you have to have a military outpost at the bend and it's best to have it across the river from the main of Banaras or Varanasi in the town of Ramigarh is a good place to have it so the Maharaja who is actually a late coming Maharaja in other words not only is he in the 47 but he's an 18th century he doesn't have a huge inheritance it was a Maharaja that was purchased for his son by a land a landlord so the family line doesn't go back that far established the fort there but the fort was on the wrong side of the river there's a right side of the river which is where Banaras is and there's a wrong side of the river where people go to do their morning toilet and someone it's not the right side but Ramigarh is on the wrong side so to bring some glory and reputation to it to establish it to bring people over to it he instigated I believe he instigated this great festival and that draw thousands of people from the 19th century across from shortly after establishing this Kila which is the Mughal word for fort this fort his palace so it's there for strategic reasons for political reasons for ritual to to establish the ritual the right side on the wrong side of the river and making it the right side of the river because the Maharaja has endorsed it yes well those those words signify different things for the same city like we call New York Gotham we call it the city we call it New York you know these things have a different resonance so Kashi is the oldest name I mean Diane Eck has written a great book called City of Light where she goes into this in some detail and she's the real expert on the history of this place the expert in English but Kashi is the ancient name for it and it's a city probably the longest continuously inhabited uh city in the world in other words there are older cities of course but they're wrecks you know and you can't go to Mahanjadar or you'll see an art you know or Stonehenge or whatever but people have been living in Banaras for at least 3000 years and we have records of it so and Kashi is the ancient name of the of this ancient kingdom and then when the Buddhists came and Buddha did his first his his sermons in Sarnat which are near to Banaras and you'll have a lot of Japanese tourists for example coming to Varanasi to go to Sarnat he Buddha lived around 500 BC about the same time that the Greek tragedians were working and he he his name the Buddhist name is Banaras and and so it still has that kind of Buddhistic Buddha was a a reformist Hindu right Buddhism is a Buddhism is the Hinduism roughly what Christianity is the Judaism and the Hindus rejected Buddhism but it is an outgrowth of it and then the modern more modern city Varanasi and it's got its name from various things from the Varuna River and the Asi River the thing between them whatever uh that represents both the colonial and post-colonial and independent Indian so these things all function simultaneously and the part of Varanasi right next to the river change has changed very little and I have photographs and lithographs from the 19th century photographs from my window and it shows the same kind of boat that's changed very little because the river itself is a constantly self-renewing sacred thing with the burning gods with a very powerful uh riverside uh places the Asi got where we live got means the banks of the river that has changed but inside the the city there's been an enormous change it's doubled in the population at least uh it's industrialized it's messy it's dirty it's fabulous people come to Banaras and Varanasi a lot of people come to die there because to die there is to immediately achieve moksha released to be absorbed so actively you can come there and do any sin you want because you're immediately forgiven if you manage to die there so it attracts a lot of uh uh good time seekers at the end of their life it's a paradox that way so the city has from my point of view both changed uh uh internally as modernized and so on but remain the same along the banks of the river and does the Ramleela also respond to that well the Ramleela changes it doesn't change let's say the Ramleela like any great performance it has its consistency as an enactment but its meaning it's semiotics change so as the rise of the BJP the the the radical hindu political party which now rules India and it's more even more radical out offshoots like the shiv sand and things of this sort as after the destruction of the mosque in 1992 in Ayodhya which is about 150 miles from Banaras not the Ayodhya in Ramleela but the quote real Ayodhya uh uh there's been a surge of of Hindu nationalism and Ram who at the beginning in the 19th century of the Ramleela was a cultural hero asserting the independence of India from the moguls on the one hand and the British on the other and then in Gandhi's time he was a unifier Ram should belong to Islam which should belong to Hindu which should belong to Christianity should belong to all the world and Ram should unify and now Ram is a nationalist Hindu nationalist figure so the same gestures mean differently within changing political context you talked about the multiple texts um yes and what is where does the story sit and what's your relation with all these narratives well there's the ghost text of Valmiki's Ramayan now Valmiki's Ramayan is the Sanskrit epic roughly 2000 years ago and it tells the story of Ram but in the Ramayan Ram is a quote a man we know he's a god but he doesn't know he's a god he is a hero and so the poet knows what the character doesn't know by the Ramchart Manas which is 15 centuries later everyone knows he's a god so that's the text we don't hear the Ramayan but it supplies the basic narrative the text we hear is the Manas in which Ram knows he is the incarnation of Vishnu everyone knows he's the incarnation the audience knows the characters know Ravana knows everyone knows and and therefore it this text as it's chanted is a kind of ongoing liturgical text at the same time the Sambha which is the recitation of dialogue and interactions is a dramatic text so that's in modern Hindi now I said I would say a little bit about it the one of the men who formed it was a man named Harsh Chandra Bharatendu Harsh Chandra now he's called the father of modern Hindi and he had a slogan which is Hindi Hindu Hindustan and this was the rise of Indian nationalism the 19th century and he said look very simple the England is the place where English is spoken France is the place where French is spoken Germany is the place where Germany is spoken but we don't have any language real language we have this kind of street language braj and so on dialects of Hindi at that time we have the mogul language Urdu and those are the language of the mogul rulers who came in with Genghis Khan's children right the mogul and we have the English but he said we must have our own language Hindi and he coined or he and his friends coined the term and he began he was a journalist and he began writing Hindi and speaking so he collaborated the Maharaja and making the sambar so now Ram the god speaks Hindi you see he's not speaking Sanskrit he's not speaking Urdu he's speaking Hindi a new language or a reform language out of existing dialects and and he is the Hindu god Ramraj the great king he he is the memory of the great king so here's the great king speaking the language so now we have Hindu Hindi therefore a proposed Hindustan and and so that text then establishes at a cultural level independent India and and and Ram is put into that so that we have that and then the final well final but the the next layer of of of text is the gestural layer of the the the ritual layers of the ceremonies of the arti of the darshan this the view of the gods all of the temple services the prasad these kind of things constitute a very very well known and believed in religious practice so that's also a a kind of text I think we're running out of time I can see the the time attire life director oh boy so now I want to brand I'm going to show those slides I think I should do it through my computer again so I need this one over here so I just later on I'll need to plug it in I'm trying to be honest I'm honored here we go here we go a great honor to be here this morning and be participating in this this wonderful event in honor of the individual who I think indisputably has had more of an impact on the theater nationally and internationally than anybody else I can think of that's currently living anyway the the particular aspect of Richard's work that we're going to be talking about for the next couple of hours is his directing and the the part of the program that you just had obviously as Richard mentioned himself connects to that in a number of interesting ways and maybe we'll have a chance to explore some of those as well when I first started getting really interested in the theater back in the late 50s and during the 60s I saw Richard Schechter everywhere sometimes literally but certainly figuratively the the work of the of TDR which he then was editing was really the bible for anybody in theater that was interested nationally and internationally and what was going on what were the new movements what were the new ideas what were the what were the theorists and and practitioners we should be interested in and one of the remarkable things about Richard from the very beginning was that in addition to pointing out people productions and movements that we we should know more about and that would be useful and influential to all of us Richard was also a very important practitioner he was doing things and and putting putting work into practice pushing out in new directions and stimulating us as much by his his practice as by his writing what we're going to be talking about the next couple of hours is primarily the practice although obviously the it's it's it's all of a piece and I hope we could talk a little bit about that as we discuss it so that's my introduction and we're going to now go through some to a short slideshow and then Richard and I will enter into dialogue okay so again there's never enough time I've been directing plays for a long time I think Brad the best thing is for me to run it from here slideshow and then when we get to the film clips should I run them from here or should we run them from you I can't hear you okay good so this is going to be a quick run through so let's take the lights down and turn turn the lights on okay now I'm just going to give brief sketches so you can get some sense of 50 years of directing more or less so this is 1967 this is The Victims of Duty it's New Orleans Louisiana it's the first thing designed by Jerry Rojo who is a student of mine it's obviously environmental theater uh it's uh Yuzhen Yonezko's victims of duty and I did my dissertation about Yonezko this is another scene from that play and that's Arthur Wagner recently passed away professor of the theater and a colleague of mine at Tulane at that point and that motorcycle is written into the center of the performance from outside there's a whole lot of stuff I could say about each of these the next set of slides are are Dionysus and Sixtinon I'm going to introduce them and not say anything just give them to you it's so well known that if you don't know it don't embarrass yourself by saying you don't know it just go online the film is there and so on but I want to give a panoply of the performing garage Dionysus in 69 you're going to see first the birth ritual then a little bit of the ecstasy dance then the famous first kiss between two men uh full on the mouth in the New York theater when uh Pentheus and Dionysus Dionysus seduces Pentheus then the sacrifice of Pentheus uh and the dismemberment of his body and finally the performance ending in the streets uh the play is based on the Baki if you go outside and see my notebooks you'll see a letter that I wrote from Fort Hood Louise the item on it was in the army in 1958 I had forgotten about that letter actually in 1957 to Monroe Littman who was the chair of the theater department at Tulane at that point I was in the army I was not there saying to him look I think I want to come to Tulane and go to school and I'm interested in this play the Baki maybe I'll submit an essay to TDR about it uh Robert Cargan was editing TDR at that time indeed I did submit that essay it was my first scholarly essay ever published anywhere and it's kind of ironic that it turned out to be the Baki young king's sacrifice to a jealous god and then I made this play based on the Baki so now let's look at Dionysus a very sensuous production to say the least this is the spectators most of those people are spectators there's Pentheus sending everybody back home there they are grabbing their clothes and going back home Dionysus and Pentheus kissing performer on your left spectator on your right spectators and performers mixed in what we call the total caress Pentheus finally coming giving over to Dionysus truly and coming out to doing his dances now in the film they're never naked because we wanted to get a good rating and have it commercially private but in the theater it was there was a lot of nakedness and and it intensified if I had to make that film over again I would say forget about the way I mean I didn't know what was going to happen 20 years later that this kind of thing would have been show showable but anyway Dionysus marking Pentheus agaves coming and caressing and there are two agaves a nice interesting personal story the one on the your right no excuse me the one on your left is Joan McIntosh the one on your right is Priscilla Smith Seal Smith they were I was living with Joan at the time and later married and later after that divorce but she wanted to play agave she says you know I'm the best actress Priscilla Seal came to me she said you will give that role to her because you're living with her and you you're always her privileging her you know I'm the best actress I finally said I'm so fucking tired of both of you you'll both play the role simultaneously at the same time and you make out of it whatever you can and then Dionysus in his final curse says and to you Joan if you've seen the movie and seal I pronounce this a doom you're doing to live out the rest of your wretched lives never knowing which of you played agave so that's that's the director's revenge of rebellious actors sometimes rather than choosing let them fight it out so the death ritual now the reverse of the birth ritual with those bloody hands and Brian took this notion of the bloody hand and use it and carry Vietnam was a period of Vietnam Dionysus cursing them all and then the move into the streets of New York at about the same time the living theater was doing similar things with Paradise now actually it was yeah about the same time all right now the next set of pictures I'm giving you an advance so I don't have to waste the time talking is of Macbeth now remember these first pictures performance groups pictures not the first two which was in New Orleans but this next set I'm concentrating on my earlier work we're all done in the performing garage and unless otherwise noted the environments were designed by Jerry Rojo in consultation with me Jerry's still alive he teaches you know he taught at the University of Connecticut and the way we work is I conceived of the set and he did the physical design and construction of them the technical drawings but the the ideas I have to say in my way were my ideas so with with Macbeth I wanted the table the banquet table and the the three witches that were dark powers and they were not only the witches but they were all of the lower class characters and they inherited and out there in the table is my version of Macbeth this is with a K my rule for myself in making the text was I had to use words that were in the original but I didn't have to use them in the order they were given so I followed the basic uh uh uh script but and it has the feeling of Shakespeare could not usually word that was in there but I retold the story in my own way there's Macbeth selecting uh two of the dark powers to kill bank well bank was played by a woman there's Macbeth at his banquet but he's being eaten by the three powers by the witches there is Macduff and Malcolm plotting their vengeance and there's Richard Shekner with the notebooks you'll see many of those notebooks out there I would always take notes and deliver them to the actors and there's the final scene Steve Boers giving to uh and Macduff uh Macduff giving the crown to Malcolm Steve Boers giving it to uh Will Sheppard William Sheppard next performance is called Commune same space and it's called several well-known uh uh scenes enacted by the youth of our nation and what it was was the Vietnam War the Milan massacre especially and the killings of Sharon Tate and her friends by uh Charles Mattson and to do research for this particular production I went and joined temporarily the Commune in Boston they wanted me to stay there etc etc similar to the Manson kind of came in they weren't murdering people at least not while I was there but they were it was a pretty it was a pretty heavy duty kind of thing to get a sense of that interiority so the conceit of the play is how would Charles Mattson tell the history of the United States and incorporate into it the Vietnam War and uh uh we uh to get into that performance you had to take off your shoes you let no one in who had their shoes and the shoes stayed by the entrance way and then the performers used those shoes when they were the murder we also stole the actor the spectators uh coats and scarves were put in the costume ourselves in their clothes which we stole because Mattson said we creep and crawl into people's houses and take things that belong to us because everything belongs to everybody he was a kind of uh insane murderous idealist utopian communist uh and uh uh and I was very affected by you know the book The Family and and what I learned about Mattson and Squeaky Frome and the rest of them and and then we re-enacted that murder as well as uh integrated texts from uh Thorough and Emerson and Melville and uh uh Shakespeare's King Lear and Richard III and Edward II and I assembled this text all about communal things it was the first time a small and gray had made a cameo appearance earlier but this was the first time that he had a major role so there is that same space as configured in commune they're small and gray as a coyote and those other two people are spectators there's another person up above as another coyote because it takes place in the desert and you can see the chalk uh when the people came in they took off their shoes but they were given chalk and they could do graffiti wherever they wanted all over now there you can see Joan McIntosh at the end of the pool there and she's wearing a coat that she took from some spectator the idea was to take it and the spectator would not know that they were taking it and here they are on the creepy crawly mission going in to do the uh killings and you can see they have shoes on the shoes and spectator's shoes uh and here they are uh killing and the people in the center represent the villages of Belay there was a scene in the play where we selected 15 people from the audience randomly to come down and represent the villagers of Belay and then these killings were going on around them as well as we interviewing them giving the testimony about the spotter at Belay if somebody refused to come down we would say let's say Joe Roche over here refused to come down I said well you have a choice you can select somebody in the room to come down for you and if they come down for you fine or you can go home a fine or if you stay and you don't select we're not going on with the performance we will not go on the performance till either you go home or we have 15 people and occasionally it lasted two three hours to stand on but once you play the rules of the game you play the rules of the game so here's that and then final the uh and this is the man in the multicolored costume in the center lower is smalding and he ends the play with this statement what the role of the artist in today's society and his answer is yes yes and then the play fades and people have to go and find their property and their shoes and so on now I want to run the film clip from uh tooth of crime that's the next play I did I don't have videos from it but I want to run on the film clip from Sam Shepard's tooth of crime I did the uh American premiere so let's get this out of here and get the picture on hey let's have the picture same space take the lights down please a little a little louder too that's falling gray across so it was done for a film and it was done as a film in a kind of Hollywood studio John McIntosh is Becky Luke and the audience could move around anywhere in this space and you can see these are all spectators there they could go up above they could hang around it was very close as though they were on a set of a film and we did film it and you could see the way we spoke was kind of movie talk in other words not loud see her and the spectators rolling nightclubs I always wanted the intimacy of the spectator and the performance together I mean even this room is distasteful to me to some degree but there's no other way to do it but you know what I mean I'd rather sit in a circle and okay move it forward a little bit I want to go do that song just move it keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going yeah that right there let's no no go forward it's not no forward human right okay let's stop I wanted to go on to another song we don't have enough time but you can get the idea so I integrated music into the performance Sam Shepard was never happy with this because I didn't follow his stage direction and he and I said stage directions are for history not for directors and and I wouldn't take his advice about music I wanted to make music from old car parts integral but so that was that okay the next is mother courage we did it during the recession what happened hello I need there you so this was the program beat mother courage is winter clearance that's Ron Vorder during the crunch your best bed is with mother courage a saving discount each night we gave a 19 cents off 18 cents production performance group for touring group rate center center center complete dinner $1.99 so I wanted to take the commerce idea of mother courage and also not to have her in some german mythical war in the 16th century but right here in the united states at this time although we didn't change the text I stood very close to the man on text it's still referred to the 30 years war where the play is set but the reference you'll see the visual reference is much different so this is the beginning we didn't have a wagon I decided that the way to do mother courage in my own way was to reject the wagon once I have a wagon I'm imitating the model books and I'm not interested ever in imitating any other director I only want to steal occasionally but never imitate so and when we talk about surrogation and restoration of labor we talk about the difference theft and imitation in my basis at any rate to the right there is elizabeth lakamp who played several roles in it and she was also into the crime this jim clayberg designed the set the jone macintosh playing courage leanie sack as catrene and a swallowing gray as swiss cheese and you can see that's the same space how the audience is packing and instead of the wagon we had these ropes and pulleys and the whole room became mother courage's wagon so here at the first scene he's the horse holding the wagging and here's courage negotiating with the sergeant everybody played multiple roles here's the eye lift singing from the general the general is played by elizabeth lakamp and we did her as a vietnamese south vietnamese general we modeled her and this is up in the corner of the garage so this is the famous scene three when swiss cheese loses the cash box throws it away here's courage here's uh event the prostitute there's a prostitute's home you know where she does her business this is a catrene and here's the home base of the wagon we can again see we had a couple of hundred people's very successful production and we left these marks on the floor so we could the idea was not to hide in any sense that's very brekkian hide what we were doing we did when we put a spike on the floor as they say in theater we left it very very uh visible so here's that scene uh catrene is running off of the red boots spaulding uh the swiss cheese as a boy scout is trying to hide the cash box the soldiers are coming to do uh sex with the event courage is uh uh getting some shit to rub on catrene's face so she wouldn't be raped etc etc and then but uh swiss cheese is caught and he's put up in a halter the event is watching courage doesn't know what to do and his life literally hangs in the balance and then we play the song of the hours there and we hold out the musicians as his life hangs in the balance and again i was always using these things now the lights are much into the set as you can see and the pulley so the the notion was to build the theater the history the americanness of it in uh swiss jesus shot and you can see courage and then we did this in india as well and this is the uh same scene uh the silent scream of halein vile very famous and that one we did imitate her steel uh because courage can't make any noise but she can have the expression of it and these are all indian uh uh uh uh indian i think this was the from the calcutta production courage goes and looks and has to deny that she knows then we serve the supper to the audience it was a four-hour performance we're no information we really did serve them supper during the uh during the performance and we did scene for the song of the great capitulation during supper as a cabaret song and then shortly thereafter we went out into the street this is the performing garage that sign is still there there's the performing garage sign this says mother courage there's uh katrine it's snow on the ground it's cold it's very hot very cold in the wintertime when we did that this door of the garage remained open for the rest of the performance again i i've always wanted to challenge uh spectators they can uh get cold and get hot they can do this or that i don't believe in coddling them so we'll steal their clothes and commune we'll make it cold and mother courage whatever happens happens uh etc katrine is uh uh killed courage strips her down to her underwear because she can sell the clothes courage is always selling things she pays the peasant woman for the burial played by la comp courage gathers up all of the ropes she's like a woman a spider caught in her own web and she goes off where everybody is in the pit all the dead are in the pit you can see the spectators in their coats it's very cold and she says wait for me so that's mother courage next is marion project the same time we did this is upstairs at the garage so we sometimes had six hour performances we did four hours of mother courage that we went upstairs and did the marion project and it was uh played by david guard marion monroe was played by joan mackintosh elizabeth will come people don't know elizabeth's uh long uh acting history with me she acted in a number of performances truth of crime mother courage marion project uh uh cops you so you'll see her so uh this is liz and this is joan mackintosh now this performance was a complete replication of itself this is a dividing line this television screen shows what happens on this side this one on this side and this is the one of the few times they see each other the performance was two simultaneous performances going on at the same time mirror images of themselves the reason this occurred actually was not some brilliant stroke of mine i did this as a workshop production american university of washington there were too many students that bucket will just double cast it and i didn't want to meet them twice so you'll come to the same rehearsals you'll be on this side of the room you'll be on this side of the room but it was it was one of those accidents that really worked very well because of marilyn's image as as a media image so it it became uh this kind of thing so you can see that there's this there's that and there's this guy and there's that uh everything is doubled and ron border was one of the directors and then these are spectators this was the only production of mine that lee strassburg ever saw there is uh uh uh elizabeth lakamp there's john mackintosh there's the scene that they're trying to shoot in a movie they want her to bend down like that so they can get a shot of her but she finally does it but she doesn't like doing it and uh they have to coach her and now of course there's an understudy and the understudy is doing it and they're talking to the real marilyn they got her doing it here's the understudy you see this so it was it took when i finally did it professionally it really took exact dance precision because all the dialogue was spoken so you couldn't have it blurry it had to be exact then they get a massage and then finally they pose the two men the gackers in the famous marilyn calendar pose but i didn't want to have a man a woman posed in it i wanted to throw that back so we had a man two men do that and the two marines took their polaroid pictures and they got up we left the polaroid shot and spectators could do that next performance downstairs in the garage same kind was of senica's edifice now senica's rather than uh rather than uh uh uh sofas and there i built uh rojo built for me a uh a roman apathy and 27 tons of dirt we had to have dump trucks come they were three and a half feet deep and we dug into that dirt not just a little bit but this this far from the floor and there's uh john macintosh as yocasa and i always thought of yocasa constantly being pregnant after edifice arrived she has four children right away and he's been gone at least 18 years so something like that so obviously she's eager now we took this uh body mask when jone was eight months pregnant with our son sam so it was uh and it was a very uh personal performance it was also at the end of our marriage so it was a doubly personal and the audience again is very very uh close in uh there's edifice uh steve borst uh creon and tiricius played by a woman and we use masks that we cast from our own face so she's blind so she has the hands over her eyes and edifice will finally have the hands over his eyes and then the uh tiricius is buried in this earth and it was very frightening for the actors because all that's left is this and her head and she's got this earth and then she starts to prophesy and the whole room vibrates because it's coming from under the earth and then the her assistant uh drops down into the earth and then edifice uh embraces uh yocasta they really know and then we speak the lines uh the shepherd and the messenger but these masks we cast from our own faces so uh this is his neesax face and this is the messenger's face i like i always like this with the spectator behind and edifice interrogating the uh shepherd then this uh strange scene where the messenger crosses with a trombone why because the actor playing had played the trombone and i wanted a pause and i always uh brek once said you want to build a house use the bricks that are there so i uh said let's play the trombone at this moment any grit i also used a great drum that i brought back from india from chow dancing as a vibrating great drum called a dorm drum edifice himself buries his face and comes up knowing who he is the messenger describes the earth being the blood throwing it up how edifice blinded himself and this was a very hard scene because the earth comes down over his face like that uh uh and then uh yocasta comes edifice is standing there naked drenched in blood his own mud his own hands blanking out the mask of his face she touches him his penis and says this is where it started right here they laugh they laugh it's an absurd kind of thing and then she digs up and finds the spear with which edifice hill lios plunges it into her pregnant belly and dies uh it was probably the harshest performance i've ever done now i want to run the yocastas clip the very very beginning i return to the yocasta theme i'm not going to play very much of this but i want you to see what i did with yocastas my own version uh co-authored with staviana stinescu who's teaching uh playwriting at uh ethical college and i was my colleague and so this is turned down to life and let's have the beginning of yocastas it's about yocasta for yocastas four times of her life but this is just the very very beginning i want to show only a few minutes so there you can see yocastas redux 2005 well i wasn't wanting to show all this but it's okay why not give them their credit you can see i i was visit all right and now benjamin moth and i have been working together since this time so this is the very beginning a little louder please from zoos what did zoos say do you want to hear it i will certainly do i was very young for the letter around quote dear yocasta you're such a sweet and nice girl you still believe in me i myself have taken a fancy to you he's really so affectionate for a guy but it's been a while by seeing the guys of a wool or a swan in fact i'm a bit reflex about what the best shape would be for me to appear on earth now would you please skip this part and go straight to the prophecy okay let me see here it is quote yocasta sweetheart i've got some bad news and some good news the bad news is you will abandon your own son the night he is born yes let him back to you and he will fuck you own son for 14 years quote and the good news that is the news i usually don't discuss my private life clean after all what are you about it now after all this time i understand so yocasta in my but what happened to you what do you make a sick and Freud statement in his interpretation of dreams and i quote it's my copy of the book all of us to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father i'm quote well that's sure the way it wasn't my family and here's what i'm doing quote king eddus who stole his father's place and married his mother yocasta the community shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes i'm quote that's not about me that is and legs i'm here to set the rubber straight those feelings we have for our boys they're natural something that all mothers feel even when you aren't mothers know they weren't even mother it was an arranged marriage i think i respected a lot he was much older than i was how is your sex life with him nothing compared to what i had so you don't regret having an intimate relationship with your son intimate are you ever sad depressed suicide never he was more than just a son he was a gift from zoos indescribable what number of ports that you did everything you could to make sure that i just never found out who he really was and when you did find out you committed suicide well i'm here and i love yes you are so i obviously didn't pain myself or stick in the night of my vagina that's what was right soft and clean and cynical wrote and people eat it up they love violence a sensational ending okay enough could you talk about that okay so what i did in that performance then she's joined by three other yokastas one who was eight years old one who's the one who gives away edifice at her birth and the perfect one yono who lives with edifice and enjoys him for those 14 years that video is available they said i couldn't turn these down a little bit just a little bit so we can see this that's good they said i couldn't do naturalism so the next thing i did was realistic uh hyper realistic so this is called cops by terry kurtis fox obtained a space next to the performing garage that's elizabeth will comp is the waitress that's william defoe is the cook you can see where the spectators are and the spectators are also in the spot where the camera is and it also had spauldin gray steve borst tim shelton and it's a cop story a shootout story and i actually purchased a an abandoned diner and brought the fixtures in and set it up and we had the real phone we had a real working stove etc and it's uh you know everybody gets shot uh and the the uh the thief holds the cook hostage but finally the cops uh the cops shoot him okay that's the end of that one so i i never return to that kind of hyper realism again but uh under duress i would uh the next is a fowl's fashion on where fowl's is a cook i was going to show you a film clip and i won't we're running way late in time and there's one more film clip i want to show so this is a mephestopheles played by a woman mephestopheles assistant played by a german woman woman orla neuerberg who spoke german and uh fowl's uh there as i say is a cook so uh here's uh mephestopheles interviewing fowl her tail had a kind of a penis ending as you can see uh and uh there it is the uh contract in blood fowl's getting what he wants he uh dances with cows uh and finally he's thrown into a huge pot of marinara sauce uh as his uh comeuppance uh next one very quickly is ma reine's black bottom the first african-american play ever done in south africa and the first uh the fully integrated performance at a major south african festival i was very proud to have african national congress behind me and uh the grams down festival the grams down memorial agreed to my request that the audience be integrated the cast uh was uh an integrated cast and it was environmental theater there is the uh 1980 something rather i have to look at my cv but around 84 85 something like that uh so that's ma reine's uh that's the recording studio that's where the producers are and that's where the uh band rehearsed so that three spaces in this big space i'll just go quickly through it there's ma reine who was playing by a very well-known south african singer and i added three songs to it in the broadway production was can music we had live music and at the beginning of the second act where the crisis occurs we have her sing three songs before she has her neck you try to introduce the music so we can hear her really singing so here's the singing and then there's uh uh levy and uh does he may does he may is uh ma reine's lover and but she's also he's interested levy levy wants to make a uh cut his own records and so he's a young guy and as you know at the end of the play he kills Toledo one of the other musicians and his life is ruined here he's arguing with Toledo and there's the view from the directors of the the uh white producers booth that we saw before there's ma reine actually doing the recording uh i was in the a peculiar position of going to south africa introducing south africans to african-american behaviors and language i brought in movies and so on uh so i was the kind of person who did that now you might wonder why uh august wilson gave me permission to do this because uh you know loy richards who's a friend he directed uh wilson's plays and i don't think ma reine's white directors especially at that time were allowed to do it i another part of my life which we're not dealing with is the free southern theater and uh my work in the uh freedom movement and and and political action in the south in the early 60s i was proudly the first uh one of the first two whites arrested in new orleans were sitting etc etc etc so i was fairly well known in the freedom movement and when i asked to do this wilson gave permission now we're going on to three sisters uh i'm sorry it's blurred but we built this complete house in india cherry caba gecha not three sisters cherry orchard cherry caba gecha and i i had it made so it was a microphone so you can have scenes inside again it was a certain kind of realism not like cops but the audience could go and and and be very close to it and the first act that they were sitting in an outdoor theater but the second act we planted 200 trees they went out into the orchard itself and here you can see these speakers and the uh people walking through those thin trees we planted and we did the second act in the orchard and then the third act we set up these 300 light bulbs nisar alana designed this with me and the costumes are done by amal alana they're very well known indian uh theater people and the audience are participated and sometimes danced and there's where lupaken comes and says you know i bought the orchard it's mine and he apologizes for it but rent of sky is of course devastated and the last act where the audience moves around to the front of the house the first act they're sitting and they're seeing the back of the house and we actually built this house and say 10 000 tiles uh nisar and i would come at night as they were putting the house up it was a real functioning house and they're then they go out and the audience and i i hired this double a horse and carriage to take all their possessions and leave them and when they left the house they went out into the uh streets of deli and here's the audience standing watching and then uh rent of sky and gay have a chance to go out and uh say goodbye in the orchard and finally fierce is locked in now uh the next production and i will show a brief film is of three sisters here again in new york and i did each act in a different style i'm going to show you the biomechanical style briefly but this is the third act which is during the siege of leningrad or in a gulag depending on how you want to interpret it uh and and uh that brick wall is constantly built in rebuild we literally built the fourth wall before the audience the first act was done as realism as if it were 1903 when the play uh began second act which i'll show you a film clip is uh uh 1923 which is the uh time of biomechanics and so on and then the 43 or 45 the gulag or leningrad and the last act everything is uh is uh uh put together uh all the uh uh uh decorative from the earlier acts you're there and the it's a radio play the actors stand in front of the microphone to just speak it the other actors are back there like trees and they move forward there's no attempt to stay can we do the clip from uh three sisters and i want you to move it forward i'll tell you where because we're really running late on time and uh okay go forward no no no back backwards is the beginning of it back back okay do it do it from there no yeah go ahead louder so this is the biomechanical act changes the way life deceives us today i was so this is andrei talking to the old man with a message a little louder in jama school Maybe she'll say something about it sooner or later. Okay, quickly to the end of these slides. This now is tomorrow's Out of the Out Mountains in Shanghai in a new play at that time. In 1989 at the time of Tiananmen Square about the Cultural Revolution. Last play till this day with an overt political content in China. And I was there, I directed it, then I was evacuated by the State Department four days after Tiananmen Square, which of course was happening in Beijing, but there were huge demonstrations in Shanghai as well. You can see how orderly the Chinese audience, we didn't tell them to line up that way, they just took that kind of position. But sometimes when the play was much more intimate outside, the first act was outside, the spectators loosened up and got inside. Then the second act was inside in the theater, and it was a story telling about a commissar, a woman commissar in her love affair with one of her subordinates who was sent into the mountains during the Cultural Revolution. And here he is making love to her feet, which was extremely erotic within the Chinese context where there's a whole foot eroticism culture. So wasn't allowed to kiss on the mouth, but they didn't think anything of the feet so I had him really do her feet pretty well. At a certain point the Red Guard come on stage, this is the political content, and they're holding mouths with a book this 1989, they go out into the audience, they see somebody really from the audience, they bring the person on stage, dunce and so on, and they put him in the airplane pose. This was very traumatic for people. The last act, the love affair between the man who sent to the mountains and a younger woman, he rejects the commissar and she sends him away from the mountains. And we ended with a Noshi ritual, which is a ritual drama from Guizhou province. And during that period, a couple of years before I did the play, I made a trip to the interior of China and I researched this form. And this was done on stage and the set behind the mountains were just the set pieces that we saw and the play went and ended outdoors. Then most recently, and there's a full film of it, I was going to show a clip, but I'm not going to show a clip, we just don't have time. We'll see what Marvin wants to ask me and how we're going to go. What? Oh, well, let's just see, maybe a little bit later. So this is, this is, this is imagining oh, it was last year at this time. It was influenced by Valtus and by Hamlet, who I returned to several times in Ophelia, there are no men's voices. Fonsia Osvalcan, who's there, saw this production and was one of the enthusiastic recommenders of it and one of the reasons it went to Montplair. But also the story of oh, which is a French erotic novel. At a certain point, there's an interview, there's film in it. That's when I was going to show this interview film clip between Ophelia and the author of oh, it's a very interesting film clip. But let's see if we have time. And then there were some very, very intimate scenes, as you can see there and the spectators off to the left. And this production took place in eight or nine or ten or eleven spaces in and around the theater, cast or theater, part of peak performances in Montplair. Some of it took place outdoors. A lot of water, because oh, means water in French. Ophelia drowns the story of oh and so on, so I played with that. And then there's this main scene called the tipping point where Ophelia talking about her monologue, her talk about the death of Polonius and the giving away of the flowers and so on and so forth. Interest first with a narration from the story of oh itself. And then we went into a game show in the same space and here they're feeding flowers to Ophelia where every spectator had to take part in this game. There were three different stations that they could do. They could stuff Ophelia, that's what this was called. They could shoot a pistol full of more or less sperm, flew it into the faces of fellow spectators or performers who put their heads through a wall or they could take a Balthus-like picture on the lap of a young performer who said, her line was a great line, he says, you know, I may look 15, but I'm really 12. And so if you know anything about Balthus's painting, they're kind of beautifully executed child pornography pictures. But if they refused to do it, the spectators were sent to dramaturgy and the dramaturge was a fierce mistress and she existed out there and literally you could not see the end of the play. You had to stay in dramaturgy and learn about the play and look at some of it through the window and several people, you know, they would say, no, but I pay for my, it's like the, Mila, you either had to do, we explain, you have to do one of these three things and you're given a pass to go on or you end up in dramaturgy. So that's where they are. And then there were 11 different places where spectators could go at that point. Here in the main theater, a woman is singing a song with a long wedding dress. Here in a woman's bathroom, a woman is being drawn on and she's talking about, and she wanted, I did not devise these. These are things that the performers brought. And this woman, Australian professor, Deborah Laser Moore, wanted to talk about her mastectomy and her breast replacement and to draw on her body where she had been surgically intervened and the spectator drew on that. So this is, as the water, it dripped down from the flowers above. Again, these are things that people say to me, you know, your performers do the, you make your performance. No, I never make anybody do anything. I invite people. I see what you're going to do. I make sure that you know what you're doing, that you're consciously engaged in it, but I want something extreme. I will, my privilege is to say no. Not to say, and finally to say yes. Or as I think it was Grotowski told me, or maybe it was some other great director, a mise-en-scene is the least rejected of all the things to try. The least rejected of all the things to try. And unless you're willing to take a long time and reject a whole lot, you're never going to get a good mise-en-scene. It's not about inventiveness. It's about taking away. My formula is direction is subtraction. Direction is subtraction. So you keep subtracting until what you have left is what you're going to show. So at a certain point there's a peep house. You can see people looking into this house. All the women are in it. But at one point only one woman is in it and she is making up her lips, her nipples, and her labia. And people look through that to see what is going on. Ophelia has done her own grave outside the theater and she buries herself. An owl, which is the only male figure in the play, but it's a male in a red woman's dress. And finally they come to the water, to the river where Ophelia drowns herself and waiting there is that same Ophelia that had buried herself. And then all the women jump into that water and they keep returning. I don't know how many of you see imagining of. So you know that they went in and out and out until they were exhausted. They kept coming back and back and forth. And then on the bridge there was the author of the story of O and Gertrude. And the interspersed the lines, Gertrude's lines about the drowning of Ophelia pulling Riaz and finally all that's left is the floating shirt of the drowned Ophelia. So that does my slide projection for the time being. Thank you. So the first production was 1967 in New Orleans. The last production was 2014 in Montclair, New Jersey and in between was Shanghai and New Delhi and Grandstown South Africa. Great. Well Richard, oh first a little question and then we'll get serious. The little question is I have to ask the peep show in O, the peep show building is that supposed to be the Globe Theater? I thought so. Yeah, only you would make a joke like that. All right, great. And I always liked that this circular O was an octagon anyway. It was never a circle. An octagon makes a cylinder O, doesn't it? Yeah. Great. Well, of course you have, you've been to all corners of the world. Shanghai, South Africa, New Jersey. And have done it dazzling, as we see in this short summary, a dazzling variety of theatrical approaches. I'd like to start with asking you, is there a through line? Are there certain concerns or certain questions that you would say inform your directing as a whole? Is there some problem, some relationship with the audience that you feel is really central you keep coming back to again and again? Well, I think the through line and that's why over all these years my work has changed is a triangulation between the substance of the theater or the ocean of it, which is the spectator. You are what we swim in and if you're polluted, we're polluted and if you're pure, we're pure. So that's one field. The particular people who come to work with me, as Brecht said, you want to build a house, use the bricks that are there. I'm much more interested in seeing what is given to me rather than saying I need this kind of person, I need that kind of person. So when I audition, I say I don't want you to do a monologue, I don't want to hear anything. If I audition you, I want you to walk across, I'll talk to you, I want you to do this. It's people who with me, who do we have an interaction with? Who do I enjoy looking at and listening to? Not something you prepare because something you prepare is going to be tainted by somebody else's opinion and I'm not interested in somebody else's opinion about you. So those particular people, and of course when I had the performance group, I worked with the same people for 10 or 12 years. The New Orleans group was some few years. The East End players, which I could talk about, which is a province town the first time I directed and when I first met Eric Bentley, Eric was going to be celebrating his 100th birthday I think or something close to that next week or this week at the town hall. So the second is the group and the third is my own friends. Where am I free? And when I run a workshop, those of you who've been in a workshop with me, I say usually something to the effect as here's the rules of the game. There are certain things you have to do like yoga, breathing and so on, but when we get that basic out of the way and we get into the probing stuff, here's the rules of the game. I will ask you to do anything, not violence, not to harm yourself, but anything else and you are free to not do it. So that I don't feel that I have to say well should I ask this person to do such and such, that's nasty or not nice and you don't feel he's making me do it. And there's no blame if you do nothing. And on your part there's no blame for me to ask. Now usually it's not terribly difficult things is when we talk to someone about workshops, about crossings and this, but I also pride myself on being well the word would be somewhere between persuasive and seductive, between creative and manipulative. I mean I'm aware of the range of meanings of these things and those of you who've worked with me nobody says I can be in my own way charming and I can say all right so I want you to walk across the room and I want you to as you walk across the room take off your clothes. Take off some of them or all of them but if you don't take off all of them you've got to stop, you can't get to the other side. So there's a rule you can stay completely dressed but you're never going to cross the room. I might say you know Moses was not allowed in the promised land. He couldn't cross, others could. So something like that. So then people will begin and say oh we'll do it slowly, slower. But again, so the through line is the relationship between what is going on, now what are my fantasies? I don't come in with preordained fantasies. The fantasies or imagination my latest book is called Performed Imaginaries. So I like to think of it as imagination not fantasy because fantasy is tainted by the Freudian notion of this, you know, edible complex. Imagination, the making of an image is something else again. So for me it is what I see in you if I look at Joe Roche or if I look at Dan over there, Friedman or if I look at Fawzia, if I look at Rishika you know all of you, those of you I know or if I look at a stranger I don't know it evokes, I have trained myself that in a certain room, at a certain time I will be able to be in contact with what happens to me when I look at you or listen to you or work with you. Not in this context, this is too much but in many contexts. And then I've trained myself to hopefully inhibit that in ordinary discourse and engage it in the discourse that comes in those kind of workshop rooms crossing the line. We're in another world. So the through line is the changing conditions of those relationships. So it's not like I have an obsessive theme. There obviously is, if I look back at my work one through line I tend to emphasize women's stories. Perhaps I didn't want, I'm glad I come from a family of four boys and my grandfather, my mother was really the only female in my intimate group when I was growing up and I was fascinated and curious about women and I've always admired something about women's complexity. Not that men are not complex, obviously men are not a complex man, but I think women have a special complexity. So if I look back at it three sisters, mother courage, we can see that I'm dealing often a story of O, so Ophelia and no male voices heard. So that would be a through line that is not there at the very beginning though in Dionysus to some degree it's there because Dionysus himself is a polymorphous perverse quote woman like man. In other words, he's a God even to the Greeks was not the Achilles type God and he drove the women mad like Krishna drove the women mad. He had a particular relationship with women that story is about the women of thieves who go nuts. And one of the exercises we did for Dionysus I think I've said this the bore you if you've heard it before is I told the women in the group you go out to the rooftops of Soho this is before Soho was called Soho and take over those rooftops you'll have an hour and a half to set it up and get signals to yourselves those are the mountains I don't care how you get to those rooms then we men are going to come out and capture you. We spent all day you know playing on the roofs of Soho God knows why we weren't shot by cops and so on and so forth and you're from one roof and the other and across then another exercise I was doing Erebus I said what does it mean to pull out your eyes that's what he does poke out his eyes how can we possibly approach this ok let's go to a kosher butcher shop a slaughterhouse rather let's watch a calf get slaughtered for views slit the throat drain the blood and I bought the head of that path let's go back to the again the roof let's go on that roof and saying these lines watching this let's try to pull the eyes out of this dead cow's head which we did it was very difficult couldn't get the muscle there then that same cows head I used in Faust castronome casted in the plasticine and then I used it again in Prometheus project which is not a performance that I've shown you pictures of so the themes are recursive and they come back and I'm also strangely gifted by being literal in other words if Erebus pokes out his eyes I want to know what that means you know you don't go like that if you know et cetera et cetera so there are in the great dramas in other words in commune the woman playing gloss I had a woman playing gloss there you didn't see it so much in the pictures but she had a blindfold on and her job during the whole performance took more than two hours was to get from space A through the different arrows she had to touch those arrows and get to the edge of that wave and stand backwards on the edge of that wave now she's gone for two hours and have the faith to leap off backwards as Gloucester does on the Heath of course he doesn't fall very far because he's live right but that's the whole idea but she had to find that way so throughout the whole place she's not doing anything people are wondering and sometimes people take her foot and put her in the right direction the performers and finally at the murder time when everything is in the murder she's back there and she can hear it and she goes and we have to run and jump and get her if we miss she really hurts herself she's going backwards and she's in the act of collective faith so I did lots of exercises in group faith in blind there was another one called blind leader where you blindfold somebody and the person runs in the room do you remember this one? as hard as you can but you can't see you'll hit the wall you'll hit a chair and the group has to protect you so when you begin with that you really don't want to run but then finally you're going to go really quick I opened my eye at the end because I'm not but if your job was to stop me from hitting and my job was to go as hard as I can and to make the sound of what that terror is so these are exercises which are simple and yet they generate groupness and they put us in contact with feelings that we don't usually get in contact with and how to express terror and that in combination with certain exercises in breathing yoga breathing some people ask me how can you do this for 12 hours? it's not much if you breathe from here and of course I'll be tired by 8 o'clock tonight or 10 or maybe not but the point is that you can train yourself to focus and endurance and performance is about focus and endurance well trained and in relationship I love sports within the rules how to get as much done as possible and in a certain sense how to cheat and have an umpire the umpire is the director what can you get away with most of what you I mean this is a wonderful condensation of work with actors one thing that strikes me about what you say Richard about your overall strategy that is to say there's a kind of collaborativeness it's very interesting there I'll make suggestions you go as far as you choose to go which is of course very different from the traditional idea of either the the dictatorial German type director that does everything or the the laid back director says show me something interesting and I will respond to it there is an interaction there you've spoken almost entirely about the actors it occurs to me that the way you work that strategy you've also employed with the audience that is to say you say alright here are some choices you have it's really up to you how far you go with this whether you're what you've done in a number of productions is saying you don't have to play this game you can do other things that you haven't said you've been speaking about the actors could we use this now as a bridge to say something about your idea of the audience and how the audience about your collaboration with the audience so one of the reasons I'm very interested I want to make sure because it's a streaming is the light okay on me or do I need to be further forward or something it's okay because I can see I'm in the shadow I'm very interested in ritual so whether it's a true etymology or not I believe the word ritual is related to the word river and the idea of a river is that there's solid banks and there's flowing in between the banks if you have no banks it floods out you have no current if you have no flow you have a dry riverbed you have California so the notion of ritual is a repetitive action that within a certain social context has extremely radiating meaning meaning beyond what it is so when the priest raises the wafer and the wine it radiates if not the actual belief in blood and flesh and it refers to it in a way different than ordinary theater the willing suspension of disbelief so I am looking for the engagement of belief as I think I said in the first hour the transformation from make believe and to make believe and the audience must be the most or the spectators or the participators and I use we'll talk this afternoon about Rasa and Rasa theory the partakers I think of the theater as a kind of feast intellectual, emotional visual, auditory with us partaking so now I'm in this peculiar ironic situation where I realize I'm talking and there are 40 or 50 people out here listening so you're partaking by that way and that's very good too that's a kind of pedagogical one kind of pedagogical model but the other way in the theater is some kind of a ritual participation some kind of a definite interaction you know as a student I became enamored of Meyerholz experiment of a Klupkov's experiment, the Russians and the notion at the heyday of the revolution at that point before Meyerholz became the enemy and ended up at the wrong end of a bullet the utopianism the idea that we were building something together and then of course you know I was very influenced by Grotowski and the notion of the secure other of the space that was organic and again it wasn't so much that Grotowski taught me those things because when I found Grotowski's work in the 60s I was already doing so it was a confirmation but he did teach me a lot about how to work with actors and I took an actual physical workshop with Grotowski in 1967 his first workshop and his longest workshop in the United States at NYU so the spectators are co-participants in the process so my job as a director is to find spaces for you you addressing the people out here you by habit in this kind of thing want to come in and sit down in semi-fetal position which you're all in right you're not quite up like that but you're not often moving and this is fine for this kind of event but I try in my performances first of all to get you moving to not give you a seat when you find a place to sit down or stand up as you saw in the films you can sit or stand in a variety of ways you can move from place to place no fixed seating in Dionysus which was one of the first experiments in a large scale that I did with this let's say Joe Roach shows up at the theater with Stanley Cohen who's sitting next to him you two should meet each other do you know each other? no, there's Stanley, there's Joe Stanley and I we're at Cornell together and Joe Roach and I we deal with segregation and restoration so let's say you two decided to go to the theater together in Dionysus and I always like to work the door I like to work the cash register I like to work the door so you come together and I would say are you two together? and you would say yes but we've come together I paid for my ticket and I said I'm sorry I don't let people in together we're going to have to go to the back of the line so then you say I will do it I said okay I'll get the house manager so I go inside the door and you say hi I'm the house manager what can I do for you? now you're being kind of plagued with I actually go further I'll get the director and the owner of the theater I do that finally they realize that the lowest person the ticket taker is the highest person so they have no choice they said well what's my choice your choice is you see that line of people a lot of them want to come in now what does this do? so he goes into this space and there are no seats the first thing that happens when he comes in is a person says to him good evening sir and this is true may I take you to your seat and you say yes but there are no seats and you wait and he just goes on to the next one good evening man may I take you to your seat and he doesn't do anything he just has this line to repeat ritually and there was a ritual line that we hear from ticket takers and now he's being engaged and sabotaged so finally you find a place you decide okay you'll find a place now you're waiting Joe is waiting for Stanley to come in so first of all now he's paying attention he's looking at the door he's looking around when will Stanley come in I don't want to be alone I'm saving the seat for Stanley finally Stanley comes in now already the actors doing some exercises in this space so what does Joe do? Stanley is also looking around so all the way you're becoming engaged with the space in a way that you wouldn't if you were taking to your seat you're looking around the space so I try to find that was the Dionysus strategy in a commune it was the taking off of the shoes strategy imagining oh it's women with their knickers as they say in England their panties down around their knees giving lines sitting in various places and you're wondering what's going on in this dramaturgic woman who's already there with her whip and so on so you're engaged you have to engage and you have to give the audience something to do beyond sitting and waiting for something to happen I also like to think for the most part that the performance has to begin before the people come to it rather I mean I don't like going into a theater when I don't like blackouts going down to black and coming up I mean all those things are so boring to me and they're worse than boring they're counter productive of the performative experience of this ritual experience so the event has to be larger than in time and space then the people come into it so you're immediately entering like you're entering into an ocean or a river that ritual stream you have to give the audience and you structure this something to do some challenge which is maybe not as overtly described you know you don't say in your program I don't give out programs I give programs out at the end not at the beginning unless I'm forced to give out but even at imagine oh we gave out the programs at the end I don't want people reading I want people watching and then if you want to find it's like a movie so if you want to find out what's going in the movie you know the credits come at the end et cetera not at the beginning for the most part so all of those things to engage the audience in in a particular way and then finally I'm seeing five years over here so I'm always a teacher I always figure if there's nothing to teach there's no reason to move and teaching is to me learning so I guess I'm always a student I'm always at the feet of the spectators what can I learn from engaging them and what can I teach them in a feedback system and how can I be articulate conscious and compassionate in my own way it may be a rigorous compassion but it's not a vindictive compassion you know I have been in my time attacked ridiculed and all I know that but I don't dislike anyone who's disliked me you know you know history will judge for one and two there's enough bile in the world to not to add to it thank you now obviously what I should do now is say let's bring everybody in a talk but I'm not going to do that sooner or later sooner or later yeah I think I know that everybody's eager to participate and Richard has essentially invited you to but I'm resisting for a few minutes longer Marvin is seeing more performances as Joe has testified than anyone in the world probably anyone in the history of the world we don't know the whole world so he speaks from a seat of great experience and wisdom and authority and authority especially here but there are so many things I want to ask Richard about and so you'll have to indulge me for probably five or ten minutes and then I really will open this up so everything you say Richard opens up other perspectives that are really which is why I've always enjoyed talking with you and seeing the work I have to say that it suddenly strikes me that there is something special about the director who meets you at the door and I think of course also of Arianne Nuschke who also feeds you the motif of sharing food is something you share with Nuschke and for some very similar concerns of bringing in of the audience and the creating of a community and so on I also remember in a more limited but very striking way when Gatovsky did constant prints down in the village that he went into trouble with Harvey at Bam and Harvey had given out too many tickets and so Gatovsky you may or may not remember stood at the door and chose who went in he didn't want the fat cats from Brooklyn to get in in front of the people that ought to be seeing so that's another memorable director at the door experience I had I wanted to ask you several things one a very specific thing I imagine that for the general public if they know one production of yours it's probably Dionysus 69 as you say much much has been written about that I would like you to speak just a moment about again if people are quoting you the most likely thing they are to quote is words restored behavior there are others but that one I wanted to ask you about Dionysus 69 and restored behavior that is this is one of the very few productions that I have seen twice over a long period of time with an actual attempt to restore the original production and I'd like to just say a few words about that experience that is what was it like seeing Dionysus an attempt to actually restore the behavior of Dionysus 69 what was your reaction to that project and and how it connects back to your ideas about audiences protecting your life well there's a back story so the rude mechanicals of Austin, Texas did a redo of Dionysus 69 and the director of the rude mechanicals was a student of mine a former student of mine so I and they invited me she invited me to go to Austin and see rehearsals at that point before they did it in Austin and then they brought it here to New York live arts anybody in this room see that see that performance okay so I advised them to not do it the way they did I said you can restore the action but you should allow it to have its own organicity and they said no because they would do things such as have an actor say I'm Bill Shepherd rather than the actor saying I'm the actor they are already playing the role of the person who is playing the role and they were and they were taking quite literally the Brian De Palma film as the be all and end all and I said look first of all there's the book which shows all the variations or some of the variations the film is shot at two different occasions there's a back story of that also Brian shot it one night look at the film carefully you'll see some is brighter than the other and what happened after shooting the first night which was the last night we were doing the play I said did you get it he said I think so but I can't be sure because it was so dark in there I can't develop the film this was not digital days this was celluloid days so I said well what should we do the safest thing we could do the play is closed I said okay and he invited the college where he was teaching and I invited people and we did it one more night the night after it closed with all the lights on so now we knew we had it so if you look at it you'll see there's a great contrast sometimes in the night but the second night's audience is a much quote smarter audience it wasn't the random audience that you get or people want to go but so I wanted so that's the film I wanted the rude mechanicals to take the book or the text and to redo it with its own processes and they wanted to do it as a replication of the film now I enjoyed it how can you not you know I mean being I'm not a man without ego and narcissistic delight in seeing work redone at the same time I felt it lacked this kind of groundedness in its own possibilities in other words it was inevitable what happened because it was tied to that film so if somebody like in the actual Dionysus Pentheus is out to select someone from the audience and he is supposed to select someone who attracts him but man or woman and sometimes was Pentheus ever played by a woman Dionysus was played by a woman anyway he was to go as far as he could go until the least resistance from his partner occurred on one night she didn't resist and they decided to leave the theater again and the play was over so the audience was infuriated and instead of me saying you shouldn't leave they left and I said to the audience I'm sorry Dionysus has lost tonight I'm the director the play is over and people said but we paid our money! I said the most I can do is give you a rain check and come back another time another point in Dionysus one other night students who had seen the play people came and saw it a lot decided that it was unjust that Pentheus should suffer this and he would rescue him so at the point that he's marked and about to die five Queen's College students part of the CUNY system five Queen's College students came out and literally lifted him out and said we're rescuing him we're taking you away from here and given the Dionysus game he left with him now this was different this was not that he had won but that he was rescued so I came out and I said I'm the director I want someone to volunteer from this audience to play Pentheus for the end of this play you're going to be stripped we don't have to strip you all the way we'll strip you to where you're comfortable you're going to go through this birth ritual you're going to be marked, you're going to be killed in a ritual way and I will give you the lines that you have to say not too many and a young man volunteered the audience was of course at first they thought it was a plant this was all and I shouldn't this is not a plant but at this point the ritual had not been completed because of some intervention different than the game where Dionysus can lose so at each of these points the audience it becomes a crucial factor within the performance now nothing as radical as that I've done afterwards your question was about the rude mechanicals one but the rude mechanicals one did not have the possibility of those kind of interventions I thought it was very good and Sean Sides who was the director who was the woman who was my student and I thought they did an excellent job of recapturing and I thought people got it but I wished it had had its own organismity one more question Richard I'm going to circle back to where we started Richard and that is when you were talking a student the Indian performances your you remarked that when you first encountered these in 76 was it the Ramleela the first time I encountered Indian performance in 1970 but the first time I saw Ramleela was in 76 I think we were from the films by certain visual and spatial parallels between the work you've been doing with Jerry Rojo and environmental theater and so on couldn't you just say a word or two there was you've already mentioned is it seeing certain parallels were there certain things that you thought that you carried away that really changed the way you worked as a result of exposure to the Ramleela any specific different visions or different procedures or anything like that that you took away from that not that I am consciously aware of I mean the way I do this anthropological field work is to immerse myself in the event and immersing oneself in the event of course it changes you but it's not like again I contrast myself to Peter Brook in this regard it's not like I wanted to do their story or or to build religious rituals into the performance I do build rituals into my performance but they're not they're again organic to the particular performance not to do an an illumination or something of that sort at the same time I'm so deeply enmeshed in the Ramleela it must you know that's the question that I think a third party would have to add by saying alright here's Shetner's work before 1976 here's his work after 1976 here are some differences and we attribute these differences to that but for myself part of what allows me and it allows this day to exist is that I have both in magnificent memory and no memory at all I don't even know what Misha and I were talking about because now I'm talking to you and then we'll have lunch and I'll talk with Mary Ann Ellen Sanford and I'll talk with Joe Roach et cetera et cetera and Paula Cole so part of my stupidity or brilliance is the ability to not be somewhere else and to not carry that somewhere else with me it sometimes gets me in a heap of trouble I can tell you but at most part it's good so allows me to to just sink into the particular moment I know there when I first read Zen Buddhism and confronted the philosophical problem of there is no past and there is no future there is only the anticipation of the future and the memory of the past and that anticipation and memory is also occurring only in the present moment all we have is the present moment the rest is presumed combine that with something I did learn in India that the world is mine and Lila in other words you may not exist I can get myself into a solipsistic frenzy and fantasy that what's happening here is all in my own dream in each of you that I would present to you let's say we're doing a workshop so for a moment each of you now will lower the voice think that none of the others exist except as you are imagining them right now do that for a moment then what song would come to your mind and can you sing it now were this a natural workshop I would wait for an hour for that song to emerge and it would emerge I promise you it would emerge someone would begin humming or something and someone would join I would stake my life and the life of those dearest to me on that this time I interrupted it you were close and that's the way I work it's a great place to be I would say in that moment which is a moment of eternity is worthy of it it was Eliade or somebody who wrote the eternal present that book it was Eliade right mercy Eliade okay I'm going to open the discussion up to the audience now I wanted to ask about song we're recording it so I wanted to ask about songs music and dance I didn't notice any musicians in the Ramayana I'd be surprised if an Indian production didn't have songs and music some form of dance in it though there are two forms at least of music and dance in the Ramlila the Ramayanis we didn't play the movie are chanting the Ramcharitmanas can you chant a little bit can you get that music do you have it well anyway if we had time we could listen to the music it has cymbals and drums and they're chanting it then the sadhus and others join them I don't know if you know the word bhakti but the devotional the bhajans the singing Sita Ram Sita Ram Ram Jay Sita Ram Sita Ram Sita Ram Sita Ram Jay Sita Ram okay and they do that it's like the Hare Krishnas but it's uh don't ask me about the Hare Krishnas too much they are they are doing these men and they're singing and they're singing their devotion and bhakti is a form emotional engagement so I remember when I first got introduced to bhakti in the true sense before I did Ramlita was when I went to see the Samadhi place of Ram Krishnan near to Ramakrishna near to Kolkata now as it's called Kalkata where this great ecstatic saint of several centuries ago was absorbed into the absolute now do I believe that yes and no see that's why I'm in the theater when I'm in that place in that time, in that present of course I believe my name is Ajaya Ganesh I was initiated in a temple in the south of india but I'm also a Jew I'm not also an atheist I'll do some of that reading tonight you'll see the contradictions I am so comfortable with those contradictions I'm uncomfortable with complete coherence because I think the profoundest coherence as quantum theorists would say is a deep indeterminacy and non-locality you know what non-locality is in physics when this thing turns and way over here on the other side of the universe this thing turns at the same time or at no time or the answer I don't want to get too philosophical it's neti, not that in other words there's a long story about neti in other words what happens before the big bang it's neti, not that in other words the negative which is so important in restoration of behavior is what happens at that point in other words the big bang creates time at space therefore there isn't time or space before it and it's a metaphor for that because we want to our human urge is always to want to conceive of an envelope in which the message can be put no matter how large the message the infinite beyond the infinite but the truth of the present moment is there's the point of nothing is the same as the everything I can't get you any closer to that than that and so what was your question? oh music they're singing they do sing in the Ramleela I use a lot of music in my productions oh yes play it just listen to it this is the Ramayani quiet, pay attention be quiet, listen that's what he said and that's the Sambad here we go it's pretty accurate and this goes for 41 days not 31 days because 10 days before Robin is born there's a whole lot of text that sets it up and they're in the second story of a building singing for 10 days before the actual drama begins because the whole text has to be spoken so the text, this is again this contradiction the text makes its claim of entirety and the drama makes its claim of particularity and both claims are fulfilled in that performance so that's what I learned it's not so much that I learned it but I found it confirmed in reassuring that you have to in a certain sense accept the entirety and locate within it the particularity rather than that's what I said I want my performances to begin before people enter into the space if I were to do that today what would have happened was Riesch and I would be talking and you would be coming in rather than waiting for an introduction but that's not the convention of this kind of meeting but where I too stayed to the second time Richard Schechter Day redux we would start and you would come in after it had begun and we would not be able to stop until you were all gone it might be a long time we are sort of in that situation Richard that is to say we were into things we were showing signs and so on and so forth we continued together which I assume will be true all day that's true I'm sure somebody has a commentary question yes it was such a pleasure listening to the two of you thank you so very much Richard I had a question about technology and particularly in cases of performances as old as the Ramleela that you have shown clips are and the fact that the Ramleela has also performed all over India in different shapes and forms and these days we find that there is a whole lot of technology that is being used even digital media what do you feel about that first of all the Ramleela of Ramlegar which is the one that I know most it's not that it rejects technology it is frozen technology at a certain point in time so I'm assuming that before there were Petromax lanterns you know pressure lanterns there was the Ramleela but it was not illuminated by that point Petromax lantern became a kind of advanced technology and it was brought in we know that in the 1940s the Maharaja at that point wanted to bring in microphones because as we almost heard the Samba they have to go Bahar Ranji because there are 30,000 people so we thought microphones would be good so we set them up the crowd came and ripped them out wired microphones and all they wanted this so it's not the question we live in we've had technology for probably several hundred thousand years we are always comfortable with this technology we are born into and a little stretched by the ones coming so the first people that were able to do a Clovis that kind of a blade that we find over North America a very sharp blade really get a buffalo with well that was high technology whoever could flake that so the Ramleela so it's not a question of technology it's a question of which generation of technology does one accept the Ramleela of Ramlegar accepts somewhere around turn of the 20th century not 20th to 21st but 19th to the 20th some technology around that time sure however I mean somebody else would have to do the deeper study that the fabrics of the costumes have changed that you know how they're made and all of this kind of stuff so there's a kind of now to answer your other question because I like the Ramlegar Ramleela so much I am not enamored of either the television Rama I know about it and worshiping the television set or high technology or the Delhi Ramleela but that's my taste I like this particular enactment I realize it is to some degree I wouldn't say frozen in time it's molten in time in its own time but that's a question of of my own taste of what I turned to my own theater I love the builders association I love the Rooster Group most of the time I do like the technology so I'm not an opposing technology but I'm so engaged in the Ramlegar Ramleela that it serves as my model and so that's my answer to that yes could you speak to the use of nudity in a specific scene or performance in terms of the acting and what your meaning and use of that is okay now I always use the term nakedness because nudity to me has the reference to a certain tradition in art like we paint nudes not naked and I use the body or engage the body and not within the frame of that tradition again I have a certain contradiction I love to see naked body I love dressed bodies too but I just like the form and shape of them and in motion so that's a personal predilection that I enjoy that although I don't enjoy it enough that I've never been to Sandy Hook where there's a naked beach so I like it within the context of work rather than just a group of naked people I've never been to a nudist camp or anything like that I think it's one of the options one has within the framework of directorial and performer arsenal or whatever you want to call it equipment so in my workshops I almost always have a place where nakedness can be performed and if we see some of the film this afternoon we might see some of it but again it's always optional but so is dress in other words I'm not I don't think of myself as approved at the same time I am born within a deeply prurient and prudish society which remains prurient and prudish so that nakedness has a different quality to it than let's say wearing a wedding ring if it was a completely neutral society it wouldn't make any difference whatever you do to your body is within the same range and something should not be particularly but we don't we live within that context as I do particular performances they generate the need for it or not so for example mother courage there was no call for any kind of nakedness although when we rehearsed not mother courage but when we were doing the workshops and were working there was a lot of nakedness but there was no call for nakedness in mother courage in fact she was always about guarding herself she was about acquiring property she was about covering up etc etc in Oedipus there was no need for nakedness until the end until he learned what we call the naked truth which actually engaged his nakedness in a sexual act with his mother and her with him at that point we needed nakedness so you see what I'm saying to me it's not a thing in itself except in the workshop I do enjoy it I would be a liar to say I don't but in the artwork itself it depends on the particular circumstance in which performances use it and when and how I've also been careful because I know to some degree to some degree of the exploitation of women in particular to move towards the naked man as well as the naked female but never to have a performance in which there would only be naked women imagining O was an exception because there were only women in the play except for the one man who was in these alomads but otherwise like in Dionysus Dionysus is naked Edward II is the character doing that role so I play back and forth with that and not just fetishize the woman's body I don't know if that answers it but it's like it's a case by case thing if you look at my whole uvra it doesn't occur all the time but where I think it is relevant it does occur and in the workshop I think it is very relevant to dress and under so one of my exercises is to line up on two sides of the row and I'll just do it briefly so it's called dress to kill so I tell them I always do this I say come in tomorrow dress to kill so of course everybody says what do you mean I say well you know when does dress to kill mean to you so of course in their imagination it could come in with the AK-47 or they could come in dress beautifully you know whatever dress to kill I say we're not going to harm each other but dress to kill come in and usually it's like really come in beautifully and then you line up and I say okay it's a slow motion I think I talked about this before this morning you can go as slow as you can and I demonstrate I'll just demonstrate with this hand now you may not notice it but I am moving my right hand I am moving it continuously I am actually that's the speed I want you to move that way so if you if we were standing here even longer I'm moving it I'm aware I'm moving it so I've moved it from there to there alright so you're going to cross and as you cross you are going to disrobe and you leave your clothes in the middle now you can take off none some all whatever you find down there you can pick up and put on you can meet people in exchange it takes a couple of hours right by the time they come back and they're lined up on this side again and on this side all the clothes have been shared or many of them together it's a spectacular visual thing or you'll see if we show the workshop 2009 the banquet where we start making and we dress but the table is already dressed then we dress ourselves so we play with these things in the workshop but it's always in the dialectical tension and development between overdress or super dress costume ordinary dress there's that kind of pendulum we're all dressed more or less ordinarily but what glorious things we could do if we began to exchange what we have even in this room but if I ask you all to come tomorrow dressed to kill we'd have a bigger repertoire of opportunity it is now new I'll take one more question let's do two because he has to do his work good question this may be a very dangerous analogy but when we were talking about Ramleela we did talk about multiple texts and coming to imagining oh I do see a lot of texts again and within this multiple layering of again the different times different women different texts what is your relation with language both in Ramleela coming all the way to imagining well do this briefly because I know it's noon I like to collage or assemble or montage texts in that sense I feel I'm like a filmmaker more than a theater maker I think the tradition of drama is to honor the playwright's texts believe me I've been attacked by this playwright and that playwright but in film even though there are screenwriters the director is the person who gets the top credit with the actors and one takes the text and plays with it I like to play with text I like multiple texts because of their reverberations and they're playing off one against the other so in Ramleela there are these layerings of Ramatex let's put it that way some of them behavioral like the bhajans and the dancing and so on some of them literary like the Ramshart Manus and Sambad and some of them ghost texts like the Ramayan which is not there but which is there because that's the source of the narrative so I like to take multiple texts and play with them off against each other and in that sense I like to think that from the most sophisticated spectator to the spectator with the least knowledge they can all have pleasure but it'll be a different pleasure it's rasa theory which we're talking about it's a different pleasure so if you know the story of O if you know that Pauline Rayage is really Honour du Clos and you know Honour du Clos history and the relationship to Jean Povert you'll have a different relationship to imagine though than if you don't know that or you only know it as a quote dirty book if you really know your Shakespeare and hear only the women's lines from all of Hamlet then every woman's line is spoken but no man's line is spoken you'll have it so when you hear all this yes my lord no my lord I thought you did my lord you'll hear Hamlet in a certain way his absence is his presence but you'll hear her really enunciating which if you play the scene with his speech of course she doesn't get much to say yes my lord I thought you did my lord but if you only hear that and then if you hear her present it as if she's Queen of Deserets II no my lord with that Queen way you'll have another reference so all of this so the more sophisticated you are I hope with me you'll match me and maybe exceed me in reference but my job also is to make sure that if you know none of that you're having a good time although that gives us the last question I'm not sure if this is a question oh better said than that as you've been speaking today some ideas from Alexander training have been resonating one is you can either have the experience or you can have the understanding and analysis of the experience but you can't have both I don't believe that I can tell the other one from his aphorisms is how can you do something you don't know if you keep on doing what you do know I just thought it might be fun to hear you play with that well first of all the first one I don't even remember what it was anymore but I don't agree with it it's like trying to be an experience in critical ever since I first read Brecht of critical position and experiences in a dialectical that is alternating relationship or simultaneous relationship or you know four brain doing one thing based on the brain doing the other so I don't believe that what was the second one how can you do something you don't know if you keep on doing what you do know well first of all I would say as a matter of principle ignorance to work with so whatever it is we do even if we think we know it well we're really ignorant about it I'm speaking the English language I think I know it pretty well I think I can handle it with great articulation I think I can construct a sentence but I don't know it I love the notion that so-called knowledge is like a little boat on an ocean of ignorance and it's the ocean of ignorance that is fascinating to tell it so I don't think of the dialectic between knowing and not knowing everything is not knowing and knowing is a bit of not knowing temporarily disguised as something else but it's still not knowing so even and what ritual teaches us is that even repeating something for the thousandth time it's different if one repeats it with a whole heart as you know if you enter into something so I don't see the distinction now I have to say that I've never practiced the Alexander technique to me Alexander is a Greek general I kind of admire his movement over into India at one point well I didn't I liked his teacher a lot Aristotle was his teacher so I don't have any direct experience for the Alexander technique so I'm just responding to your statement about his assertions not to the technique itself since I don't know it okay thank you Richard it's been wonderful thank you thank you one o'clock one o'clock thank you