 good evening. If I could have your attention we'll get started. My name is Chase Robinson I'm the president of the Graduate Center and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this featured program of Richard Schekner Day in which we're honoring the renowned theater artist and pioneer of performance studies. Tonight after a conversation with Frank Henscher of our own Martin E. Siegel Theater Center Richard will give a rare presentation reading selections from five decades of his notebooks his fiction and his poetry. Now for those of you who don't know much about where you are sitting one or two sentences the Graduate School is the Graduate Center is the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences but it is much more than that. It's also a center for applied in theoretical research a platform for performance and conversation and public debate. As a community of faculty and students committed to the perhaps unfashionable idea that learning is a public good we regularly offer public programs that feature eminent thinkers writers artists and cultural leaders. Tonight we welcome a major figure in the world of theater who is all of the above known internationally as a director as a teacher a theorist a writer editor and founder of the performance group and East Coast artists. Richard Schekner is currently University Professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and editor of TDR the Journal of Performance Studies. His many influential books include Environmental Theater between Theater and Anthropology Performance Theory and Performed Imaginaries released just this year. Now enough of me I'm pleased to introduce Frank Henscher who is the Executive Director and Director of Programs at the Martin E. Siegel Center. An important part of the New York Theater landscape the Siegel Center bridges the gap between academic and professional performing arts communities with a wide range of programs notably its Prelude Festival. Please join me in welcoming him and our honored guest Richard Schekner. Thank you so much Chase for your kind and most generous words. My name is Frank Henscher and I'm the Executive Director and Director of Programs at the Siegel Center and we do bridge academia and professional theater international and American theater and this day the Richard Schekner is truly a significant one for us. It's the first time we have done such a format where we have all day long sessions in depth discussions so really far the furthest removed from the sound bites of four or five minutes something was a truly remarkable events with truly national leaders of the field who was here with us all day and it was a great great honor to have Richard with us. Richard is something like Stephen Hawkins in physics or an Andy Warhol who was a director, a filmmaker, a publisher, he made records, he also did his famous prints and was a nexus. They combined people brought people together and thank Richard in all his life in his over 80 years on this planet Earth really has done something remarkable and it's really something we look up to and in the heaven of theater and performance studies in a good sense it is a star where we all guide our little wooden ships and look what would Richard say and what would he do. The bio is in the program so I will not read it all it's truly worth reading it's an exceptional work it's an exceptional body of work and this is of course also the hallmark of a really great artist body of work that has been created and he is still strongly going on and this is by no way a culmination it's just a milestone and we are truly honored that we are the ones in New York City and in the Americas for hosting you here. I know it was in Paris in London so thank you Richard for trusting us. The format of the evening as Jay said there will be a short introduction by me. Richard will read from his new book a performed imaginary some pages as a start off for a shorter conversation and then something truly rare and remarkable will happen. Richard will read from his notebooks from poetry short stories things he has not done in public and most might not do it again or we hope he will but it is truly a remarkable moment we can all share here together in this room and with Richard so thank you so much for coming Richard we would like to invite you to read the beginning of your newest publication performed imaginaries. Well first of all I want to thank Chase and CUNY and everybody who worked with me during the day it was an extraordinary day because the interrogators or the people I was talking to I'm looking at two of them Joseph Roach and Marvin Carlson and there were others Paula Murray Cole there many know me from a variety of ways and kind of although I'm I hope I don't look like it I'm the elephant who you somebody says as a trunk somebody says as a tusk and so on but none of these people really know all of me I don't even know all of me and this was a rare opportunity to have a kind of scan of my work from the Ramleela in India through my directing through my teaching my scholarship my editing and these collaborators Mary Ellen Sanford over there Rishika Marishi who's somewhere I don't see you in the room right now all participated in this and I really am very very very thankful what we did during the day I'm confident about I know that stuff I'm doing tonight is truly from my perspective scary I began out in the lobby there are my notebooks there's one a blue one says number one 1952 or 53 something like that they go continuously to the present there only a few of them distributed out there and what's in those notebooks is a repository of things I don't really think hard about some I do and some I don't it just whatever is going on I put that in recent year since the advent of the computer as an efficient machine I've done notebooking by typing and I have a lot of files on my notebook I'll be reading some of them I didn't bring the physical notebooks on stage here to read from because they're written in shorthand a lot of them and I would have to I mean I know what they mean but the handwriting is not that good they're not meant for publication sometime after my present form has been absorbed into whatever future form is going to absorb it and after some people who I want not to read the notebooks after all of that the notebooks will be open to public view at the Richard Shetner papers at the Princeton library I doubt whether anybody will ever read all eighty thousand pages but they will find certain interesting things in them and I will read a little bit from a few of them I'm going to begin but not by that but by this performed imaginaries the very idea of performed imaginaries is very important to me as a concept I think I talked about that this afternoon that if indeed I am to some degree given my age pessimistic about the future of the species but the human project at another level as an individual and as a social being I am optimistic or viscerally committed to the happy continuation of life and the improvement of life so performed imaginaries the book itself deals that in many ways I'm going to read just two brief sections from the opening chapter which is called can we be the new third world I sit here this morning does it really matter which morning trying to be optimistic I want to write how performance studies and the performing arts can save the world or at least help save the world I am typing while rockets and bombs are exploding in Gaza and Israel Egypt is in turmoil Syria in the throes of civil war M23 rebels are closing on Goma in the Congo putting a million people under threat suicide bombings and assassinations continue in Iraq and Afghanistan the Somali civil war is ongoing Sunnis and Shias have warred against each other since the martyrdom of Hussein in 680 CE in India Hindus murder Muslims and vice versa anti-Semitism is rife in many places and not long ago Catholics and Protestants were murdering each other in Northern Ireland a few centuries after religious wars decimated Europe the Shoah is not ancient history I am more than halfway through my 79th year I wrote this for 71 of those years the USA has been at war big wars small wars long wars short wars good wars bad wars just wars greedy wars invasions incursions missions actions in Europe Asia Latin America the Middle East Africa from World War two in the Korean War to Grenada operation urgent fury and Lebanon twice 1958 and 1982 1984 from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan from Serbia to Libya and Panama Cambodia El Salvador Colombia Liberia Egypt Zaire Kosovo Bosnia East Timor Yemen the Philippines Congo Ivory Coast Haiti Dominican Republic Nicaragua Honduras dot dot dot and where America has not sent troops to descend arms trained soldiers created alliances and supported proxy armies sometimes with grotesque paradoxes such as helping Saddam Hussein invade Iran precipitating a bloody stalemate from 1980 to 1988 a half million dead and then barely three years later turning against Saddam with Operation Desert Storm and after that in 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom where the USA led the coalition of the willing who's kidding who plus untold covert actions and wars waged by surrogates with American advisors the dirty wars in Latin America fought in the name of anti-communism the Cold War with its nuclear buildup still not substantially dismantled what about the close calls from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the US 7th Fleet patrolling the strait between mainland China and Taiwan the continued showdown against North Korea and Iran over their nuclear arms programs the US Congressional Research Service in its quote instances of use of United States armed forces abroad unquote reports that from 1950 to 2006 there were 153 occasions when American forces went on missions outside the borders of the USA no year was without its particular military excursion many years had several yes some were for just causes or humanitarian reasons but most were applications by force of US policy in addition to active armed intervention is the US presence troops stationed in bases around the world and multiple covert operations covert means classified secret kept from public view and accountability even in self-professed and a self-professed open society with its free press who knows who knows how many secret actions there have been and how many continue today these operations surgery involve intelligence what a weird name for spying and dirty tricks terror and torture in camps such as Guantanamo and secret black sites around the world even the seven years of peace my infancy and early childhood from 1934 to 1941 were gloomed by the 1937 Japanese invasion of China the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland in 1939 and the preparations for the USA's entry into World War two and what about the wars within American borders war being used only partly metaphorically the House on American Activities Committee 1938 1975 the anti-communist witch hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s the violent response to the African American civil rights movement and gay liberation the Patriot Act the war on drugs dot dot dot the list goes on and there for that part of this essay I want you to ruminate on what I've presented jump ahead to the new third world and read the dark bright side of what I've just read today artists activists and scholars are a new third world I had talked in the essay about Nares proposition that opposed to the bipolar world of the Soviet Union in the United States he proposed a new a third world in 1955 today artists activists and scholars are a new third world Nares third world had a specific geographical location today's new third world is a proportion of people present everywhere with a majority nowhere what unites the new third world is a community of purpose a mode of inquiry the experimental if you will and a sense of being other of not being hangers on the new third world is incipient seeds not yet fully aware the new third world needs to organize itself as quote non-aligned quote neither capitalist whether of the USA or the Chinese brand nor knee jerk communist socialist nor fundamentalist religious whether Islamic Christian Jewish Buddhist or whatever the vanguard of this new third world are and here I hope you won't think me too arrogant performance theorists and artists who practice collaborative performance research persons who know that playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge renewing energy and relating on a performative rather than ideological basis what would be a manifesto for this performance third world one to perform is to explore to play to experiment with new relationships to perform is to cross borders these borders are not only geographical but emotional ideological political and personal three to perform is to engage in lifelong active study to grasp every book as a script something to be played with interpreted reformed and remade and for to perform is to become someone else and yourself at the same time to empathize react grow and change I'm asking quote you whoever is reading this and at this moment whoever is listening to me consider to consider the almost unimaginable because it is so hard for people to take seriously those who are not doing business making war or enforcing the will of God to take seriously those who play those who create playgrounds and art spaces to take seriously the personal social and world making force of performance we must reject ideological economic and religious rigidity in favor of flexibility and fluidity that is my dream thank you so much Richard and thank you all for coming out on a Monday night after Thanksgiving so that is truly a great testimony to that city we all live in where art and theater does play a major role just to know who has seen Richard Shekner performance or who has been in the seminar who has been taught by him or yeah so there's a significant influence we we all see here right away Richard has not only done one of the most significant theater performance is one of the most famous Dionysus and 69 in the history of theater he's the editor of the most significant theater magazine if I may say so TDR he created the field of performance studies coined at the world and and you spoke about the manifesto but in the beginning about war and are you also as we learned today volunteered for the US Army so tell us a little bit about that of course I wanted to fight communism no I was 24 years old I had been from birth in the middle to upper middle class of a Jewish family first in the Jewish neighborhoods ghettos if you will of Newark New Jersey and then in the more upscale Jewish extension or remake of those in South Orange New Jersey where my brother my eldest brother still lives I had gone to elite colleges Cornell University Johns Hopkins University University of Iowa I had studied with Paul Engel and the writers workshop at Iowa some of the fruits of which you'll hear later I realized in 1958 after doing a summer theater in Provincetown that my horizon was very blinkered I had never really dealt with anybody out of the class of my own or even out of my own religion of course I went to school with people who are not Jewish but I didn't really deal with them and I also knew that I would not do so voluntarily there was no way that I was going to do that but I thought hey if I join the army I will find a different world and I went down to the draft board those days it was a draft and of course I could have gotten a deferment I was already 24 that was older than they were taking 18 year olds I had a master's degree I could have gotten a commission I said I want you to draft me today they said we'll give you a commission you can become a second lieutenant well I said basically I didn't say to them to myself a second lieutenant is the life I've always been leading I want to be an ordinary soldier so they took me of course I regretted it almost immediately I mean when I finally got the reality of having somebody kick my ass at four in the morning of doing basic training of finding out that I was going to be assigned to strike the strategic Army Corps as they said the Marines of the Army and that I was the lowest of the low I actually called my father and said get me out of here he said no you you did it there's no way I can get you out of here however it was extremely helpful to me it really changed my life in many ways I'll just give you two of them first of all I did deal with and meet people that I would never have met before a couple of whom I still have as friends I formed some last in relations including one with Paul Schmidt who was the translator of Chekhov and the Russians and so on I later met in New York and Muldoon elder painter in San Francisco and so on and very importantly I was stationed in Fort Polk Louisiana which we jokingly said of God had wanted to give the world an enemy he found a place from which to do it Fort Polk and Lee'sville it was that kind of place I remember dancing there with a one-armed dancing per made you know bar girl and whose special technique would be to stroke your neck with her stump and it was nice actually so I'll make a long story short I was introduced to New Orleans I decided when I got on the Army to go to Tulane University because I love New Orleans so much I knew Tulane was not at that point one of the great universities I was offered a full scholarship University of Texas so offered one at Iowa to go back there but I decided to go to Tulane because I didn't want to live in Austin I didn't know what a cool town it was at that point I certainly didn't want to go back to Iowa City and I went to New Orleans the rest as they say is history thank you so much Richard you saw that as a writer we saw some of your drawings in your notebooks out there you have a great interest in film why theater why did you decide to do theater well there are many sources one was when I was about 15 or 16 outside of Bradley Beach New Jersey where my summer and my family at a summer home there was a thing called the Neptune music circus and I went out there and they were doing musicals like Carousel which I still when you walk through a storm and and I saw the life that those people were leading you know girls who were in the dressing room and not so shy about being half dressed boys who were with them the chorus boys the actors I said my god this is fun so that was one source I really wanted to join a world where I was going to have fun and then I my imagination began to lead me later on that was temporary I did volunteer and I did work at the Neptune music circus but when I got drafted in the Army I wanted to kind of get out of my ordinary duty so there are a lot of stories but one of them as I said I could direct a play well like I had never directed a play well I had done a few but I hadn't really done that much but I was asked to direct a visit to a small planet which kind of makes fun of the army in its own way and I did that in Leesville Louisiana so and then I loved directing I had done a little bit of it in Provincetown earlier so I came to this I came to it through as many people with their profession through a kind of accident and appetite combined and and at the same time I was an English major and I never gave up my love of scholarship I never gave up my need to write but I added to it was this appetite for entertainment really before quote significant theater but then I realized that significant theater because in my summer theaters which I did once before and then once after I were doing things like No Exit and Crafts Last Tape and the Genese the Maids and I was doing very heavy theaters for summer theater that you could be entertaining and do serious and important theater at the same time I don't see a contradiction between the two in fact I feel again I think as Brecht said space spice space you have to have fun in the theater it's that kind of so and and it was collective I really I like to have my solitary moments but I like to work in groups so a painter is alone for the most part a writer is certainly alone I like that aspect but theater is always with somebody else both the somebody else with whom you are making it and the somebody else when it's finished with whom you are sharing it and both of those social occasions really are important to me now today I took a long time to explain much more of that but for those who weren't here so that those were the origins of my wish to be in the theater and I wanted to be a director because I like to look around I like to look at Peter Eckersold I look way back there who's back there and etc and so I don't have the discipline that an actor needs who's supposed to only look at the person you're supposed to look at you know you can't get on stage it's oh it's really interesting over there I'll look over here so a director you know has the freedom to kind of wander that's what a director is supposed to be have a global view wander and to tell other people what to do and I love to do that too so the director's role was well suited for me I have done a little bit of performing I made a movie with Richard Sarah and Spaulding Gray I have a small role in another movie called swoon and any of you have seen the Magic Mountain of Yodorovsky Alejandro Yodorovsky I'm the voiceover when they grow up to the mountain in in English so I had to but I like movies because it's not any work at all they put a card in front of you you read it you know you don't have to really work like in the theater so that's why I love I love the world of theater I love the sociality of the theater other fact that knowledge the epistemology of the theater can be transferred to people both fancy and plain for those 71 years of war in your life you made many of those years you didn't make more now because I wrote that two years ago so 73 you made theater what is we all know theater and many theater students here but so what does theater mean what should theater be especially perhaps in the moment we are going through now well I put it in that little manifesto theater should be we should first of all take seriously the notion that play is redemptive I said this afternoon I think stem should be extracurricular and the art should be the core of the curriculum I think we need to train our children in deep playing not only athletic playing but as it says the title of my book performed imaginaries in exercising their imagination we were in the green room between the last session and the first one it was very gloomy in there I was perhaps excuse me the gloomiest could not see my way through population expansion the consumption of resources and you know ecological problems global warming now I'm here and I'm happy because I realize that you that theater allows you to work you play through the gloom on the other side of tragedy is tomorrow's chance to reenact the tragedy and we need to inculcate or educate our children to the deep catharsis and and helpful benefits of this kind of play not only the play as I say physical play but the play of the imagination what kind of future can you imagine it's not important at the start to say how do you get to that future what do you imagine what's your perfect day what's the perfect day if you were to what if you were a family what's the perfect day of a family what's the perfect day of your village then work backwards from there how do you get there I know it's there I'm giving you different kinds of imaginative games I think the theater can do this best of all I think film does it quite well but in film you're behind the instrument and you're finally working with thing in theater live theater which I hope will never die you're working with human beings sometimes with animals too you're working with living beings and you're working with them through this process so that even as they move towards a product to entertain they are themselves being changed by this process in my experience of making film you become integers in the film machine you may do seven takes of a scene and you may not even see the final scene the somebody else puts it together the editor or the director but if you're in theater finally you have to experience and enact the whole thing for other people who are experiencing and receiving the whole thing or in my kind of theater participating to some degree in the whole thing this is helpful this is something that people should have more of sports gives you some of it but sports is so agonistic so conflictual and theater is it does of course have conflict and so on it has tragedy and so on but it also has this remedial and healing aspect to it theater is very deeply connected to shamanism and other forms of traditional healing so for these reasons I emphasize theater and as I said in my little manifesto to play is to do these kinds of things is to restore ourselves is to explore the possible and out of the many explorations of the possible some actual possible will hopefully take root and make life good for you your children my children and grandchildren and on I really I really feel that that's something we need and ought to do and ought to recognize and not think of ourselves as a sideshow not think of playing and art as something that's extra but that's intrinsic and central thank you the role the years in as a soldier as it really changed you fundamentally but also as we learned today and I was not fully aware of it also a deep engagement in the civil rights movement ways that you saw those children walking and something happened I felt at least it how you communicated that deeply also influenced your theater work absolutely and that maybe that moment that people don't moment maybe you could share again and well I I said in brief because how many people were here this afternoon's I don't want to and how many people are not okay so more we're not so I'll tell the story briefly so what I was a sophomore in college at Cornell University in 1953 I got interested in the Brown versus Board of Education case which was about the segregation of the public schools I was working on the Cornell Cornell daily son I didn't know much about it as I said I live this middle-class life basically segregated life but there were African-Americans around and some Asians etc etc but I really was not interacting with them but so in my research I found out that a man named Thurgood Marshall the general counsel the National Association the advancement of color people was the lawyer who's bringing this case to the Supreme Court and I wrote him a letter I guess he didn't get too many letters from white boys at that point and he said come down to Harlem and meet me and I'll explain the case so I went down and I met him it was one of the great moments of my life to be in the room he wasn't the Supreme Court Justice at that point he was a younger lawyer he was represented he but he was still regal he was big and he threw his legs up on the table he leaned back and he told me this history from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1898 through to Brown v. Board of Education and what he was going to argue and I wrote that out as a series of articles for the Cornell daily son I still have those articles well you know the case was decided in favor of the NAACP and segregation was ruled illegal and it started the whole chain of events that we're still living through black lives matter we're still living through that chain of events from then Marshall then and I maintained a kind of relationship I never was a good friend of his but we were maintained a relationship and in 1960 or was it 5960 I think there was the case of the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas and I wanted to be there I was actually assigned by a magazine called reporter to write about it so I called Marshall I said I want to be there he says good I'll give you later to Daisy May Bates she's the local NAACP chairman you can help that I was the only white in the basement when those children were there so they were they were in this basement across the street from Central High School Central High School was up like this they were down in this basement there were little basement windows you know what you look through and they were dressed perfectly you know suits and ties and dresses and all not like they would normally dress they were rehearsed they were told when you go through you don't look to the left you don't look to the right you go right through the National Guard is going to open that door it's all been arranged over for this the governor of the state is going to be standing there but the National Guard will remove him and he's agreed to be removed he doesn't want bloodshed it's all a performance right he's agreed to be removed but because he can say to the people of Arkansas look I tried to defend segregation but I wasn't allowed to the federal government made me you know like the Civil War and I watched that and I watched those children come out of that basement and go across the street and I saw Forbes and I saw the National Guard literally set him aside and I saw them walk into that door it was an extraordinary performance event and it further galvanized me to say that this struggle was my struggle that the Civil War was not over I worked in that movement for a long time my most significant work was one of the three producing directors of the Free Southern Theater the book is out there with Gilbert Moses and John O'Neill John is still alive and we did theater in Mississippi Alabama Louisiana for as we said theater for those who had no theater we performed in churches we performed in form yards we perform when people shot at us which they did we performed powerful plays waiting for Godot which a black audience has responded to this kind of waiting the white potso the incoherent lucky like their politicians and go go indeedy two different kinds of black people we did in white America Martin Doverman's great documentary about the black experience in the United States a great documentary play and we did pearly victorious which is a kind of parody of relations on the plantation I directed pearly victorious and others directed these other plays and we toured it so that I did that I also was the first white one of two to be arrested for a sit-in in New Orleans and the civil rights movement segwayed into the anti-Vietnam War movement as we know when King finally came out against the war when Muhammad Ali you know Cassius Clay refused to serve etc and I was the person who did the first teaching in the south against the Vietnam War and I led demonstrations so those things to me were always performative I didn't use the word I didn't know the word I hadn't read J.L. Austin but they were performative they were some kind of theatricalization some kind of demonstration they were symbolic acts I called them they were more than themselves in the negative vein terrorism is the same terrorism is not about taking territory it's about a state of mind I won't go there right now so I was involved I saw that the theater was part of a wider panoply of actions including political actions and I saw that sports did the same thing that uniforms were costumes that positions were roles that coaches were directors you see I saw all those panels it just came it came to me what happens to me as those who know me well know when I'm in a certain kind of state things just occur to me and they're sometimes very interesting and and I write them down and other people want to read them so it was this broad and view that's that's true it's this broad and view of performance that I that I got in the early 60s and I said let's call it performance and not theater now I took the term from Irving Gothman who wrote a book presentation of self in everyday life and he had a chapter called performances and I like the word performance you know to furnish thoroughly through but let's call it performance and let's say theater belongs in it sports belongs in it popular entertainments belong in it the practice of law belongs in it medicine belongs in it not that that's all these things are but it's an important part of what they are a jury is an audience the contending lawyers are kind of two gladiatorial fighters fighting on behalf of the state and the defense etc etc we can go through all of these analogies and they are strict analogies they are correct analogies now when I first had that idea back in the early 60s and when I first wrote about it in an essay called approaches 1966 or maybe it was 1964 early I wrote about it nobody was thinking that way I mean Gothman had thought about performance every day life but he didn't put all this other stuff and they hadn't systematized it and they hadn't put it in relationship to ritual which I also put it in relationship to the plane ritual so I instituted that and out of that seed came performance studies no truly it was a disruptive invention you what theater changed from how it was before at least how how we looked at it but also since we also are the university and we are proud to be at the graduate century the Segal Center is your perfectly situated here that great institution over 30 programs on one building 30 centers you also always stress there's a need for theory it's not just doing the art which of course great and so many people are in fact you wanted to be a director and an actor they like the backstage but you did your work but you also stress the need for an academia for for theory where do you see that now in the changing fields of humanities of course theory is important but theory has to have its feet on the ground theory has to be rooted in behavior in action and that sense I'm a I'm a physical scientist you have to have observation experimentation verification it's not about theories not about itself theory has to have a tangible connection to ongoing experience so that's why I continue to make theater I love to make theater I do it as a as an artist but the the theater that I do most recently imagining oh has a theoretical dimension and the theory that I conceive of has a theatrical dimension the two are like night and day you know they they they seem to be opposite but they are simply questions of how the earth revolves around an illuminated dome sphere so the Sun if you will if you go that analogy is kind of knowledge and the dark side of the knowledge may be the performance which involves tragedy and all these things that happen in performance in the light side may be involved theory where we're trying to illuminate what is happening so I like to think of the two together also given the kind of mentality I have my mentality is such that I can't do something physical without saying why does it happen this way why couldn't it happen that way what's going on here that's the arising right describing it organizing it assessing it and I can't get a theory by without saying how can we how can we enact that how can we embody that so I was one of the ones who introduced into performance in the notion of embodiment that we're dancing I'm talking now and I'm moving my body I'm dancing my ideas I was just sitting back here and saying exactly the same words at this tone like this you would have a different relationship to it maybe it would be better I don't know but it would certainly be different once that you I'm not a scientist I'm a social scientist right it has to be in behaviorism and I think what is so great I do think and respect from us to your generation that there is a strong connection of a political message that personal experiences and that art itself and making art is essential and of real significance as part of a joyful participation in the sufferings of the world as some some Buddhist if I remember that right acclaimed but coming to we are coming a bit closer to the end so you will have time for your reading but you've seen you have done so much you have seen so much what are the most beautiful or most interesting things you have seen on stage well sir it's hard to pick you know what you ask me what I would pick tonight might not be what I picked tomorrow but certainly Grotowski's three great works that I saw in the 60s will always be there in my recollection in my experience apocalypses come figures acropolis and constant prints these were great productions they were great productions in terms of their use of space in terms of the intensity of the performance in terms especially of acropolis of their meaning and the radiation acropolis having to do with the show up from a Polish perspective so that would be one the early Worcester group when it was still part of the performance group rum stick road especially great performance and which spalled in gray who I had the privilege to work with on many productions before he did rum stick road you saw him this morning in tooth of crime but he also was in other productions of mine telling and enacting the circumstances of the suicide of his mother Mara Saad of Peter Brooke more than the Mahabharata with Glenda Jackson I think it was you know when she comes to approach Mara to kill Mara you know and this one may surprise you because I was only four Fantasia at the Radio City Music Hall with a live orchestra 1938 and in back in that register the World's Fair of that time too and the General Motors exhibit where you rode around and saw the whole city before you they're not theatrical in the normal sense but they had a deep effect on me and the great hurricane of September 1938 which I saw at the sea shore and saw the white clouds on the horizon and those huge waves and forever after I wanted to return to the shore to see more hurricanes I've never been at the shore for more hurricanes I was involved in Sandy we lost our power but I was not at the shore so those are not the last are not theatrical events so a cropless you know Mara Saad and so on and rum stick road a few others as well but but what do these share they share an enormous commitment to highly accomplished technical acting in other words acting at its best professional level acting a sense of space and the need and a desire to contact the spectators the audience to not exist without some kind of deep relationship with those who were experiencing it thank you Richard before I take up too much of your special time I want to hear you you're writing we had Richard Shackner making the documentary Zooter Shackner the director Shackner the editor Shackner the performance theorist we had Richard Shackner the actors trainer and and Richard Shackner the editor and we also now will learn a new side is that Richard Shackner the writer but not for the theater but for the writing itself I think it shows you also a child or contemporary of the beat generation and it is truly a big honor for us that you will share this and as you earlier said it's not as easy as you might have thought so thank you so much for doing this and now Richard Shackner 26 September 2004 530 a.m. the morning of mom's funeral what am I feeling when I heard of her death by phone for my brother Arthur I coughed up a few tears not many I was not thunderstruck this death was no surprise I was waiting for it yet she was all in all a gentle woman she died with a song in her lungs her final exhalation but did she know what she was singing does it matter she was a float in her own reality long before she had left the daily reality of her earlier life she visited there sometimes with startling up lucidity and wisdom when do you want to go home Arthur asked mom in the hospital the day before she passed away I am home she replied simple true to my ears cruel and final to her own some kind of ultimate settlement it is sad to finally be alone in the world to no longer have mother or father ahead of me to guide me not that mom was much of a guide after her mid-80s I don't mean that I ever really asked her for advice but she was there stalwart and practical idealistic and down to earth but once her mind began to sort experience differently once her outer sight began to fail though her eyes maintained a turquoise blue clarity that be lied her blurred vision bomb began more and more to turn interior the porch at brady beach with her legs up on a table her eyes closed mostly just feeling the ocean on her face I have no idea what she was thinking at those times to be a good son I used to speak with her raising my voice as one does with the heart of hearing but there was never evidence that mom was hard of hearing my loud voice wanted to break through the barriers of her crumbling mind and get I don't know where back to the mother I knew I didn't have the courage to probe too far into the new mom the woman of broken memories surging forth and sometimes expressed the woman who told of mr. Bradley who liked little girls of her inheritance from shock river to the Verrazano bridge of her fragments of memories of her beloved father Samuel so dear and frightening also sometimes to me or of my husband the Sheridan whose name vanished as soon as he died in the hospital my mother was very tiny under the white sheets and white cover she was barely a ripple in the fabric she was on her side with the oxygen intake pinned to her nose nothing uncomfortable no intrusion of twos and intravenous stuff she was given her dignity at the end but still she did not pass at home she did pass in the hospital which as she said she had made her home and now her ultimate home is where in our hearts in the many offspring of offspring in her collection of letters and paintings and other memorabilia she is not only my genetic forbearer she is emotionally within me as is heaven help me my father too and mom passed within the 10 days of grace between Rasha Shana and Yom Kippur while the book of life lay open to be written in she died in a liminal time in a liminal place but with a settled mind wherever her aftermath has migrated to it came from a special time in the year's progression the Jewish years progression these are some of my thoughts the morning we are going to eulogize my mother then accompany her body to Oheb Sholom cemetery in hillside New Jersey and layer to rest next to sherdon my father and not far from Samuel her father they all who come this way find solace in the days of Homer a poem for Stacey and Carlos where are you there in the days of Homer before leaving Ithaca for Sparta the lovely polycaste youngest of Nestor's daughters bathed and anointed to Lomacos with oil from that bath Odysseus's son stepped looking like an immortal to Lomacos came to Menelaos's high roofed home where maids bathed him anointed him with fragrant olive oil dressed him and brought him to a chair next to Menelaos son of Atreus in Troy Helen recognized Odysseus but she did not give him up she bathed him anointing him with scented olive oil Nossica too rinsed the resourceful Odysseus who had not been so well handled since rafting from fair haired Calypso's island the fourth maids servant of Cersei built an abundant fire under a cauldron heating the water to a steamy boil seating Odysseus in the deep bath she washed the weariness from his body mixing hot with cold as he desired in the days of Homer when Agamemnon sailed the wine dark sea from the blood dust of Troy home to Argos Clytem Nestor gave him the bath of his life dog in an Indian railroad station 1980s the most horrid poverty I know of is in the cities Calcutta New York Bhopal India has a special kind of hard poverty broken limbs leprosy flies starvation I remember once in a railroad station in northern India I forget the city but Carol was with me so it had to be in the north we heard this horrific howling a dog howling with fear and pain the noise was amplified because we were in the wavy ceiling place where the trains pull in and out and the ceiling amplified the sounds people were coming and going nonchalantly middle-class people cripples mothers with drugged or starvation sleepy children draped almost dead across their arms beggars all this world of the living the dying the almost dead the ambitious the going to get somewhere and the I was dead before I was born kind of poverty together and over at all the horrible howling of this tortured animal a being not knowing why it was being put under pain a pain so palpable as to be suffocating finally we could see the creature a mangy dog dear thing its next stretched almost a breaking being dragged dragged dragged across the concrete slabs of the station next to the trains the trains steamy and snorting the people rushing to and fro the hawker selling oranges peanuts newspapers toys tea themselves over at all the howl of the dog its eyes bulged out blood bursting from the corners of the eyes its teeth bared its tongue hanging out its throat extended dragged dragged dragged dragged by a rope around its neck all its weight resisting to being pulled its back body a triangle against the cement its legs with claws scraping the man pulling this in pain beast was indifferent get this dog out of my station was in his manner of pulling his soul was deaf to pain of the dog he was doing what he was doing the start of a short story no first a very short poem in winter's cold coats wines winds tomorrow approaches yesterday's son who are you tomorrow asks this short story of which I'm going to read the first page in a half is called think about me when I'm gone I am going away now I have made provisions for you and the children money will be available but I can no longer live with you or them don't try to trace me I know how to cover my tracks don't wonder where I have gone treat me as disappeared as dead I want very much to die to the life I lived with you and with the others that does not mean I want to be reborn I am satisfied with a simple death retaining only consciousness of course and my own kind of breath if you want to divorce me go ahead I don't care one way or the other you will not hear from me but you will receive money on a regular basis this will continue for a long time probably long after you are dead the money operates on a separate schedule that has a very long half-life therefore I advise you to make provisions for the children or anyone else you designate even a charity find the ultimate recipient or recipients or beneficiaries of this money which will grow independently of you or me which will soon have its own immortality you are right I'm obsessed with money I got that from you and from my father who formed money as his beloved crop but then what he couldn't harvest as well as he could sow and tend he gazed on his bank accounts day in and day out regarding the rows of securities and cash waving in the winds of time he advised me never to borrow never to put all my eggs in one basket always remain liquid he counseled as he lay dying in his hospital bed I noted that fatal symptom his urine had ceased to drip into the bag collecting it from the catheter inserted through his penis into his bladder his liquidity was failing I didn't take his advice regarding money I borrowed to the Hilt maxing out every credit line I lived like there were no tomorrow now there are more tomorrow's than I can count more futures speculations options I gravitate to airports I buy tickets under all kinds of names I have many passports I keep them like a deck of cards dealing this one or that one according to my needs I do not make a fool of myself I don't claim to be Ugandan or even Chinese I hew to my Eastern European roots and my mid-eastern possibilities it takes money to get passports official documents don't grow on trees none of this surprise you surprises you does it you always call me a liar this disappearing act I am now engaged in is my final response I am just smoking mirrors and illusion and finally from an email to Carol in response to her question do I believe that animals are but seldom Elohim in God's image do I believe that animals are in God's image not believing in God I don't know what it means to be in her his it's image going beyond my atheism do I believe that animals share whatever it is that is fundamental essential real in the cosmos whether or not this cosmos was found atheism or made God the Creator yes the animals are part of it all as we are then why do I eat their flesh condone and collaborate in their slaughter the weak answer is that I am not a perfected human being and in my seeking pleasure the pleasure of my mouth of my appetite I exploit the destruction of sentient beings strong answer is that I accept my imperfection and in accepting it to some degree transform it into my own perfected being I take from various religions as you know one of the ideas of Hinduism that fascinates me is reincarnation after all no matter is ever lost it just goes from here to there so too of perhaps the non-material effervescence of our existence the mythic level reincarnation allows for a slow improvement over the span of many many lifetimes it makes each life a recapitulation of the last and a rehearsal for the next this then gets folded into the Zen present-centeredness so that past and future collapse into now fancy I know and I will enjoy the roast chicken this evening that's all for now thank you I had a little more to read but I thought chicken is a good start we are recording it so if you could please have making the world a better place well it's a fun idea but isn't that work so in a way contradictory I don't see work and play as contradictory I think play is a kind of work and work should be a kind of play in other words I don't see play as a kind of easy thing and work is a kind of hard thing or work is obligatory and play is voluntary I don't see any of those distinctions in my theoretical writing which I've done quite a bit of the play mode is a particular kind of mode of possibility while the work mode is a mode of inevitability it's not about the difficulty it's about the process so that to put it in Greek tragic terms tragedies or works rehearsing them as play and in rehearsing them you are opening the possibilities of doing them in many many different ways once they have been fully rehearsed and they've been performed and you follow then it becomes a work so there's works of art which have this kind of inevitability and I was emphasizing in that manifesto or trying to emphasize that the the seriousness if you will paradoxically and the importance of this play mode of the mode where possibilities are left open where the imagination and the fiction is on a continuum with the actuality and that in so far as we begin to play with those modes the needle of actuality may shift towards the fictional you may be able to realize something you know I'm not Polly Anna about the future of the world but I'm not as depressed as I was before coming into this room when I was back there with my friends and we were really we really bummed each other out so the chorus exactly my problem is that when it becomes the job of the arts to fix things and I think it's I think I think that something's lost there and that's not its only job you know just because I do the dishes doesn't mean I always do the dishes that's all I do so art obviously I think Horace said it first and Brecht act to it art is to entertain and to educate so those are two other things and to the do the work of healing the world is still something else again to pass the time as something else again in other words again what I was emphasizing today is the multiplicity and contradictory qualities of art making of living it doesn't have to all be mathematically consistent so art some art will help save the world some heart will just pass the time some art will be pleasant perhaps the one that helps say the world will also be pleasant etc etc etc it's not an either or for me but I do feel that where I am a little bit rigid is that I feel that in our educational system in our popular imagination in what we're doing we need to put more emphasis grant more respect to the art making process to as part of the fundamental education of human beings and just as very poor people put an enormous energy to exercise the rituals of their religion I've seen people with hardly anything in parts of the world put in what little they had to do a pooja to do a religious observation you know observance and so on so people do give material things to do non-material things if you will in order to save their souls in order to participate with their deities whatever their reasons and I want to see that same kind of devotion to the art making process so it's not a question of diverting the surplus it's a press it's a question of in in engaging the body of stuff so that people make art the way they make religion and religion very often is art you know when they made the rose window a short one they were making art and religion at the same time when they did the caves at Altamira they were making some kind of ritual and art at the same time so we have examples of it but now we've bifurcated and we've divided it off and we put art in the lower category of value let's put it that way and unless it happens to be an object art like a painting then it can be millions of dollars worth but at that point they're not buying the art they're buying the reputation of the art that's a whole other discussion so why these artworks are so valuable is the same reason why gold ingots are valuable in and of themselves are not valuable one more one less man go doesn't make any difference but so that's a different question I don't know if you've covered this already but a lot of people know you know with internet being so popular are talking about having theater where people and are not all in the same place at the same time and I was wondering if the element of time and space has to have integrity for there to be a work of theater or if you can do theater in a remote fashion using the internet yes never underestimate the means of communication this is Elizabeth roof we work together way back in the day as it were and you don't look a minute older so maybe a minute over I function according to and and and not either or so the kind of art I'm involved in is face-to-face because I like to look at these faces I like to be in the presence of the body I like the heat of it of course I use my computer and I use the internet I do not in any sense deny the possibility and the operation of what you're talking about but because the art of the internet is audio visual and not the other three senses and especially the heat of the flesh near to you etc etc I am more for the in my own practice for that and also because airtime becomes valuable even if it isn't valuable we treat it as valuable while rehearsal time even though it is valuable we treat it as if it isn't I mean we have a certain kind of thing that happens when we meet in a room together and so on and so forth so I entirely agree that one can make the kind of art you've referred to my own preference is not to and I'm sure there'll be plenty of people who make the kind of art you're talking about I what you were talking about that art is basically the rehearsal of one's future perhaps made me think of professor of mine Morse Peckham who wrote a very well-known book in the 60s man's rage for chaos in which he set up a theory about art as being our human capacity to as an adapt as a as a tool for adaptation for adapting to discontinuities to incongruities that art is not for making order but rather to rehearse to deal with this order with discontinuities and I was wondering he did not use the term performance but your your sense of performance and rehearsal to performance made me think about that and I was wondering if you had a comment to make about this almost biological view of the place of art in human endeavor I don't know how familiar you are with Newton's second law of thermodynamics but in it he's talks about entropy which basically says that everything finally runs down and stops what Einstein did to a Newton's second law of thermodynamics or and what Heisenberg with the quantum peers do it says not true things don't run down and stop there is always a kind of chaotic or indeterminate element that renews and changes it and we haven't yet who knows if we'll ever be able to actually harmonize Newton whose laws work very well at locality with quantum mechanics and relativity which work in technically what's called non locality which means a spooky action at a distance as Einstein said all right now how does this relate to what you're you're saying I think that art is of course for the most part a construction of order in the possibility of disorder except for that or art which tries to construct disorder out of order so John Cage would try to construct art that was fundamentally disorder out of order and they would saying that everything may be random and that there are deeper structures that may be orderly in the disorderliness of a random piece of music or ambient noise or what have you so what fascinates me is the huge range of possibilities from Newtonian physics which would be you know like an Ipsen play to quantum mechanics which would be closer to John Cage and therefore I cannot myself give a single answer some art creates order some art to depends on indeterminacy and indeterminacy by definition is if not chaotic because that is an ultimate decay but is at least not predictable except again to use a fancy word stochastically you can say that a hundred times you flip the corners island we've talked about it but we haven't really dealt with it it's it's much worse than Guantanamo Bay now although I shouldn't compare to terrible things like that Guantanamo Bay is very bad too but we have our Rikers Island and and other things and homelessness and all but in so far as we can bring those into consciousness and into play yes I think that's good I think the actions that are occurring I think what's happened to Princeton is extraordinary it's not that Washington and Jefferson didn't have slaves they did Jefferson freed his and they were moving in a certain direction Wilson was egregiously and consciously retrograde he was consciously moving in the other direction he was undoing reconstruction he was ridding the government when he was president of African-American participation so it's not simply what people do what's the direction on the road that they are traveling so as Jefferson more of a racist at death than he was 20 years earlier or less etc etc so I feel that that to come out so when I was discussing with members of my family of Thanksgiving my extended family in New Jersey about this question some of whom are students and former students of Princeton and they said well you want to erase history I said not at all I I think there should be a plaque saying Woodrow Wilson as president the United States removed 850 black civil servants and then became president of Princeton University I think that's accurate we don't have to name a dormitory after him which is an honor we should describe it we shouldn't avoid history or you may want to have something that says we are honoring Woodrow Wilson at this point for his presidency of Princeton University realize also that he did such and such and such and now does that mean we go back and do Jefferson and all the other people who were also racist and segregation not necessarily but it's not like one shoe fits all you start where you start and you make your progress you make your progress and it's about it's again about it's the same as the demonstration civil rights movement you bring attention to something what was the second part of your question the role of theater well I don't think I need to answer obviously the role of us as artists citizens is to you know we shouldn't only do political action I mean we can but I'm not Augusta Boal I'm not saying to do only political action theater I like to do entertainment theater I like to do tragedy I like to do a lot of things but I think part of what our palette should be should be active theater and in the period that you're talking about I did the Friesen theater I did guerrilla theater about the Vietnam War etc. I haven't done activist theater recently but there are the people doing it I think it's part of the palette I think anybody who does only the same thing over and over again is kind of like like Mondrian you know one of those painters that just kind of repeats themselves it's okay but it's not my kind of thing you know my question emanates from your comparison of your use of Nehru's idea of the non-aligned world which interestingly enough has become irrelevant in a in the post-Cold War world irrelevant it is irrelevant in some sense because the bipolarity of the world is is gone so you know I was wondering what kind of polarities are you using when you're sort of replacing the third world by you know with artists I'm saying that artists have to be a counterbalance to the corporate and nationalist and religious forces that operate in the world I think that virulent religion rampant corporatism and militarized sovereignty are all enemies of the human project and they need to have some non-alliance to them to stand up to them to perform it in contradistinction to them that's what I was meaning thank you again Richard maybe as a closing book and will you read us something thank you a book published in India but it's from a notebook from 1978 when there was a great flood in India she the Ganga with a piranha say came rushing out of the sky her great fall to earth softened by her root through Shiva's hair it's many strands breaking and dispersing her powerful flow as Shelley says life like a dome of many colored glass stains the white radiance of eternity or as I redacted the great white dome of eternity is shattered into the many colored shards of experience so the symphonic Hindu panoply continuum of myriad gods converge to express the single force of life in the process of forcing life to become manifest the balance the poise and the stillness of the uncolored unmanifest absolute is dispersed into the ups and downs the ins and outs the huts and colds the livings and dying of my experiencing and yours this is the great clothes line on which is hung all philosophy and art and all else we do or imagine or think coming down to the river the cycle rickshaws we passed a corpse bundled up in white silk tied from head to toe like some terrific Christmas present but so tightly that the forms of the body from the round head the upright pointing of the 10 toes plainly show with flowers under the head all bound to a palanquin made from big green bamboo shoots and branches a mattress for the corpse not unlike a charpois that the livings sleep on carried by six men chanting and sometimes laughing not grieving this is for later at the burning ghat or for the nearest relatives I remember meeting a weeping old man at Manacarnica got the burning in 1976 he told me he was weeping because his son had died he shouldn't be cracking my skull instead I will be cracking his the order of nature had been disrupted and inverted a mistake had been made or bad karma was working itself out the tears were not against death but against the injustice this cosmic payback thank you