 Hi everyone, welcome back. I just want to say welcome, welcome to the new school. My name is Carrie Neal and I am the director of academic and faculty affairs for the new school for drama. And this afternoon kicking us off is John Flax from Theater Gutesco in a performance of Consider This. For those of you who met, sends her regards, she had a very small version of this, the lesser half. There was a time, had this fights in the lobby, this fights on the street. Actors were writing manifestos, they were changing the world. And I know some of you are thinking now, I didn't sit far enough to the edge, an old guy in clown pants and a flannel shirt's gonna talk about style. If Danielle were here, it would be a different story. But that's personal style. I wanna talk with you about theatrical style. So I'm gonna make some large generalizations and you can shoot me afterwards if you want. But in America for the last 60 years, we've had three predominant styles. We've had musicals, some form of situation comedy, and another forms of dramatic realism. And it's very curious because in all the other art forms from fine arts to performing arts, it's evolved like a ticking clock from style to style to style. And for some reason in theater, this is what we've had. And we can say again, so what, it's fine. And it is fine except that the audience after a while knows the form so well that we can't surprise them. We can't shock them. We can't fill them with wonder with the form. So what do we have left? We have virtuosity. We, young people coming up are saying, okay, I wanna do the Marlon Brando role. And really Marlon Brando did it already. So what are you gonna bring to it that Marlon Brando didn't? You can bring something, but it's kind of topped out. It's not gonna go a whole lot farther. And we can look around and say we're losing audiences. The young people are coming. The old people are dying. Pretty soon we're gonna be in large empty theaters. So what do we do? We can look at the other art forms. We can look at painting, for example. And if you start with realism, they went from realism to impressionism, to post-impressionism, to existentialism, to symbolism, to cubism, and it just took off. And it moves so quickly, the danger is that it becomes a kind of intellectual exercise. The audience and the artists are working so hard to figure out what the style can do before the next one comes along, that it's all up here. Big generalization number two. In the fine arts, I think we can say that much of the fine arts has embraced that. It's a badge of honor to be an intellectualist form. In the theater, we wanna touch people. So what do we do? Oftentimes we go backwards. We say, okay, well let's do a Shakespeare. It worked 400 years ago. It's gonna work now. We can change it a little bit. We can set it in modern times or something, but those are revered words. We're gonna do a Shakespeare. And it's a little like going to the museum, and we're looking at an object in a glass box. And it becomes another intellectual exercise. We're saying, okay, I understand that in this time, this had this meaning, and I can see how it applies to our time now, but we're up here still. Another form of intellectual exercise. So what if we go backwards and forwards at the same time? What if we look at classic styles and look at them for their architecture and their spirit, and then apply that to our times as modern works? And you're saying, wait a minute, architecture. If there's no set up here, what are we talking about with architecture? Well, architecture is lines in space. So when I walk forward like this, when I gesture like this, I'm making lines in space. If you wanna think of this as a two-dimensional canvas, I'm making a painting here. And each style of theater has a different interpretation of that architecture. It's the energy of the lines, the boldness of the lines, how long the lines are. So for example, if I'm working in tragedy, and my director says I want you to point stage right, the whole body is gonna take this line and hopefully put it right through the wall into the face of the enemy that I'm confronting tomorrow. If we work in melodrama, it's gonna be a very different line. And I'm not talking about snidely whiplash, tie the woman to the tracks. That's kind of a very special American thing. Classic melodrama, we know best from the silent films. It's the style of grand gesture. So point stage right in melodrama is gonna look like this. It's full of breath. There's hope there. She's out there. I know she's out there. It's a different line. It's a very different line. Clown, point stage right. You know, it's an energy that just, it dies right there. It's pathetic, because that's what clowns are. Bafunary, a little known style that is actually the opposite of tragedy. So as tragedy speaks to the gods, Bafunary speaks to the devil. But it's the same dimension. It's the same style. And if you tell a Bafun to point stage right, it's gonna look like this. What is that? Grand artists, they hate us. They will never do what we tell them to do. So before we start, I just wanna back up a little bit into the training room, because in order to do work with these styles, you need your body to do what you want it to do. Nothing more, nothing less. And it takes a fair amount of training. Neutral mask, probably lots of you have worked with this. For Grotesco, this is a tool to use in the rehearsal hall. We don't put them on stage. Other groups do. But this is what it does for you. It takes your face away. So you're no longer getting clues from my face. Now the whole body has to talk, okay? It takes culture away. So this is not an Asian, a Native American, a black person, a white person. It's a human being. Just a human being. There's no history here. So if the neutral person wakes up in the morning, it's because they're finished sleeping. They didn't have a rough night. They don't dread going to work. They don't eat coffee. They're finished sleeping. That's all right. Imagine that. So we borrow a lot from nature with these exercises. And I'll do a couple very simple things. They're deceptively simple. They're actually quite difficult. But first I'm just gonna turn my back to you. I'll turn around and you can see the body take on the presence it needs to support the mask. If you don't do that, it's kind of ridiculous. It's just a piece of plastic on your face. When it works, I disappear. And there's just a neutral human being there. So I'm gonna show you another exercise from the neutral mask and you'll see the kind of simplicity of this. I'll turn again and I'm seeing the ocean for the first time. The largest element on the planet. How do you reflect that just with your body? And after a while, a ship's gonna pass and maybe a quarter of a mile out. When it gets over here, someone waves. So you see everything. You see all the little physical ticks, all the little things that don't quite work. This is the training and we can spend months and months on this before we're ready for the physical styles. So we're gonna go on a little journey of theatrical style here. We're gonna be mostly in Western Europe. This is by no means a complete version but you'll get the abridged version. We're gonna bounce around in time. We'll bounce around geographically. I'll try to keep you up to speed. We'll start in the 1700s in France. The church has the ear of the king and for the first time, they're banning public speaking as a way of curbing political dissent. So the words go something like this. There shall be no words spoken in public space to a gathering of any size. And the actors get together and say, shit, the mics are on, no f-moms, but okay, what do we do? What are we gonna do? And it doesn't take long. Word goes out. Meet under the big tree in the plaza. A crowd gathers. After a while, an actor steps forward with a gesture, no words. And it might mean we're about to begin or once upon a time, long, long ago. And then that narrator begins to animate no words yet. And we're going forward in time. We'll go to America, the 1800s, the wild, wild West, just because we can. Gee, gee. A duel at sunrise. Much easier with Daniel here. Ding! Slow motion. Silent storytelling, we call it in English, the French call it ban animé as opposed to ban daisy name, which you know is comic books. When you work with this style, oftentimes you do a classic film that everyone knows, so you can just say the title and you do the film in 10 minutes. Star Wars, Frankenstein, things like that. Okay, we're going to Basel, Switzerland. You guys are taking a little vacation in a minute. This is still going on now and no one's really sure exactly where it started, but these masks come from Basel, Switzerland and they're part of Mardi Gras. So the story is that each trade union has the same design mask and on parade day in Mardi Gras, you can see 40 bakers coming up a side street all wearing the same masks, painted in wild colors, feathers and stuff. And is anyone here Swiss, are we okay? Okay, well the Swiss are normally pretty sedate. But on Mardi Gras, behind the mask, they throw oranges and they get a little spunky, they have some fun. Lecoq, Dr. Lecoq found these masks in the 50s, brought them to the stage, painted them just white, no feathers, nothing like that, put the lights on and he realized he had something that he eventually called a larval mask because there's no indication of emotion or anything. It's up to the actor with their bodies to show how to play it. And it's basically a sculpture. So you look where the volume is, you look where the lines are, lines in space. This one has a very striking line, right? So that will tell the performer what to do with it. So I'm gonna show you just a little bit that you can do with these. We're in a movie theater. Guy comes in, after a while, something begins to stink. Cometi de l'arte, Italy 1500, start up through the 1700s. So when we talk about America, 60 years, three styles, Italy, one style, 200 years, and not only Italy, all the way up through Europe. So Moliere, Shakespeare, they stole from Cometi de l'arte shamelessly. They took scenarios, characters, gestures, all kinds of things. The miser is Pantoloni, straight out of Cometi de l'arte. Probably the merchant of Venice, Shilac, Comedia. This is how they say it started. Farmers markets, Italy, big farmers market. Maybe 20 vendors selling the same tomato and they're thinking, how are we gonna get people in to buy our tomatoes? So they hire some two-bit actors and they say, go out and do something. Just get some people around here. Same thing happens these days. But, um. So we're outdoors, right? So this is a huge style. They start wearing masks because you can be even bigger. And this is slapstick. The lines are tremendous. They go past walls. They go all the way up. It's an outdoor style. After a while, it begins to work. And they say, we don't need these stinkin' farmers anymore. Let's go be actors. And so they form these itinerant troops and they travel around Italy. Each company has a cross-section of Italian society at the time. So they figured out the archetypes in Italy at the time and each actor plays the same character their whole lives. So when they're rehearsing, there's no, I've gotta find my character. They have their character, no problem. They go into a town. They listen to the local gossip for a couple days. They play the story of that town back to them and they get run out of town. And they go to the next town. And by the time they circulate around, they've forgotten that it's that truth and everything is okay. But Arlechino, you know, is probably the most famous servant. And he started out in the 1500s being very stupid. And by the 1700s, he was very clever. Probably the most popular because some actor played him really well and everyone said, I wanna hear that guy. And so his role got larger and larger. The servants are making fun of the powers that be. This is a populist theater form which already is revolutionary for that time in the world. Anthony de Meijer. Okay, what do we need for this? You want, like that kitchen, like I get, oh, my money. Where's my money? Oh, and two, and three, and four, four. And three, and four, four, and four. Two, and three, and one, and two, and three, and four. Ha, ha, ha, and one, and two, and three, and four, four, and four, ha, ha, ha, ha. And one, and two, and three, and Arlechino. Arlechino! Doctors, and it's different than now. They're not doctors of economics or biology. They're doctors, they're experts. They know everything. So, uh. L'actore. Everybody, I am d'actore. I have survived the age of enlightenment. I am enlightened. You are not. Ask me anything. I will tell you. I'm d'actore. Let's see. D'artalia is another servant. And there's many, many servants then. If we were to look at America Modern Times, we don't have servants, but we sure got a lot of minimum wage workers, quite similar. So, d'artalia brought the most important news of the day, and to make it fun, he was a stutterer. Excuse me, everyone. There's something I need to ask. Does anyone here have a... Does anyone have a horse that's not white? Anyone? Okay, good, because he got away, and the butcher has him. So, usually by the time he got it out, the house had already burned down, and that was half the fun. So, okay, we say we're going to take a style, we're going to take the spirit of Comedia Del Arte, for example, and make it modern. How do we do that? Well, you know, it's someone, someone you young guys could write a thesis about who are our archetypes now. We know that we have wealthy people, plenty of them. Antoni's probably the Donald Sterling of his time. Only they approached it through fun. They really made fun of him, and that helped him, I think. We know that we have experts, probably a plethora of experts. So, this is Jim, not like my brother was in the audience name. Jim, but this guy just happened to be named Jim. And he's an expert. And we'll say that he works for Governor Christie. That's not funny, Governor Christie. And let's say that he works in disease control. Hello everybody, glad you could make it out. It's good to see a big house like this in the rain. And, you know, I know you're a little concerned just about getting out in public. So, I want to talk to you about this, you know, the E-word that we're talking about, the E-bowl I think there's going on. I want to assure you that there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Now, I had breakfast this morning with the Governor. We had pancakes with syrup. Made in America, just stuck the road in Vermont. And I just want to assure you that everything is okay. Now, you've read about this young woman who came back from Africa and we wanted to be sure that she wasn't going to spread this horrible disease into the populace. So, we built a really nice tent there in the back of JFK airport. We built a tent because, you know, that's what they do in Africa and we thought she'd be really comfortable with it. We gave her a box for, you know, her business. And again, you know, that's what they do in Africa. We figured while she's been over there working she's going to be most comfortable with it. So, now, she wanted to go back up to Maine or wherever she's from and so we sent her up. We sent the tent with her in the box so she can be comfortable up there. And just between us, we're frankly happy that she's co-owner of the city at JFK. So, you can fly as much as you want. Now, you know, a lot of these African countries have not paid their debts and, you know, you never know what precipitates this kind of thing. But we're looking into it. We've got it in control and there will never be any problem in New Jersey or the New York area. So, thanks for coming out. Be safe, everybody. It's easy for us to say, well, that belongs to another culture. That's Italian or that's French or whatever it is. And, you know, it's not PC to do that. And I just kind of want to make the point that artists, I don't think, have ever respected geographical boundaries. And there's no reason for us to do that, really, unless we want to self-censor ourselves. This is a Balinese mask. And the first time I saw a Balinese company, I was shocked at how similar it was to Comedienne de l'Arte. The characters, the gestures, the scenarios, it was Comedienne de l'Arte. And I understand there are many styles of Balinese theater, but this particular company was doing Comedienne. And you think, okay, well, how did that happen? Where's the chicken? Where's the egg? And what was Marco Polo's role in this? Another fellowship for you young guys to figure this out. All right, we'll move off with the Comedienne. It's big, it's got its do. If you take a belt sand, no, no, where should we go? Hang on. This would be a whole lot easier if they're not with you. We can do it, though. Buffoonery. A little-known style. It comes out of the Middle Ages. And there's good argument that this is where Mardi Gras actually began. In the little villages in the Middle Ages in Europe, if you had any kind of deformity, anything that made you different than anyone else, mental, physical, didn't matter, behavioral probably, they were frightened of you. They thought that you carried evil spirits. And so they banned you from the town. And they sent these people out and just said, go, go, go, get out of here. And these people found each other one by one in the villages and on ships of fools, we have those records. And they created their own societies. And they were a little different than our societies. They had years, they had families, they did all that stuff, but there was no centuries and centuries of this is how we do our societies. They invented it as they went. Again, it's a little-known style because it's very difficult to do. So it comes back every now and then. And in Paris in the 80s, there was kind of a rediscovery of the buffoonery. And we would go often to see great directors take on this style and they would fail one after the other. And so we just kept thinking, why is that director failing this style, what's going on? And what we kind of discovered was there, what we surmised was that it's a little like going to the zoo where you look at an animal for a while, five minutes or something, ten minutes, and then you're ready to go to the next cage. And in theater, you're stuck out there. And so at intermission, if you already had wanted to go to the next cage, you're out of there, it's done. So we did a buffoon show and we ended up blending styles. So we gave it a melodramatic through line and storyline and we found empathy for those characters and it changed everything. So when we work with this, we want to kind of create some kind of deformity or whatever that we can bounce off of. So we bind ourselves. And then you think, okay, physically, how do I do this, how do I get around? And the characters from Brotesco often start there. Eventually you can make a costume. My dog made me this hat. You're pretty. It's a very fun world. Anyway, if you were back to the belt sander, if you take a belt sander to that style and you just smooth it down, smooth the edges out, you'll go to France in the 1800s and you get the smallest pass, the clown. I read probably because they drank too much. They're anarchists as well, but it's not intentional. They want to be part of what's going on. They just can't quite figure it out. So everything they do to be part of it, it just makes it worse and worse. So there's actually, there's a fascinating, I put a costume on to take it out. I saw Peanut Bows last night. That's what they did. There's a fascinating architecture that follows the clown in addition to the little lines that they make in space and it's metaphysical. It's called Waiting for the Angels to Pass. So it doesn't matter whether it's a theater clown or a circus clown, eventually they will do a number. And if they're really good, the number will fail. And in circus tradition they do it again. And it will fail again. They'll do it again. It'll fail again. And eventually they have to just stop. And it's the hardest thing for an actor to do, is stop, be on stage, and do nothing. And it's the moment where the audience gets to see the vulnerability of the human being slash actor and it's what they came to the theater for. And that moment of vulnerability is in every style, but it permeates and really owns clown. So the Angels upstairs today. So once you have a number of these styles, they're like paint on a painter's palette. And you can begin mixing them together. You take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and you begin to experiment. And it's what's that going to make? What's that going to give us on the canvas of the stage? And it might work, it might not, but at least you have something to play with. It's what I think what Liz Lerdon was talking about today. So I'm going to show you a little piece that mashes up styles. There's a little bit of clowning in this, a little bit of buffoonery, a little bit of object theater that we'll get to, and some classic theater just for good measure. They took us on a trip in the van. I sat in the back with the things. I made a fort. You want to see the animals? This is a lion, tiger. This is a kangaroo. They have a pouch with little kangaroos. This is a wolf, hippopotamus. This is a zebra. I hate the zebra. His stripes are coming off. This is a little lion, worm. This is an elephant, but they don't have pink ears. That's paint. This is an anteater. This is a moose. This is a monkey. He doesn't stay up very good. Where the animals come from, some are friends and some are not. These animals are friends and these animals are friends. Once they came together and they had a big fight, and the elephant came and said, wait, it's not good to fight. He sent them away. These animals went away, and these animals went away, but they had a party. They had hot dogs in Coca-Cola, and they danced like this with their feet. And sometimes they danced like this with their feet. But the other animals, they came to the party by the trees. Yeah, because if there's a moon, you can hide behind a tree and no one can see you. And they came to the party like this by the trees. And the anteater said, but the other said, they'll know who you are. So they went into the forest and they had moss and sticks and they made disguises. And then they went to the party. And they had hot dogs in Coca-Cola, and they danced. And the kangaroo and the little lion fell in love. But then the big lion came and said, wait, I know who you are and you can't be here. And he sent them away. And the kangaroo was sad. She cried like this. But the little lion, he came back by the trees. And then they were happy, but they didn't want to dance. So they went to sleep like this. But then the big lion came and said, wait, I know who you are and you can't be here. And he killed him. And then all the animals were sad and they came. And the elephant said, it's not good to kill people. So don't kill people. We ran over the anteater. Yeah, we stopped at Denny's for hamburgers. We like hamburgers just what catch up. And when we came out, we ran over the anteater. You could hear it. But he doesn't mind. I hate the Z-band. Imagine this in America. In Holland, a curator pulled together some puppeteers, dancers and sculptors and said, you guys are all doing the same thing. You need to get together and talk about it and write a manifesto. You are a movement already. You need to make it public. I don't know if they got that far. But this is what they were doing. They were using everyday objects in different ways than were used to seeing them. There was a connection to surrealism. So Dolly's Melting Clock was kind of the image of this. And they called it object theater. They did just explicit things with objects. Everyday objects. Fifteen years ago Peter Grotesco began working on a show where we were exploring gesture as an expression of the subconscious. We wanted to create a language that would contradict the words that were spoken. And we were working with migration and how generations of people had come to America looking for a better life and just trying to fit in even though many of them came from difficult, difficult situations in student. We invited audiences to come into open rehearsals and we asked them for family stories of migration and upheaval. And just for fun, just for some levity we asked them also for family stories of great generosity. Different than Pina Bausch, but we actually had the actors then create one gesture for each dramatic moment of each story. And the gestures began to form together into phrases of gesture and the phrases went together into forms of dance. If people leave the theater and they don't know exactly what it is they saw, but they're intrigued, they want to talk about it, they wake up in the morning remembering it, and they want to talk about it more, then I think the theater is in a good place. So we're going to end there. I'm going to leave you with one last thought and if we have time left we can do a little Q&A. But the thought is this Peter Brook, the great British director said when an actor walks on stage the audience is very interesting for the first two steps. And then something needs to happen. Thank you all. Thank you John. Do you have time for like maybe a couple of questions? Like about five minutes. So if you want to, if there are any questions about for John, for the show, for, yeah, yeah. The answers are very good. Have you performed for theater history courses for friends out here? Do you have a theater history? I'd love to do that. I was at the ATHA conference and they were talking about theater history classes and saying how dull they were. And I just thought my god, dull. What could be more interesting than this? It's the history of the world. Yeah. So call me. I have a website. Very modern. We don't need no stinking words. Just have a question. When you talk, when you talk about making something like a media for now so what you showed was sort of like, you know, taking the able situation, so like the circumstances or the scenario is now and the mask is obviously you know, a new form. It's not the classic. So is there a production? I mean, these are sort of sketches that you're showing. Like is there a production that you guys have done that sort of took that to a sort of production level of taking that style contemporary times and could you describe it? Yeah. Did you all hear that? Yeah. Okay. And on the web and all that stuff they heard it live streaming. You know, we don't. We end up mashing and styles up together. So, Commedia dell'arte is at the heart of much of the work we do in its rhythm and essence. Sometimes we'll be much more specific than that and we'll do a scene that we think is best played in that style. But we've never taken on a whole show in that style because again it's another way of acquiescing to the form. So we're much more interested in kind of creating new form. Yeah. Could you speak, John, to any thoughts you might have about you know, the sort of naturalistic theater, regional theaters that are doing be it Williams or New Plays but in a pretty much you know, naturalistic form in the sense of behavior, Stanislavski whatever. Pretty traditional I guess for lack of a better word. How there is or how there could be more of an integration of bringing back some of the Commedia or the the buffoonery clown, those physical theater elements into today's production with the goal of having people lean forward and have a more theatricality than just watching what film does very well. So let's have the stage be at a place where stories are told that demand the stage as a platform in which to tell story. I don't see that so much now. I see either the camp of political theater, the camp of the more physical theater and it sort of isolated in its own form and people go for that and then the you know, traditional theater and I would just love to do you have any thoughts about how they would synergize? You bring up a great question and I think it's a very complex answer. You know, I think anytime we take on a play, anytime we walk on stage it should be for the first time. So we're not redoing a play that has been done before even though it has. So how do we tell that story that way? You know, I think the reason that realistic drama still exists is because America did it really well. I mean we knocked it out of the park and so it's a style that is revered and we influence the world with that. The danger is just becoming kind of stuck in that. So you know, and then we have this model of whatever, you have four weeks of rehearsal come off book, we're opening on this date and that's it. So we need to take more time. I mean we need to think more about the audience than about bottom lines and existing models. Part of the reason, and here's another huge generalization, part of the reason that theater is in trouble I think is that there's so much of it and you know, many groups do six or seven shows a year and that makes it harder to do them really well so that there really are something brand new that is going to elevate the art form. But you know, some of them do six or seven and there's brilliant six or seven brilliant shows. So it's a case by case basis, but I think we all need to ask ourselves how can we make this something brand new and fresh and if it's another style, if it's starting at the beginning and going backwards whatever let's play with this. This is art. This is art. That is a fantastic note to wrap up this session. Thank you very much John. So at this point we are going to take a break and then at 3.30 the next rounds of sessions are going to happen. Rooms are here. I think you know the layout of the space now, but we have folks around if you need directions. So enjoy the break and keep going. Thank you so much.