Conversations on Art & Performance

CONVERSATIONS ON ART & PERFORMANCE Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 AT WORK DOWNTOWN Process and Performance Yehuda Duenyas, Ari Fliakos, Pavol Liska, and Victoria Vazquez in conversation with Joseph Cermatori our of New York’s most prominent young actors and directors met with PAJ assistant editor Joseph Cermatori on June 20 and 27, 2011 for a conversation about the current state of downtown theatre. Aiming to focus on the question F“How are you working now?”—particularly with regard to the development of new performance vocabularies—the participants spoke at length about their approaches to acting, the rise of the ensemble, new perspectives of narrative and text, and the impact of media technologies on live performance. As the conversation ranged broadly, they also discussed their formal development as theatremakers, respective influences and legacies, and the working conditions of the contemporary theatre in New York. Yehuda Duenyas works as an actor, director, designer, and producer. He is a found- ing member and co-artistic director of the multi-award–winning theatre collaborative, the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA). His NTUSA credits include Chautauqua!, Abacus Black Strikes NOW! The Rampant Justice of Abacus Black, What’s That on My Head!?!, and the Episode 17 of our Fathers Garvey and Superpant$: Placebo Sunrise, and Garvey and Superpant$!: Episode 23. He has an MFA in electronic arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Ari Fliakos joined The Wooster Group as a performer in 1996, originating roles in the group’s productions House/Lights, To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre), Poor Theater, Who’s Your Dada?!, There is Still Time..Brother, Hamlet, La Didone, and Vieux Carré. He has also performed in the remounting of Fish Story, The Hairy Ape, Brace Up!, North Atlantic, and The Emperor Jones. Pavol Liska is one of the directors of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Together with his partner, Kelly Copper, he was awarded the Young Directors Prize at the 2008 Salzburg Festival for Romeo and Juliet. The duo’s latest project, Life and Times: Epi- sode 1, was selected for the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2010. Other works with Nature Theater of Oklahoma include Poetics: a ballet brut, No Dice, and Rambo Solo. Liska is a 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant recipient. He has an MFA from Columbia University, and has taught at PARTS in Brussels and the Norwegian Academy for Scenekunst. 148 PAJ 100 (2012), pp. 148–162. © 2012 Joseph Cermatori Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 Victoria Vazquez has been a member of Elevator Repair Service (ERS) since 1996, and has performed in ERS’s productions The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928), Gatz, Total Fictional Lie, Cab Legs, as well as with the New York City Players/ Richard Maxwell in Caveman and People Without History. She has also appeared in productions of Pullman, WA, The Voices, Wrench, Songs and Monologues, Mean Rich White Ladies, and Pre-Paradise Sorry Now. Her writing and directing credits include Wrestling Ladies, The Florida Project, and Isabel. CERMATORI: I want to begin by having each of you speak about the approaches to acting you work with in your respective companies. What do you feel are the values most important to the work, and how do they influence or respond to performance? VAZQUEZ: It’s hard for me to talk on behalf of my company because many of us approach performing differently. I don’t think that consistency among what people are doing is of interest. A really important value for us, however, is humor. For example, a lot of what we do is sound-based, and the humor is often built upon a lot of different cues stacking up, but the tech works some nights and doesn’t work other nights. I think the most interesting nights are when things fail: what do you do within this failure? LISKA: For me, as a director, I have never felt that anything I’ve made is so impressive. I try to convince the actors that it’s impressive so that they try really hard to execute it, but I am really looking for that failure and that pathos. It is always going to feel pathetic. That’s where the humor is for me, in absolute pathetic-ness. But, actually executing an idea, I am not so impressed with that. It’s not that everything has to come together in order for the show to come off. Instead, everything has to fall apart in order for the show to come off. So I try to stack up as many things as possible so that the show falls apart. FLIAKOS: That’s interesting, Pavol. There was something new that we were deal- ing with in Vieux Carré. In this piece, for the first time it seemed like the show couldn’t stop for a technical malfunction. For some reason Vieux Carré was radical for us that way, maybe because of the nature of the play. We were engaging the play in a different way, it was accumulating in a way that I think we were not used to. Usually, for us too, we thrive if something malfunctions; it’s an opportunity for the audience to slip into us in a way that might be difficult when everything is so beautifully put together. But in Vieux Carré that was different. DUENYAS: With our current piece, The Golden Veil, we’re researching medieval and nineteenth-century acting styles, but just in order to figure out the puzzle of the material. Like ERS, we’re not looking for one consistent style: in our production of Don Juan, everyone was acting in a completely different play. I think we are at a place culturally where we don’t ascribe to a specific style or school. It is not really an age of methodology. We have many different methods at our disposal that we can mash-up and pick and choose from. I don’t know if dogmatic schools or methods still exist. I don’t even know who those teachers are. DUENYAS, FLIAKOS, LISKA, and VAZQUEZ / At Work Downtown 149 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 FLIAKOS: It’s also hard to present your work for criticism today. Critics still think we’re interpreting a play. Instead we’re asking: “What’s interesting about us coming up against this material?” VAZQUEZ: That’s true, but I think it is also really hard for the critical community to embrace ensemble, in general. We’re all ensembles. It’s easier when a writer, director, actors are all clearly defined. CERMATORI: Let’s discuss the question of process further. Most groups working today are in some sense ensemble-based. How does the tension between collaborative forms of working and internal leadership structures play out for each of you when you’re making choices about performing? FLIAKOS: In the beginning of the process it’s more like you’re working with an artist—which Liz originally was, she was a visual artist—who is trying to get material to accumulate in some way on her canvas. At a certain point, it becomes clearer based on what’s sticking in relation to our original impulse, which is usually a text of some kind. Also, we have a whole history of theatrical vocabulary that we’ve been using, particularly with media, and that is also the material that we have to work with. From all that it starts to become clear what performance style will allow the text to be heard or the experience to be had. Once you start to develop instincts for what works, then it goes backwards: you dictate the performance style from the instincts you have had for the world you’ve created. CERMATORI: Is the text just another material like the other media materials you’ve mentioned, or does it have a more privileged place in the process of generating a performance vocabulary? FLIAKOS: It is privileged to the extent that, at the end of the day, we are interested in telling that story, whatever that story is, but that story can’t be told without our story. So there’s this sense that the text is not everything, it is something we are interacting with. But there’s absolutely an emphasis on telling the story—I can’t think of a time when this wasn’t the case. It’s just that that story is a little bit different because of who’s telling it. Again, with Vieux Carré, the nature of the text demanded a kind of rigor in the storytelling that made it different. That particular text demanded a certain kind of attention to its development. We had to sublimate our own instincts to break out of it. CERMATORI: Yehuda, NTUSA works in a totally different way, although you recently staged Molière’s Don Juan, which was something very different for your group. Can you speak to this question about collaborative structures and process? DUENYAS: With the Don Juan example, there was a French grant—a lot of choices are dictated by what funding could potentially be available—so we sat down and read almost every play by Molière. Don Juan seemed very well-suited to our aesthetic and style: there’s travel, multiple sets and places, swashbuckling adventure, burlesque, 150 PAJ 100 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 farce.

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