Comments on: Nature Theater of Oklahoma

By: Bryan Markovitz

Bryan Markovitz — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 06:55:23 +0000

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” – Groucho Marx

Tonight, I listened to a few episodes of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s new-ish radio show / podcast, which I absolutely adored. I am so excited to be listening to candid conversations with theatre artists that I have admired and followed for so long, Pavol and Kelly included. While listening, I remembered the rant that I wrote (above) from days long gone.

I have to say that I was a fool to compose those comments. A fool caught up in the critique-obsessed milieu of an art school MFA, which made my own cynical hubris swell with greater intensity than it usually does.

While many of my opinions came from a place of real concern, they were really badly expressed. The blogger actually did a great job of sharing what she liked about the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Nature Theater made good work for her to experience.

It’s been seven years since I wrote those long comments. It’s likely they’ll never be read again, which would suit me fine. Still, if the original reviewer, or if Pavol and Kelly ever come across them, I hope they will accept my sincere apology for writing such a pompous and foolish diatribe.

It’s bad enough that artists and the audiences who love them have to struggle with the challenges of making live theatre. We shouldn’t be trying to cut one another down in the name of some critical high-ground.

Long live Nature Theater of Oklahoma and all those who make exciting art, then and now.

By: Bryan Markovitz

Bryan Markovitz — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:01:03 +0000

Not that anyone will ever read this, but I thought I would note in my comments here that I received a fair amount of slack from my friends for commenting on a performance I never saw.
I thought this was fair because my comments were ostensibly about the lack of effective critical writing about new theatre works. It still holds true that I have not seen Poetics: A Ballet Brut, but this week I did see the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s most recent work, No Dice, in New York. After seeing No Dice, I believe that my views are still valid tools for looking critically at this kind of work.
The only thing I might add is that I am sure that Liska and Cooper are aware of the way their work re-deploys historic ideas of the avant-garde and theatre. My question is, to what end? Their work is very well constructed and enjoyable, and obviously I think it is important, but it ultimately leaves me with a sense of lack because I am left with the question posed by Shawn Marie Garrett in a 2001 issue of the journal Theater:
“What can be done with worn-out irony? Show it unraveling, unsex it, drain it of cool. What hides behind slickness? The halting, the tentative, the shy, the uninteresting. What is unpresentable? Awkwardness. A humble goal for fledgling artists? Yes, especially compared with the dramatic gestures of the past hundred years. But if “truth” is altogether out of the realm of possibility in a culture of acknowledged and celebrated simulation, superficiality, and materialism, what’s left? If the presence of the actor and the integrity of the subject can no longer be trusted, what happens to self-expression? When self-expression—“Think Different”—is the M.O. of every Internet entrepreneur, inexpressivity becomes the territory of the artist and the subject of performance. This development, too, is ironic, but in a historical, rather than artistic, sense. Beginning from what they know, young experimental theater artists in New York are cornering a kind of individuality that flies below the radar of identity politics and eludes what Augusto Boal calls “the cop in the head.” Whether they are breaking free or further boxing themselves in remains an unanswered question.”

By: Bryan Markovitz

Bryan Markovitz — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:02:03 +0000

Kirsten,
I am happy that you wrote a description of what you appreciated about Poetics: A Ballet Brut. Without it, I would know less about how this performance fared with Portland audiences. I was not in Portland this year to see Poetics, which I suspect will soon hit the international touring circuit.
Having said this, I do have some criticisms to offer, so forgive me if it seems like I am singling you out in my concern for a bigger issue, but I would like to make some views available on this blog and your post seemed like the most reasonable place to drop them.
As with much commentary on this blog (and in most press published about contemporary performance), your post, at best, provides a cursory description of what you saw, articulates a trivial judgement of the performance, and, worst of all, offers no reflection on the judgement you actually make. If we put your experience of the performance aside (which is something only you can truly know) then we are left with a posting that reaches toward a critique of monumental issues that theater artists and critics have been trying to address for at least fifty years, if not longer. These issues strike at the very nature, meaning and relevance of theater and its role in a media-saturated “reality” obsessed culture.
As a critical piece of writing (which, I propose is the proper use of a blog), your work would have fared better if you had described the methodology and formal techniques that Cooper and Liska present within the historical context from which they draw inspiration. Without knowledge of history, one can only hold a very shallow understanding of how long it has taken for work like Poetics to reach audiences in a mainstream performance venue. (Despite the use of marketing speak like “cutting-edge,” any contemporary art institution of PICA’s caliber is by nature, mainstream). What is remarkable to me about the praises sung for Poetics is that you and other audience members seem to be discovering “anti-artifice theater” at a time when many artists have exhausted this course of action, and others have moved completely away from the theatrical modes that Poetics’ “anti-style style” still clings to. What is most striking about the thought behind Liska and Cooper’s work appears to be that they have succeeded in making the very theatricality that they strive to eradicate more central to the work through its overt absence. I doubt that is an accident. From what I have seen of his past work, Pavol is a very perverse fellow.
You might have served your readers better by placing Poetics into the context of history. Liska and Cooper’s work is largely derivative of experiments conducted by artists in theater, music and performance for the past half-century. The most obvious reference must be to John Cage’s work with chance operations. Others would include the long-standing tradition of breaking theater’s fourth wall. This goes way back, but Pirandello would be a fine starting point in the Modern theaterical cannon. Re-situating the audience on the actual theatrical stage is a practice that has been used by at least a handful of artists in the past twenty years, including Goat Island in Chicago and my own Portland-based ensemble, Liminal. Finally, the use of non-actors and non-acting also has a long history, but the 1970’s work of Richard Foreman most immediately springs to mind.
This history is hardly exhausted. Precedents also exist in the work of artists since 1965 who have stripped theatre of its many facades and who have engaged in a highly self-reflexive analysis of the relevance and meaning of live performance in a postmodern landscape. I will only cite a few here, but anyone who saw Poetics and found that it raised compelling questions about the nature of “liveness” and the meaning of “truth” in a performance should learn more about an array of artists and writers who have done extraordinary and truly groundbreaking work in the field. The list includes, but is not limited to, Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Peter Handke, Bruce Nauman, Fluxus, the Wooster Group, Spalding Gray, Pina Bausch, Manuel Pelmus, Jerome Bell, Forced Entertainment, Philip Auslander, and the ruling prince of “non-acting,” Richard Maxwell. After spending an adequate amount of time learning about this history, I would suspect that a viewer of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics would have a different understanding of their work beyond it’s mainstream capacity to entertain.
The reason I articulate my thoughts is because I have watched this process happen before. Ersatz work is selected by performance curators who say (and usually believe) that they want to bring new original work to a broader audience, but who, I suspect, are ultimately drawn to work that is readily entertaining, more or less inexpensive to tour (or at least financially viable to splurge on), in-touch with zeitgeist trends and appealing to an educated and affluent audience demographic. My concern for this process is how it stalls the real progress toward a new kind of performance experience that might truly change the way we understand live art. This kind of work, which demands highly specialized sites and modes of viewing, has not yet found a way to co-exist with the survival interests of the contemporary arts performing circuit, which must sell a very limited kind of culture if it is to survive.
As for the artists and audiences who seek a new poetics of the theater (which I believe includes the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma), the really interesting work is still yet to come.

By: Kirsten

Kirsten — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 17:30:32 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Scott. One reason I connected so well with the piece is that I’ve studied theatre, and continue to spend a lot of time watching plays and other performance pieces that just aren’t very good. So, I’ve found their critiques of conventional performance practices very useful. Though I’ve only seen it on TV (an awards show, maybe?), I think STOMP is based more in showmanship and challenging or flashy choreography. Also a fun show, but I think Poetics offers more depth than a pure entertainment piece. For me, Poetics demonstrated that it is possible to work around the conventional pitfalls that I believe are suffocating theater as an art form.

By: Scott Millar

Scott Millar — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 14:32:53 +0000

Gosh. People can squeeze a little concept out of anything.
The problem with pieces like this are: once you the joke is finished – what’s left? You can travel the loop with it and try to find some rationale, but I refuse to romance the past and rethink things in an attempt to make history seem more meaningful and enjoyable then it actually was.
Although POETICS: A BALLET BRUT was well executed and well acted, the only response I had was amusement. It is essentially a trite little number masquerading as something more. You could milk the same concepts out of seeing STOMP.
Even if the concepts you defined are valid – it is rather easy for a performance to comment on and challenge convention, but a lot harder to do something useful with the critiques.
P.S. I may not agree with your writing on this but it was very well done!

By: anna

anna — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:56:23 +0000

Kirsten,
This is a great, thoughtful piece on Nature Theatre, and eloquently captures a number of similar thoughts I’ve been having. I wish I’d been at the workshop!