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

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 ...