From Artvoice's Theater Week, by Anthony Chase:
Richard Foreman is universally regarded as one of the great pioneers of the American theater. His two-week visit to Buffalo (March 16-29) with his collaborator, Sophie Haviland can, therefore, be seen as something historic. During their residency at the University at Buffalo, Foreman and Haviland will conduct an intensive theater/film workshop for students in the UB departments of Media Study and Theatre and Dance as part of “The Bridge: An International Art Initiative.” The general public will have an opportunity to see Foreman at an event on March 23.
Known for his non-narrative theater projects, Foreman has been recognized with numerous honors, including multiple Obie Awards (five for Best Play of the Year), and is the director and designer of more than 50 plays.
Begun in 2004, the Bridge Project promotes international art exchange through a collaborative process. Reached by telephone in New York City, Foreman described the Bridge Project as a kind of artistic sharing.
“My collaborator, Sophie Haviland and I, have taken the Bridge Project to nine different countries,” says Foreman. “Buffalo will be the first American city to host the project. We will work with a group of performers and technicians provided by the University. Each participant will create independently shot film in the style of the project, and we hope that they will then use this material to create their own original works, their own short films. The interesting part is that all of the participants will have access to all the footage shot by other participants, so the Buffalo participants will have access to film shot in Portugal, or Australia, or Japan, and so on.”
I ask Foreman to describe “the style of the project.”
“That’s very difficult to say,” he answers candidly. “I’d say it has a quality of ‘presentation,’ of performers looking into the camera. And in every image, a sense that something is about to appear or occur, a strange sense of expectancy.”
Much of Foreman’s work has been done at his own “Ontological-Hysteric Theater,” which he founded in 1968. According to its web site, OHT exists “with the aim of stripping the theater bare of everything but the singular and essential impulse to stage the static tension of interpersonal relations in space. The OHT seeks to produce works that balance a primitive and minimal style with extremely complex and theatrical themes.”
In Buffalo, OHT certainly will find kindred artistic spirits. Most prominent among them is probably Dan Shanahan, founder and artistic director of Torn Space Theatre, who happily acknowledges Foreman’s influence on his own work. Shanahan has made his reputation for large non-narrative theatrical presentations as the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle, the old Central Terminal, and the Ukrainian center on Broadway.
“I think Foreman’s biggest influence on me has been in the way he uses theatrical time in his productions,” says Shanahan. “He analyzes time while he manipulates time, fracturing it, going backward, repeating it. I used it in Architect the most, and also in Area, because in both instances the production confined the characters and took away their autonomy. The production, itself, was an outside force that the characters were living in.”
Shanahan thinks that bringing the Bridge Project to Buffalo makes perfect sense.
“There is plenty of experimental work going on here; we have a lot of well-informed people who are connected to the larger theater world. I think the upcoming production of WoyUbu is an example. There’s Alt Theatre, and what’s being done there. There is a lot happening.”
The Foreman piece that resonates most vividly in Shanahan’s memory is My Head Was a Sledgehammer, which he saw at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. In describing the piece, Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote, “the most recent offering of Mr. Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, is to be swept into a dazzlingly self-contained, thoroughly exhilarating universe that seems in the viewing—as does the best of Mr. Foreman’s work—logical, rational and disturbing in the way that individual dreams can be. It is a testament to Mr. Foreman’s hypnotic artistic control that only afterward do you scratch your head and wonder what it was all about.”
The same is often said of Dan Shanahan.
The general public will have an opportunity to interact with Foreman on March 23 at 7pm, when the University at Buffalo Center for the Moving Image (CMI) directed by Emmy Award-winning arts filmmaker Elliot Caplan, UB professor of media study, will host “An Evening with Richard Foreman,” free to the public, in the Market Arcade Theater. Foreman will discuss his work and screen material selected from 25 years of his plays, as well as his last film production in Japan and the UK.
More information on Foreman can be found at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater site: www.ontological.com. Additional information on the Bridge Project is available at www.bridgefilm.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment