LARRY KORNFELD INTERVIEW with Steve Bottoms, 9.95 - Judson ...

SJB: Yes. But was there a tension, then, between the right to fail, and a sense ofpressure to succeed, and I'm talking not just about Judson but the movement ingeneral, if there was such a thing as a movement..LK: I think as time went on it grew. And you would have secret hopes, or not suchsecret hopes, and you had to relax, you had to give that up, you had to practice allkinds of meditation to get rid of that kind of ego. Because you knew it affected yourwork. And after a while it became quite clear: you know, in Everyman, Everymansays to death, 'Thou comest when I least expect it.' And death comes in that way, butalso success comes, when you least expect it. And I think that's true of everything,professional and amateur, Off-Broadway and on-Broadway, you hope you can buildthings up ... but essentially art has to do with the release of yourself into the work, andthen it comes. Of course we all know that the history is that some of the greatest,most successful works of art ... we know that La Traviata was laughed at, so wasCarmen ....SJB: Do you think OOB has had a big influence on what has happened in the theatresince?LK: I don't want to slough off your question, but deep in me I'm not interested ininfluences. You see A doesn't influence B, A and B are both influenced by somethingsimilar, we don't know what it is. A may copy B, or be sllpported by B, or vice versa,but. .. I know I look back on some of my work in retrospect and realise that clearly Ihad seen such and such a thing, but at the time I wasn't conscious of it, I didn't knowwhat the influence was. I've never been a critic, I'm not good at it. So I'm notinterested in who influences who, I'm more interested in the work getting out. Nowwhen I'm listening to music, I'm very aware - when I'm listening to Benjamin Britten- of the incredibly subtle and beautiful influence of both Shostakovich and Mahler.But that's not important. I'm not a musician ... Shostakovich was a friend of, wasbefriended by Britten, and was certainly very much in awe of Mahler, but was heinfluenced by them? No. But you can see there where they were and what they did inhis... Britten, when he does atonal passages, does that mean he's influenced bySchoenberg or Berg or Weber? Not really. He just used some of that vocabulary.LK: It's a funny thing. I don't know how many directors think of themselves as artists.I think young directors now do, but in my generation I think most directors werepeople who worked with artists, and who helped the artwork. They were organisers.But I felt always that I was an artist.SJB: Is that an "influence"? Directors now thinking of themselves as artists in ownright?