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

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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
polished when we revived it at Theatre for the New City, the original theatre atWestbeth, beautiful theatre, big hall. But when it was done at Judson, on the altar... Imean people wrote about it, saying I thought I was going to be struck with lightning,the blasphemy, or the beauty. I loved that piece, that production. Also very verydaring.LK: I don't know, I just think it got to a lot of people. I know a lot of the people whowere IN the play said it changed their lives. That was a horrifyingly beautiful piece,and people giggled like mad because of nervousness ...LK: One of my favourites was an absolute flop, and bored everybody. I loved it. Itwas a piece called Play One - no! - a piece called Pour Madeleine Renault. And itwas a short piece, about forty minutes long, and it had music by Telemann [7], it hadsets by this painter Ralph Humphrey, who did big things like this on stage. It hadAileen Pasloff, the dancer, and the words were by Wallace Stevens and EmilyDickinson. And the whole thing was about gestural [7], and I wanted to take thatgesture and play it abstractly against the music, against the paintings and dancers andactors. And it was a very private piece, wonderful, I loved it. And people said it wasnice, but it wasn't startling and funny or tragic, it was very cool, and I was known as ahot director: what happened on stage was very 'hot', things had heat. They still do.But I loved that piece.LK: Oh I think so. I've seen things on Broadway and I've said 'Oh my God that's soand-so'swork, that's mine, or something. Now I don't think they copied it, but thatkind of freedom, it happened because so many of the important directors werechoreographers who were very influenced by Balanchine, and er. .. especially byBalanchine, this great free-er of the space of the stage. I still go and see Balanchineballets and I'm wiped out by what he does in formal terms on stage, building thescene: he's a great theatre director.SJB: What about Tom O'Horgan7 There was this great commercial breakthrough withHair ...LK: I couldn't have done Hair. There was a time when Gerry Ragni and ... when theywere thinking of me doing it, and I said no. Because I saw it at the Cheetah, and itwas not my cup of tea, I knew it. It needed a different hand, and Tom gave it abeautiful hand.
Page 6 and 7: -- from song to song in one play: w
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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