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

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So they really retained the quality ... Promenade was expanded! And I think it wasquite wonderful. But it did lose some of the focus of the original. It did, I'll admit that.LK: At Judson it was a play with a lot of music. When it went uptown it became amusical. And Irene wrote lyric after lyric for it too, and we were all involved in it,Irene didn't have to fight, we were all very excited about it. And when we looked at it,certainly when Irene looked at it afterwards, we realised that the focus ... it gotrefocussed, it was obviously a musical. If it had remained downtown and beenexploded, it wouldn't have been such a musical. By moving it uptown, and having theprice of the tickets go up, it might have been reviewed for the music! You see AI'smusic is very seductive. Extremely harmonic. And .... the record of Promenade is notas good as it could be. Madeleine refused to be on it. She left the show, went to LosAngeles, and when they recorded it, the record company wanted to bring her back butshe didn't want to, she was happy to get out, for personal reasons.SJB: Did you apply a Brechtian approach to Promenade as you did with HomeMovies?LK: No, I did not apply a Brechtian approach [in Home Movies]. It was anundercurrent in me, of some of the formalisms of Brecht. And that's it. It did not looklike Brecht in any way.LK: At Judson when I did it - I have to separate the two productions here - it had todo with the set. The set was a flat back, and every time you changed the set,somebody would walk the set like a book, and turn the page, and there'd be anotherset, turn the page, and another set. And it was painted in a sort of cartoonish way. Itwas sort of like ... I don't know if this is after the fact, I may have thought about itthen ... I have a vague memory of wanting to ... a walk through a cartoon world,walking through pages ... I wanted the feeling of Promenade to be that people are inone place, and the world keeps changing around them. And that was much clearer atJudson than it was in the uptown production. It was much more of a musical comedy,it didn't make quite as much sense. So from that point of view, the production uptownwas a pure caprice, and most people who went to see it saw it as such - as a caprice,but with very strong political points made in the lines, in the words. The production atJudson was much more about how the world turns around us. There are those twoyoung men in prison, and then suddenly you're in the ballroom, and then they end upin the park, and all is well with the world, and then something else happens to them.That was clearer there, and when we went uptown it became in a sense more abstract,more decorative. The production uptown was much more decorative, and thereforeIrene's book was more hidden, although it was very strong, it was very much there, itbecame covered. The production at Judson, the book was much stronger, not becauseit was changed, but because it was just more apparent.
SJB: Was there any sense of you applying chance procedures in directing Promenade,as Irene did in its writing?LK: Always in every show. There's always a chance element in what you do. Whenyou think of something else it's chance ... I've done chance plays, when I was with theLiving Theatre we did a play that had a score by John Cage, and you threw dice! TheMarrying Maiden. And it was deliberately changed every night. So that element wasthere: if you got involved with Merce Cunningham, certainly that whole element ofchance was there! And juxtaposition! See what you learned from Merce Cunninghamwas that anything can go with anything. And I add to that: if there's somethingguiding it. And what's guiding Merce's anything-with-anything is that all hischoreography is coming from the same source. . . . I think most of the so-calledcutting edge art, certainly in America, so-called avant-garde art, is very much to dowith juxtaposition of the unexpected. Chance. I think Schoenberg opened that up. Byreally breaking through tonality, showing that there are other ways to combine things.And I think that what chance did, for the theatre and for dance especially, was tobreak up, break apart, the tired formalisms ... You don't have many more plots toinvent. ..SJB: Do you have any thoughts about things I should watch out for in researchingwriting on all this?orLK: When you're writing about something as you are, you have to write about howyou think it comes together, and what people did ... But hIstory isn't always cause andeffect, and I think the theatre of our time finally broke out of linear properties, linearperceptions, and has gone non-linear. Now Stein did that a long time ago. BYchnerdid it almost 200 years ago: he's the father of us all! Look at Danton's Death, it isweird! Look at Strindberg in terms of linear - where the hell those things come from -? - and we did just did more and more with that. As we break away from linear ideas,we find new ways to create, new kinds of lines! You know chaos theory shows that...that there are structures within the non-structures. That inside of nothingness isawareness. I spent a whole year reading Heidegger trying to find out something ... Ifound it out on about the twelfth reading! Read Heidegger that way! It blows yourmind trying to explain it what... read to anyone it's impossible, because he isexplaining beyond what is able to be said, he actually says the unsayable. And that iswhat Wallace Stevens does, he says the unsayable, that's what we're all doing. Whatis every artist doing? Saying what you can't say in ways that you can say it. Andwhen you go back and try to take it apart, analyse it, you may succeed, but youdestroy the event itself. Oh, all you have to do is see the event again and it comesback, but the actual work of criticism or analysis is very rarely constructive, it is infact always destructive, and not in any Derridean sense. So I hope when people writeabout art, they realise it is tender. There's a wonderful line about 'Do not bruise thefruit'. Don't destroy it.
Page 6 and 7: -- from song to song in one play: w
Page 8 and 9: The church's mission was very spiri
Page 10 and 11: LK: Yeah. I was always very fond of
Page 12 and 13: of the truck driver, who's the chor
Page 14 and 15: young playwrights, poets, who had a
Page 16 and 17: LK: The theatre was originally form
Page 18 and 19: SJB: Michael Smith said somewhere t
Page 20 and 21: LK: Remy Charlip's work. Almost any
Page 22 and 23: SJB: Yes. But was there a tension,
Page 24 and 25: happened with the best of Off-Off-B
Page 28 and 29: SJB: Irene was saying how you shoul

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

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