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

The church's mission was very spiritual. I mean you have to go into a whole thingwith liberation theology, which is involved here ... my wife is a minister, you know ...of the left! And I met her because she went to seminary with Al Carmines ... and theJudson position about the arts, and its support of the arts, came out of its theologicalstance. Liberation theology's support ofmarginalised .... and artists are marginalised inAmerica! You wouldn't know that in New York, but if you go outside of New York. ..So at that time, Judson church was revising its liturgy. They were Baptists, AmericanBaptists or Congregationalists at Judson [7], and they created a two year study group -and put me on it! along with one or two other artists - and talked about the liturgy,what it meant. There were some wild liturgical sessions all of a sudden in the church.Aileen Pasloff did a very famous one where she danced during the liturgy, and hadoranges and threw them out to the audience, and people went wild. The idea of havinga liturgist do their own piece ofwork. ..LK: Well if Michaelangelo can draw cartoons on the ceiling of the church, you canpour paint over yourself! So your question was, was this theological, and the answeris yes! Now the artists were never required to do anything religious there, but if theywanted to, if you liked to, then fine!LK: Well it ended up with them taking the cross down, taking the pews out, puttingnormal chairs in. It meant breaking away ... the minister did not wear the black robeanymore ... what they tried to do, and this is a very common thing now, was to takethe veil off. They were secularising the church. Harvey Cox was a member of theJudson church, a very famous theologian ... one of the people who talked about theDeath of God, in the Nietzschean sense, and wrote a book called The Secular City . Avery influential man... The theology of the place was absolutely clear in the fact thatwe were able to do a play like Dracula: Sabbat. And a whole bunch of nuns came tosee that, and thought it was very religious, very beautiful. See what the piece is is acomplete black mass, complete. But instead of telling the story of Jesus or the Devil,it tells the story of Our Lord Dracula, and uses the elements of the Stoker novel to tellthe little vignettes that form the story. But it really came from the black mass.LK: Hell no. If we had problems from the outside, the church stuck up for us. Therewere times when they were going to close the church, almost. They were marvellous.We couldn't have had a better place. I mean Howard Moody would say 'I don'tunderstand this, I don't understand what's going on ... go to it!' ... Dracula Sabbatwas one of my favourite shows. I loved it. And that was a staggeringly importantpiece, I think. Staggering, its influence on New York, oh yes, I think. When it wasdone at Judson it was particularly effective. In some ways it was more beautiful and