 Welcome everybody back to Segal Talks here at the Markney Segal Theatre Center, the Graduate Center at CUNY, the City University of New York in Manhattan in New York where somehow the city is trying to get back to life to the opening bars and restaurants and partly work is restarting. It's a week 12 of our series, every day we talk for artists around the world and and today we have with us in Japan, he would be called a living legend, one of the great great makers of theater in the history of theater Peter Schumann from the bread and puppets theater with us. But it's going to be also a wonderful week. We're going to have Govan Rubin and Terrence Conrad from Malaysia with us from the Terry and the Groose Company, the really significant and important political activist and installation artist, from Cuba, is taking time out of her work to talk for us. Hope Azeda from Rwanda will join us on Thursday. She did many of the reconciliation performances and she will tell us the situation for theater artists in Rwanda. And then there's Saman Amini, an Iraqi Iranian refugee with the age of 11 left his country with his family came to the Netherlands, somehow got into an acting theater there will tell us about the situation of theater artists in the Netherlands so this will be truly an interesting and I think important week and what a start we have. The world is of course still confusing. Iran just said it went up within couple of weeks to 200,000 infections, the medical community is coming together we have a 161 vaccinations in testing 242 remedies, 700 different tests everybody tries to work together. In Beijing, the neighborhood has been closed again the high down neighborhood is not good news for for everybody it looks like it's cannot be fully contained Paris opened like New York, the restaurants and cafes but as here in New York they have big concerns. And there might take back the reopening if the crowds really don't behave. And only 1% of population has the immunity at the moment to have that what they call herd immunity. We would need 70%. So we are far far far away and what happens and how fast this can spread out is Brazil. When we talked to a Brazilian colleagues they were like 200,000, 300,000 cases now they are close to a million cases. They're still behind us the most devastated country at the moment is the United States of course it's a big country and testing is more but still things haven't been turned right and now let's have a look at the great great work of Peter Schumann so I'm going to read that's a little bit so we know a bit about the history and also we want to thank thank Elka Schumann, his wife, maybe we saw her I'm not sure she came in with whom he created that politically radical puppet theater in 1962. Peter has been a legend for his work as a Vietnam War protest, his politically themed social commentary theater is of significance in the American theater history, and he invented kind of a radical street theater that is being followed by by thousands and companies around the world and watched by so many at the moment he is in Vermont was there with his company, where he creates his outdoor festivals for a long time he ran the domestic resurrection circus a very big extra he participated for a long time in the Halloween parade was in trouble when he said I'm not going to support the the Afghan war when he said we want to be critical of it we think of the people and he refused to participate his New York home is the theater for the new city where he shows his work regularly if it's open. He has been known for his opposition and place against the World Trade Organization against the Vermont nuclear power plant. He supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Zapatista movement. In the year 2000 some members of his company got arrested at the national right Republican National Convention where they were building theater in a workshop and they thought it was a terrorist plot. There's a big law case against him when he was performing in the Patrick's Cathedral and they were wearing the 60s masks and painted their faces and policemen said they should stop that that's not allowed there's a big case they ultimately won and their characters they created Uncle Fatso the washer woman, the white Latina and the many armed mother, a legend, Julie Tamer quoted them in her film work around the universe and so this is a long and big introduction so Peter, again, thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time to come with me he was always born the same year as my father in Silesia in Germany he ended up here in in New York as an artist Peter where are you at this moment and how do you feel I am in my daughter's house which is one hillside east from our house we are on the next hillside we're sitting up here looking into that beautiful it's called the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. So we're in the Northeast Kingdom. We don't know where the King is we are still looking. But it might be you. No, no. No, but behind you. That is from what we call a bad bad sheet philosophy painting, because a friend of mine bought me a whole truckload full of a discarded bed sheets from a big hotel outside a big hotel and dump them into our workshop and I feel free to paint as much as I want. It's wonderful to know that I'm painting on surfaces that had so many uses so and they some of them are ripped. Not so great and when I hang them out in the wind they may rip a little more, but they're terrific. So this is a bad bed sheet philosophy painting. Here you see. My God looks pretty apocalyptic doesn't yes. Well that's because our life is that way those fires are coming closer and closer. And as you all experienced this big saying with the virus coming on us. Our civilization twice to redefine is its essentials. But we are puppeteers so we know very well we are non essentialists. The fingernail polishers are already declared that they're essential, the tattoo artists are essential, but we are puppeteers so we know we are non essentialists so we can talk from the standpoint of non essentialism. This time is quite difficult here on our farm on which you do gardening. In addition to see it there to feed our team, but the team isn't there. We normally at this time of year we are about between 7500 people on the farm. And right now we are eight people on the farm. And the tour that traveled in the springtime with 25 people throughout the states was interrupted when the virus came about they lost all their engagements. And they had to come home people who could still go home went home. And these are the eight stranded people who ended up here and that's our new company. During shows out on the farm in the pine forest. And we call them combined insurrection and resurrection services. And unfortunately we can only have 10 first 10 for the first few. Now we are allowed 25 people to come. And by mid July. We want to get enough neighbors involved so that we can do what we usually do in the summer. Circuses. We have a big old gravel pit that's our amphitheater that can very in the 90s had like 20 30,000 people. Seeing the circuses. So that's big enough that we could have many groups of 25 people seeing the circus. So that's our aim this summer to see if we can get enough performers and neighbors together to do that again. That's where we go. Yeah. But I mean the arts are in general in trouble. I mentioned the Iraq war. And I won't ever forget that how the Iraq war was started by the United States assigning finally an essential task to the arts. You can't find any documentation on weapons of mass destruction. So they found good artists who could fake it and made fake little pictures of tunnels and trucks and all that. And that's how they persuaded the whole goddamn Western world to go into those horrendous war in which millions of people got displaced and murdered and what have you. With the help of the arts imagine. So the arts are a political power finally. Unfortunately in the wrong direction. So that's our situation. And we live in the midst of this. Yeah. So our little services in the pine forest. It's about an hour long. People come and sit at distances from each other. We have a garbage man with the yardstick going around at measuring their distances off and on that they don't wiggle away from the positions. And when we sing, we try to sing, or even when we shout, we try to do that in off directions that it doesn't go directly to our audience. So we are practicing a new art form with this distancing. And it's very few people, but that doesn't make any difference to us. We traditionally do village parades in the summertime here in Vermont up in the north and east of here in little towns. And often enough, there are way more trees there as spectators than people. There's about 25 people there and about 100,000 trees. So we are used to that. Still, that's a big difference. 20 or 30,000 people who once also came to this circus. And now you're down to this. So you put it out on the internet and people can register and pay a ticket. That's the next step. We haven't done it yet. Right now we do everything by calling people up. But the puppeteers are going to change this. They're going to make it with internet. Yeah. How do you run with seven people? The entire farm or eight? Yeah, that's a big mess. We have a garden. A bit of time has to be spent in the garden. Rehearsals are very short. So our shows are as bad as ever. But the people that we have happened to be great versatile performers. So they are musicians, they are dancers, they are shouters, they are narrators, and they can manipulate the puppets and the masks we have. And what's done doesn't compare to these huge pageants that float over the fields. They're starting to mechanize some of these big mass movements of a herd of caribou coming out of the woods and make that into mechanical pulling things that very few people can do. Incredible. As someone said one, one can do everything in life, but not at the same time. And when you do a big show for thousands, you cannot do a small one. You have to do a small one. You can do one for the big ones. But Peter, what do you think of the times we live in? You have this Danteesque inferno behind you, then you perform in the pine forest. I think Dante said that terrestrial paradise isn't the pine forest close to the ocean, of course, where he was in Ravenna. But so you are between the pine forest and the hell. But what do you think, what do you make of this time, where we are in now? Well, it's a great task for us who want to address the problems of the time to the public large to reinvent on it and to find the really meaningful things and the meaningful ways of saying them to our audiences. Whether that's a little audience or a big one is almost secondary to the fact that it has to be reinvented because the lost normality that is being deployed wasn't so great and is rather deplorable when you take a closer look at it. So whatever normality comes back to us can't be that old decrepit normality. There must be a better one that learns from the insights that through this situation we gain by looking at our normality, which is so proudly trying to come back upon us. It shouldn't. And it won't. Yep. That's the situation. You said we have to do it in a meaningful essential way in a way that works. What, what way works? What do you say? How do we have to do theater now? Well, the littleness of things that wanted to be big has to be considered the absence of the means the normal means that are available seem to have changed. So for us, I mean it's different for you in the city but for us in the countryside, it means, for example, we can't do simultaneous theater. We are not enough to have four stages going at the same time and such things. It's also an opportunity to, because of the restriction to invent exactly those forms that are possible with the restrictions. So yeah, for us, it looks like we just want to work on it figure out how to do it. I think the same is true of language. You know, the normal address, the political speech, the sort of interpretation of the moment in time, the horror of capitalism upon the world, the seeing of that and the saying of that, the concentration of getting the words to be clearer, to be fewer, to be right into the brain of people and not just into their taste buds or into that which they are used to. It's another thing that you owe to an extremely difficult situation. I'm a war kid, you know, I grew up in Nazi Germany in the war with the bombs falling and the hours of that regime restricting family life to whispering and whatever. And then became a refugee at that war. And that fleeing from burning buildings, the fleeing from an area that was under attack to the countryside, then learning in the countryside how to live on the things that you glean from the fields because you don't own the fields and the crop. And from the berries that you pick and the mushrooms that you learn to eat. That is, that was my basic education. I was 10 years at the time and I think that whatever I learned in life is all from that time also did my first puppetry of that time, because when we fled Silesia, my parents were five kids in the family. My parents allowed each kid to take a little bag of their own. And I took a bag of hand puppets that we had. My parents were friends with puppeteers and for Christmas, we usually got a hand puppet. And so our home entertainment when I was a kid was to put a bed sheet between two chairs and then pick up the Casper and the devil and the Oma and the robber and then you make up a puppet show. So that was what we did for each other for our birthdays and so on. And when we were in that village in on the Baltic in northern Germany, I asked my brother to help me and him sing for the village population. We knocked at the door and said hey, there's a puppet show over there and we did kind of show first public show. What was the first public show? What was it about? What was the theme? Ah, that's the best part of it all. There wasn't any what was it about because the puppets themselves tell the story. There's a robber, there's a ghost, there's Casper who solves all problems. There's this grandma who always knits. It's all given. You don't have to invent it. It's there. So Peter, you saw burning cities bombs falling in World War Two. How serious is the situation we are in now? Well, it's unfortunately way more serious than just the virus because the boss of the world, Mr. Trump, before the virus came decided to arm a trident nuclear and trident with a nuclear weapon and ordered it to sale. And I believe it's now still in the Mediterranean, but it's going towards the Gulf. And I think that this is an unacceptably dangerous situation to have an idiot on the trigger of a destruction weapon that can wipe out the world because it will have chain reactions. So it's unbelievably dangerous and it's not paid attention to. I don't understand why, but no screaming is happening and screaming should be happening. That's the situation we live in and luckily we still have the trees out here. We have a gorgeous cloud particles above us and we live as if that's the life, but that's not the only life. The way we are boiling it the way I'm killing it and the way we allow our super bosses to regulate our life into submission to these destructive forces is understandable and nonsensical. So we are all educated intelligently and we also act stupidly by not acting upon all this sufficiently. But the sufficiencies are to come by what is it sufficiently screaming all day long you get horse. Yeah. And what to scream and how to bring it across. Yeah. We do one show that's called the praise and denunciation show, and it consists of five praises and five denunciations. The praises are all dances of the jolly dandelions that grow all over here. I don't know if you know them, but they're the gorgeous little yellow golden flowers that become booster bloom. Yes. They are wonderful. They're all over their place and they sort of dip the whole field into as a golden glory and just too much to take in. And the denunciations are the obvious ones of what we read in the paper and what we see there. The total incompetence of how to deal with this. Look at this richest country in the world. Richest country in the world doesn't know how to deal with these things. There was tiny countries that know very well how to alert their population, how to protect them, how to do it. And these billionaire idiots that run the show here, no idea, no capacity of understanding or of sensing the suffering that their idiocy creates unbelievable that this is happening in the so-called civilized country, or maybe over civilized country. Yeah, my god, what a world. And you're in New York City right now. Oh my god. We lived for nine years in New York City on the lower east side. The Lansing Street, right? Yeah, our loft was on the Lansing Street, but we lived first on East 4th Street in a building. Yeah, it was five flights up, I think. And no elevator, no nothing. And we had our kids up there and oh my god, what's that interest. And about once a week, a robber came climbing through the fire escape and emptied out our fridge. And that was a very regular occurrence. And I was stupid enough one time to follow that guy was just a kid over the rooftops and the jump and jump, but neither me nor him fell so lucky. Yeah, no, you have been such a such a such a presence. Your work is admired around the world what you invented these kind of the Benkel singing, the songs, the kind of Breitschen, the declamatorial political singing, the puppet work. We work in streets and places. We talk to so many artists, whether it is a Milo Rao in Ghent or it is people in Lebanon or people in Taiwan, people in Brazil. And they all say we have now we have to get out of the theaters we have to get out of the of these buildings, not only we can't perform there because of regulation but also perhaps it's time to go out you have done that for such a long time. It works. What did you find what methods. What do you feel really works and something to tell to our listeners who often are theater artists. Well, I guess it depends on the circumstances when we and on the cops also. We started in New York in the street and 62 them cops hadn't seen any streets here that I wasn't any day, because they didn't remember that during the labor, the early in the 20s I was already something like that that had died away and so the cops are too young they didn't know this. We had to have our shows all while it was easy was just me and usually a friend, a Puerto Rican friend who could translate things into Spanish and to it always had to be lightweight. So when the cop started moving the wrong way that we could just move and was all this technique of being quick on your feet, being ready to leave avoid confrontations. And it worked for a bunch of years. But the what you say, well, our things were done on the first ones where paper scrolls that we called cranky sort of an imitation of what the movie does. You paint on the paper scroll which you find lying around outside of newspaper printing places they throw them out. And you pick them up and throw your story on there you crank it in a box and you tell the story along with said they were mostly but cops rats horrible murders resulting from either or angels for salvation purposes and so forth. That's how it started but then they, in addition to the neighborhood, the overwhelming powers from Vietnam, whether next was just too hard to take to listen to all that stuff and to not do it. And then in New York, the situation was that a lot of the casualties were Puerto Rican who couldn't even vote. But they were used as cannon fodder in the Vietnam war. And there was an organization of Puerto Rican women who had all got the same letter that starts with the words, we regret to inform you. And they asked us if we could do a play for them and we did. And there was the play we played more than any play we ever played. It's a tiny little street show for five people, very easy to do, very lightweight just a few masks, a drum, a bugle, and, and that's it and a few performers. And it was about that letter we regret to inform you. Yeah, these were theaters that work that reached audiences you said you had an interpreter so you always translated your shows into. But on the lower east side on the between Avenue D and B, those blocks were mostly Spanish speaking. There were other blocks that were more Ukrainian and Russian, but the blocks where we lived where there was a lot of Spanish. And if you played in the street. Yeah, it felt you needed Spanish translation. And it's so so incredibly forward thinking to make theater that it also can be understood by the people there for whom you make it to have languages you hear on the street also on the show participation in that way to create a meaningful work of theater work of art, actually for the people who are most were most affected by it. That was the great Jean-Glut van Italy show at La Mama, but I'm sure it was not not and he's did great work and I like him very much and also his upstate But you were on the street in different languages where you could run away from the cops and then slowly you brought in larger puppets and And so I think really your way of working is so significant. You also mentioned often you were influenced by the avant-garde by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Fluxes. How did you see your work connected to that movement? I had a little dance company in the late fifties in Munich outside of Munich in Germany. And when we had that dance company, we saw Cunningham perform in Munich and I met Cunningham and Cage. And then when we came to New York, I visited Cunningham Studio. And in that studio he conducted evening classes together with a person called Robert Dunn, who used interpretations of John Cage's book Silence as material for dance choreographers. These were all the dance choreographers who later on got a big name, even Rainer, Simone Morris, Robert Morris, Trisha Brown. They were all in that workshop. But their work was confined to this small circle of intellectual fire brands and innovators. It didn't extend. It was an inspiration for me to abandon that, frankly, to go in the street and do in the street where the majority were either Puerto Ricans or Hasidic Jews or Ukrainians in the majority. So for me to abandon that was just as important as to be inside it. And the abandoning wasn't just the little cranky movies, but it also linked itself with the war resistors league, with the Greenwich Village Peace Center, which was just created at that time. And those were all things that afforded us to be big, to get many, many people into shows. So we built the puppets bigger and bigger, made the noises louder and louder so that it would work in the street, had big drum choruses of dozens of drums and use puppets first six, seven, eight and 10 feet tall and use them in the parades. And we found out that we got people to participate very easily, that they were sick and tired of just holding up their slogans on the stick and rather joined in on a big chorus of gray lady puppets or whatever we used at the time. And to be part of a more total picture, a performance where an airplane would fly overhead and mow down the Vietnamese and that's what pulled them up and the airplane would come back and mow down and other forces would pull them up, etc. Continuous performance down 5th Avenue. Those were possibilities given by the moment, really. They went, we didn't have to invent them. They just had to be the reaction that was possible to do to the horrors that existed. So it was massive. And it worked to that degree, didn't stop the war. No, but some of the strongest memories of many, you know, of theater have been your your work your shows and it resonated with them confirmed to believe in something the fact that you were doing as a symbolic imaginary art made it real. You write also you said the way how your company is organized is a form of art that you are self govern that it's an auto structure that you do not depend on city funding or others. Tell us a little bit what what do you say when you say this is an art form. Well, the normality of art production as we saw mostly in the city relied on systems that existed like for painters the gallery system. Okay, well the gallery in that system only accepts what is running as the fashion at the accepted style of painting, but not the opposite of that. And the same is true of poetry magazines or of music makings or of puppetry or of theater that these these halls of traditional communication to the public have their restrictions. You got to do the art you need to do. You got to first destroy that hall there. You got to step out of it or climb on top of it or reinvent it or not use it. There are all these alternative things that you learn from. Yeah, mostly from not having money. So when you don't have money, you just invent something that you make from garbage. And we didn't want to rely on money raising on sitting at a telephone at a typewriter and asking for money. We wanted to have applications for being part of the economy as it were. We wanted to be opposite the economy. So the opposite means you have to learn yet to learn discipline your eating your discipline your users view you pick the garbage as good as you can make your things from the garbage. And you can make big things by just utilizing the garbage. And that was being became like a an attraction for the youngsters who come every year to help us make the circus is because they are brought up in the American or European tradition of that art is a soloistic. You do it and you develop your this and that and style and you and so on. And it's not it's a communal enterprise art. It's something where you talk not only with your wife or your friend, but with your enemies as well. And with younger ones and older ones. And you make something you pick your theme that way. And then you make your things that way. It's it's it's the opposite of an individualistic enterprise. It's it's speech is collective. Even it's speech is something that's composed of elements that consist of many people's speeches. And so that was what we wanted to bring across to the many kids who came every year to be here to be in the countryside and to do circusing. Yeah, circus circus. It's such a significant important art form we had also circus artists with us, but also I would like to point out early on that your idea of audience participation, which was a real participation and not making fun of it or including someone make about you know what often done or you know you're used as a prop whatever no you said come hold the puppet be part of that movement show something and that way when you do something in an action perhaps you know is something different than as you said just shouting a slogan or holding up a poster you really do something and call to action that as Brett said it's no longer good enough to portray the world as it is, you know we have to change it and we have to take action or perhaps our theater has to has to take action I don't know we talked about earlier I think your why cheap art manifesto is this one of the great pieces of writing in the 20th, 20th century one of the great manifest of any artists in any time any century. And you wrote this I think, and if do you have it or should I read do you have do you have it with you. I have. Yeah, so I want our audience to listen to that it was done in 84 and it said the why cheap art manifesto. People have been thinking too long that art is a privilege of the museums and the rich. Art is not business. It does not belong to banks and fancy investors. Art is food. You can eat it. But it feeds you. Art has to be cheap and available to everybody. It needs to be everywhere because it is inside the world. Art through this pain. Art wakes up sleepers. Art fights against war and stupidity. Art sings hallelujah. Art is for kitchens. Art is like good bread. Art is like green trees. Art is like white clouds in the blue sky. Art is cheap. Hoorah bread and puppet in global Vermont 84. Tell us a little bit about this manifesto. I think I wrote this in reaction to some big full page ads in the New York Times. That proclaimed art as being good for business like Exxon and I forget which other companies published these big pages with big slogans of how wonderful art is for business because it can decorate their sales and what have you. And I wanted to say that this is exactly the opposite of what art is. And art is not a piece of advertisement for a money maker. But art is the thing that's inside you and it comes outside. So it was relatively easy to oppose that relatively stupid advertising page. And I made a lot of those and later on, when I met Hans Hake, who's also German and also lived in New York. What a great exception just last year. Yeah. Yeah. And he, he saw the same pages and had the same reaction to it and also made the series of not manifestos, but of artworks that dealt with these silly commercial slogans. But what I say in here and isn't stressed enough is the fact that we are called the bread and puppets theater, not the puppet and bread theater. For us, the bread that we distribute to the audience at each show and that we bake ourselves is that's the fundament of our art. That this real reality of eating and not eating as a solo act, but eating as a communal act with each other. And in order to make it a little harder for people, we smear a very strong garlic sauce on it. That is called Aioli that we learned in the Provence in France. And it's, yeah, and it tips them up and makes them jump up. And yeah, we have big ovens. We grind our own rye. We grow our own rye now. We, I learned the bread baking from my mother in Silesia. So the bread we make is Silesian rye bread, sourdough rye bread. And we, when we were refugees, all the grain was what we, the kids could clean off the fields. And we had a little coffee mill and was ground in there and the sourdough was made and the bread was baked. In a communal oven which the village had where once in a week the baker was the fire maker. He made the fire, the villagers came with their loafs, each loaf had a different sign on it for each family. And the baker baked them and people went home and ate them and next week the same thing. And we have a big oven the same size as that village oven was so that when we had 20 or 30,000 people, they could all get bread. So we baked five, six times, I don't know, 50 to 70 loafs in there. No problem. Baking and distributing bread was our start of how we wanted to do theater, eating theater, chewing theater. Yeah. This is a question in part of your family continues the tradition. I know your daughter is so married to to Sebastian Brecht who makes chocolate. Grandson who has that fantastic chocolate store. The opposite of bread. Yes, the opposite, but fantastic one, but still it's we also are in in different terms, but Peter what this time of Corona where you already said you do your painting now but you can't do your work you're not in contact with 7080 people where you, you know, as a cattle. It's different. No, I know. What do you what do you how does that have an impact on you does it change you what do you think about what do you dream about in the night. Yeah, it's it's your right it has to be everything has to be reconsidered every aspect of it. And I don't know my first reaction was to put free bread on the table outside our museum to make a table with spread on it. And I made little paper puppets from it to make up pine with a little paper face. And I put signs out saying bread. And I gave it an adjective. I called it immune system boosting bread. And virus fighting clown puppets help yourselves and people come and they put a little money in the head that's there. And they help themselves have the bread in the box and the puppets right next to them, and also bring loaves of bread to two local stores to the local store in Glover a common store and to a co-op store in the village a little further away. And I bake as much as I can we still have right left so I keep grinding and baking and I'm now at the moment I'm baking tiny little one pound rolls that are relatively easy to bake in the form that takes to bake 40 or 50 of them takes one bucket of pine wood. That's all that heats the oven and then the pump and it stays in there for 12 hours and bakes at slow temperature for a long time. It's a bread that keeps. It's not like your normal bread that goes stale it doesn't. You can keep it for a month for two months will still be good. Yeah, that's one aspect of trying to react to it. How to solve all the other aspects, namely, the many friends who have come over the years and were living in Boston or in New York or wherever, and who want to be part of this has been part of it for so long. But how to overcome the complication of their coming quarantining for a week, getting a test done, then being able to be close to people, how to cook for them, how to have them use the outhouses, all these problems are overwhelming. It's big. So we are working on it. We have no solution. We are just going piece by piece. We're doing small shows now and we want to build them up. Yeah, I have no good answers for but this will come to you. We hope to get circuses. There's enough locals coming to participate in a careful way by mid July. So that's the goal. And what do you do for inspiration? I think Ria from the Paper Moon puppet theater company in Indonesia said that, you know, to keep the motor warm we have to do something. What do you read or what do you listen to music? Do you write? Yeah, I listen to music. What do you do? If I have time, I do a little reading. We read my wife and I read quite a bit of Emily Dickinson together in the evenings. So you're reading to each other? Yeah, or I read her a piece of Jacob Böhme Aurora. Or I read her a little she speaks German as well. So I can read Möhrige. I can read Goethe. We can even read Herdeline together. So we are naturally Brecht and others. Yes, we have the fortune to have our two languages. And there's a lot of literature available, as you know. But we are especially found of Emily Dickinson as a treat before we go to sleep. Yeah, who also lived in our house and moved from it. So do you think about work? Let's say there is a vaccine as found and a very promising one, as they say just in Germany started last week. If you reduce theatre, let's say next year or whatever it might be, will there be, will there be something different than what you did before? Or do you think it will be an adaptation, a mutation? Or do you think for us, we have always done the right thing? We're going to do it an even better one? What will happen? We can't be defined of having found out how to do theatre. We haven't. What we do is extremely unfinished. What we do is fragmentary. It's a piece of larger thing that we haven't succeeded to do. It's always like that. It's something that when we started off, it's a big concept. And what we do is a couple of fragments that contribute to that. But the finishing has never happened. So for us, finishing is somewhere, I don't know, way out there somewhere. It's suddenly not achieved or reached. It's like music. When I was a kid, when I was in high school, for me, these radicals, the Schoenberg school, Weber and Schoenberg, that was an eye-opener. It was fantastic. I mean, I was brought up with the classics and I loved my Bach and my Mozart and what have you. But then to hear this radical turnaround, this totally revolutionary anti-Boussouar taste, this totally aggressive sound, this totally uncompromising aesthetic that didn't bend to popular conception of pleasingness and so on. That was a fantastic eye-opener. And I was so sorry to see it being taken away by the minimalists and the other later fashions of modern music. And it wasn't there, but in our company, we still work with that kind of sounds in addition to doing traditional brass music and Scottish dance music and such things. So we have youngsters who are totally into 12 and 13 tone radicalizing of music. And that will continue. And it's unfinished, as I pointed out. It's not a thing where we say we have it, we know how to do it. No, we don't. But we are continuing to look for that, to do our searching. Yeah. And this is so it's in a way has always been like this a moment of questioning what you are doing and reinventing it and trying to present fragments of the possibility. What art did you see? What theatre or maybe music are there? But since we are about theatre, what did you see? What masters or what theatre works influenced you? Well, you said, this is something that moved me. What in your long work in theatre, what are your point of reference? What influenced you? Right, it's hard to wrap that up. But recently a friend told me about a piece by Irene Fornes that I, the Cuban playwright, and one of my strongest memories of New York City Theatre was a piece by Irene, done in the yard, not in Judson Church, but in the yard behind Judson Church, which opens to not Thompson Street to the others, maybe Bleecker could be. It was a big metal gate, and it was a piece that was based on Wilkes' poem Annunciation. And Elka Mainz was the pianist, and he was very gifted to do speaking lines while playing piano in a totally different beat. And he could do that. And I believe it was a Bach fugue that he used and he did do the speaking lines visit. And Irene Pasloff, the dancer, opened the big gate. And I also believe, I think that's true, her father was a feather merchant and had helped her to make a giant pair of wings from polychrome feathers. And she had these wings and she came, the light was shining on her as she came to that big metal gate, which closed behind her again. And then, instead of flying onto the little stage where the Mary who was expecting the angel was sitting, she just went to the audience and showed off the beautiful feathers and went around and people stroked her feathers and admired them. And only then did she become an angel and went to Mary. And, oh, it was such a gorgeous piece, unforgettable. And, you know, radical theater done on very traditional, use of very traditionalistic means like marvelous costuming. The Bach piano, I think it was in the clavichord that he played. And then, oh, yeah, the colors and the light, the way it was used. And so, so super simple and concentrated on very few gestures. The dressing of Joseph was one of them, just dressing a person to be an actor, to be made to be appropriate for performing the role of Joseph and so on. Wonderful. Anyway, that was an example of an, yeah, but New York was so full of interesting things in 61. Our, the super of our building was a man who called himself the uranium ambassador. He sort of himself as being an ambassador to the planet Uranus. And he had a club of friends who smoked a lot of dope together and did music together. And they had gotten the loft of Judson Church to do weekly meetings. And those uranium Philanster as he called them. And then this was my first company to work with. I tried to get these attendees in the Cunningham studio to do that. And they had a lot of offices with me. And I, but I didn't have a telephone at that time. It was too complicated to ever meet anybody and Dickie Tyler and his, these neighborhoods kind of dopey friends, they were very willing. And they had a dance for the war resistors league, the general strike for peace, living theater and war resistors league end of 61, 62, pronounced a general strike for peace. The general wasn't very general because it was for a couple of hundred people, but it was in an attempt to start a movement against atomic war, mongering England had that movement already and the US didn't have it. And the living theater and the war resistors league wanted to instill it in there. So I made that dance, a dance of death, which a mass dance, which I had done in Munich. And otherwise in Germany, before I came to the States, and I did another version, this is uranium alchemy players in the Judson church. Yeah, that was my first production in the thing, but it totally relied on this group of music makers that were available to me because of our, the super of our building, Dickie Tyler. He was a great artist, a great woodcarver. He had a pushcard where he took his woodcuts, little chapbooks and single, what did he call the single sheets. He had a name for this. Anyway, he took him out because he was a war veteran. He was allowed to sell things in the street. And he had a pushcard that Judson allowed him to park in their backyard. And on weekends he would go out into Washington Square into this area and try to sell his cuts for a quarter, a nickel, a dime and so forth. Yeah, it's a great, great, great lesson how to make art. You know, you ask the people you know you have the places that are available, but you need a cause, you know, the one that you had, you know, the strike for peace. Peter, why do you think we need art? Why is art important? Oh my God. Mama Mia, now I have to start thinking. Alaskar, can you answer it? I can't hear anything. Why do we need art? The bread is easier to answer, right? Why do we need bread? Good bread. But with the bread it was, for us it was an eye opener to do German bread in America. The bread was so terrible in New York. We didn't want to eat it, so we had to make our own bread. And I mean, America was overwhelmed by what's it called, Wonder Bread. This is sort of like a white fluffy thing that the schools together, it's when you squashes together, it's a whole loaf is about this big. And then you can toss it at your, that's what students do in cafeterias, they push together, throw it at somebody and send them a message. Yeah, why art? My God. The why art question. I don't know if it is a question. It exists at the companies that the human marching on, whatever that marching on is. It tries to channel it, very seldom succeeds. It tries to influence it to a certain degree, maybe. And it tries to stop wars. You don't quite see how it could or how it does. It tries to change the foolishness that the general direction of civilization has taken with something that's more related to what should be, namely Mother Earth. And what's what we have as a life with our neighbors, the sparrows or the pigeons or whoever they are. And it does all that because it needs to be, there needs to be other responses than the jargons that we have invented. That call themselves communication, but communicate not enough. Don't have the intensity that communication would have if it would be a real communication. So we have delegated that away from us to and call it poetry or philosophy. But in actuality, that's our real speech. That's our real communication. And the other one, the pragmatic one, is the doubtful one that should be junked overhauled. Yeah, it's not a good answer, but it's a very good one. But I can't think of other ones. Yeah. All right. My God. Art is cheap. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah. But I should like to introduce you. I have no idea what's going on. This is my sensor and editor supervisor. Publisher? Yes. Yeah. I don't know if she's on the picture there. Yes, she is. Yes. Good. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And we are doing this together for over 65 years now. So we are going on and on. Oh my God. Where is it going to go? All of this? We don't know that. Yeah. I thought it was going to be an hour long. It's okay. Frank, what else? Well, you have said so many things. Yeah, we have said so many, many things, as you know, and maybe we could also come back one day. Maybe, yeah, so to come to a conclusion in a ways, and we are over the hour, as Elke said. Yeah, good. For young theater artists now, whether they may be in New York, like you were on the lens history one day, or maybe they listened to us from South America or Asia or Africa, your work is so well known around the world. So many companies have you will name you as an inspiration for their work. It's just one of the most influential theater movements. And what advice do you have for these young artists or artists in general to say how to use this time we are in now, and what is meaningful to think about? What should they do? Well, I think the advice is in the details of the situation where you're in. How are you confined if you're in a single room if you're confined to not seeing anybody being on? Well, then you have to invent art that is blind, that is non-outlooking, that is independent of these visits that you normally get. If you're already able to go through the door to meet other people, that's another piece of art. So then you have to follow that and see what that one does. And it's even further if you can have a group of friends that quarantine together with you, then you have that greater possibility. I think we have to stick to the advice we get on the carefulness of our behavior. And we have to invent our art according to this advice. That advice in mind, we can't do it against it. It has to be visited in mind. The government is doing the against it. And that is so apparently stupid and irresponsible. It's so clear that we can all learn from that. That's the way how not to do it. To just say, oh, we need an economy and we need money making a bullshit now. We need bodies. We need health. We need kids. We need grandparents. That's what we need. We don't need an economy. Economy by economy. They mean billionaires. That's what they mean to make the rich richer. That's what they mean. And that's what they do when they get the taxpayers trillions of dollars and distribute them. They go to their billionaire friends and then the little crumbs go to the little businesses. No, it's a totally unjustifiably horrendous devilish system. This capitalistic mode of this late stage of this collapsing system that obviously can't survive. So. Yep. Kick. Push. Fight. Speak. Stand on your head. Scream. Break the window. Fix the window. That's really, really is a great advice next to so many are they break the window, but also fix. Fix the window. That's the windows we look out now. And we are forced to look out at you. Of course, our. Up there in Vermont, you made a decision a long time ago, which now looks like a very important one, you know, that perhaps as some people say, it might be. The end of the very, very big cities where everybody want to go, the people will have a second thought now, you know, where to live, how to live their lives. What is essential and. What is important. Peter, you gave us so much and okay, thanks for being there. Thank you for. Getting on zoom and preparing and talking to us. This is very, very important. You are a pioneer. As they say, the pioneers are the ones who sometimes get the arrows in the back, but still they are the pioneers. So you did. Work theater that was. Guarded towards the future anticipating the future and what you found and the way you make theater. Is going to work also now and in the coming months and years of this Corona time. So it should be studied should be looked at. Seriously considerate of significance and importance and congratulations on everything you did, the way of life, the way you work together, the both you guys are together, your farm, the community created. What a great life if they ever is a saint hood in theater. For the gods of theater, you will be in there. And. Yeah, you did so many plays. I remember the passion plays of the Latin American people, what you created for. I know the beautiful thing you did for Judas Melina. After she left us. So really thank you. Thank you. And thank you for sharing into our listeners. Hopefully you will be with us this week when we have. Governor Rubin and Terrence Conrad from Malaysia will be with us tomorrow and tell about the situation there. Also from Australia. The great Tanya buggera and the way she did was getting in and out of prisons also for her work. And she's in Cuba now and it's a very difficult circumstances in her work. And her work has been so. Significant and you know, not only at the Tate gallery, but also the center she created in New York. A city hope. A Zeta from Rwanda. In Africa will talk about her life and work there. And someone amini about being an immigrant artist from Iran in the Netherlands. So really. Again, thank you both. Thank you to our listeners for taking against some time out of your life. I know how much is out there and it's getting more and more, but it means a lot to us. And our artists really do need to be heard as we heard today. They really have something to say. It's of importance. It's significant. Artists have been on the right side of history. They have been on the right side on the complex struggle for freedom and liberties. And we listen to them and we should listen to them. And a lot of evil and suffering in the world could have been prevented if their voices would be heard in any society where artists are in the center and closer is a good one. It's a great one. It's a measurement. Of what. Human civilization can and should be all about. So thank you. Thanks for howl around. See. Travis. Great things to all of you. Yeah. And good luck and stay healthy and careful. Thank you, Peter. And I'm going to come and visit you soon and. Good painting. And thank you for being with us and. And taking you away from painting and baking bread and thinking about your auto performance. But to everybody. If you haven't seen some of their work, if you haven't been there, please do go whenever it's possible again. It's a brilliant. And again, he is a living. Treasure or living legend. And thank you for sharing your time here. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye. Okay.