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

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-- from song to song in one play: we had a Protestant hymn and a Spanish tango, andan operatic duet -- it was highly eclectic. So people would say "that's his style", thiseclectic style. Because we were trying to discover each moment anew, it meant thatwe were trying to create almost new synthetic structures out of all different kinds ofelements -- collage. If that's a style ... People said we were all avant-garde, I don'tthink we were avant-garde, we were right with the time ...LK: We all knew that to the rest of the world we were avant-garde, but when youwere doing the work you weren't being avant-garde, you were doing what you coulddo! The way you saw things, the way you do things ... I think there are people who arefakes, who are trying to make themselves avant-garde: they don't last. There's muchmore of that now, I think ... We didn't think we were trendy, other people would try tofind out what the new trends were. People would come up to us from the newspapersand say 'What's the newest thing?', I'd say 'I don't know'. I'm not trying to shy awayfrom your question, but it's a great existential fact: we were doing what we knew howto do.LK: In the moment. And of course at that time the moment here and now wasphilosophically very important, so we were involved in the here and now. The LivingTheatre's great guru was Paul Goodman, who was the co-author of the great textbookof gestalt therapy ...SJB: And you took those ideas with you, you didn't have a difference of opinion onthose things ...LK: I came to them with those ideas. We thought alike. I'll tell you something aboutthe time: modernism was enthroned, we knew nothing about anything calledpostmodernism, and there were a whole bunch of artists doing these fantasticexpressions, abstract expressions ... The friends at the Cedar Tavern, all of us, therewere Motherwell, Kline, etcetera etcetera etcetera. They were people who you talkedto, who came to see your shows, who did sets for you, you'd go to their galleries ...SJB: A lot critics see that as a big break - that going from abstract expressionismpop, you go from the modernist to the postmodernist. ..toLK: I don't really want to get into postmodernism, because it's stone soup. Irrelevant.The point is that the so-called pop and op artists were THERE. Each one was doinghis own work. Lamont Young would sit there at a party and play the same four chords
on the piano for hours and drive us all crazy ... John Cage and Merce Cunningham hada studio over the Living Theatre on the third floor ... We built the theatre becauseMerce said he would rent that top floor.! would go up there sometimes and watchMerce rehearsing. . . Everybody had their own style, everybody looked at whateverybody did and we worked together. As a period, the people in it were notconcerned about each other's style. My impression of it is that we did what we did.Some people had very formal printed documents -- Richard Foreman certainly didwhen he came up, because Richard thinks a lot about ... part of his thing is what he'sthinking about. (When I did a production of a Foreman play, it was nothing like whathe did ...) But we were playing around with things. I didn't say I had to do thissomething or that something, but what would it be like if I did this ... You can seewhere postmodernism theory gets a lot of its roots, because our productions -- not justmine but other people's and other theatres' too -- we were convinced, we knew thateach person in that audience would see their own thing. We knew that the finaladditive quality to a production was the audience .... The best things that happenedOff-Off-Broadway, and certainly in my plays, the best things were those thatsurprised everybody, and to this day when I'm directing, my most constant directionto actors is 'Surprise me. Surprise yourselves.' ... Go too far! That comes out of myroots in the theatre, the arts of this time. To go too far. .. people used to say, thebourgeois, constantly used to say, constantly: 'You're doing this just to frighten me,you're doing this just to annoy me, you're doing this just to disgust me'. And I wouldalways give them the same answer: 'Who are you? I'm not bothered with you. Ifyou're disgusted by it, that's your problem. I'm not!' There were things I was disgustedwith that people laughed at and liked!SJB: What about this high/low camp distinction ...? Irene Fornes describes Judson asproducing high camp plays, in the sense of a sort of Noel Coward-ish, archsophistication. Like in What Happened, or. ..LK: That was a show of mine. That was the first Stein musical that we did. We usedfive dancers, four actors and a musician. And a piano. There was this famous momentwhen we moved that piano right across the stage while Al carried on playing it. Now,Irene could see that as Noel Coward ... that's what the old-timers might think and Icould understand that. There was nothing like that for me when I did it. Those thingsjust came about spontaneously in rehearsal, and then they were interpreted asmeaning all these different things in performance ...LK: You know, the artists were involved in changing the liturgy of the church too.They were invited to make changes. It was a very radical church. I loved Judsonbecause it was so free and so open and the space was divine, we could carve outwonderful shows there. We started off in the choirloft and did quite a number of playsup there -- it was very nice working up there, a 99 seat theatre. And then we moveddownstairs, did plays in the corner, or using the whole stage, we had plays in everypossible configuration of space ...
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 26 and 27: So they really retained the quality
Page 28 and 29: SJB: Irene was saying how you shoul

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

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