Entry #10

RICHARD FOREMAN INTERVIEWED BY STEPHEN MOSBLECH, INTERN, 11.2.06

STEPHEN MOSBLECH. Your unedited notebooks are available on the Ontological site, to be used by writers and directors to generate theater pieces of their own. These texts can be unrestrictedly cut. Also your more recent plays are archived on Ubuweb along with sound files from Now that Communism is Dead… and your film Strong Medicine. Is this an important project to have your plays available online for free?

RICHARD FOREMAN. I’ve always made the plays free to any group, unless it’s a big theater that can really afford to pay a royalty. That doesn’t happen very often—it’s happened once or twice, but other theaters, they’re just free to use them.

SM. How will the recent “theatrical scores” from Zomboid and Mr. Sleepy plug into this?

RF. I have no idea. It’s a problem and I don’t know if it will ever work. The only way I can see it working is with a lot of photographs, like a photograph on one page and then all these other individual aphoristic lines on the other page as a kind of collage. I haven’t given it that much thought because I felt probably these plays can’t be published. It could be published that way if some publisher had the money and wanted to do it. But just to publish the text, I would be perfectly happy if they would just publish the aphorisms, that’s fine. I mean, we do have scripts we use in rehearsal, so I guess that could be published but I’m not sure what people would make of it. You know the publishers insisted after my second book or something that I write in a lot of stage directions which I have mixed feelings about; in Unbalancing Acts it was the scripts without any stage directions as a kind of open field poem and in many ways I preferred that and I would be perfectly happy to publish these texts also, just with all the things that are said as kind of an open field poem. Just statement after statement, both onscreen and live and then people make of it what they will. But I don’t know if anyone would actually be interested in that.

SM. But in regard to the actual video itself, would you be open to other directors or theatrical conductors using the video either in its complete form or re-edited?

RF. I don’t see why not. It’s a little more problematic, I mean I’m not going to go into the business of making videos for people, so I don’t see exactly how it would work, but in principle I have no objection.

SM. We talked briefly, I think it was last week, about the fact that Bresson’s movie Au Hasard Balthazar, to an extent, conditioned the use of donkey props in Zomboid.

RF. Yeah. I wouldn’t say it conditioned it very much. It’s just obviously I was reminded that that was a great movie and it had donkeys in it. Other than that I’m not sure how much it conditioned it. When I began making theater Bresson was one of the people I thought about a lot of course, especially his use of actors.

SM. Are there any filmic precedents that, in any way, are seeding your use of the airplanes in Mr. Sleepy?

RF. No. I don’t think so. You mentioned Come and See, but I certainly wasn’t thinking of that. I have used the image before, in Egyptology; the play opens with Kate. Kate Manheim was playing the lead. She sort of tumbled on stage as if she had just been thrown out of an airplane that crashed. Other than that…I mean I have used airplanes before, in Maria Del Bosco there was an airplane the actors carried around, a little baby wrote on it and so forth, so you know it’s one of those archetypal images like so many others that I’ve used. But I can’t think of any other particular, specific big airplane things in a play before. The image relates a little to me, to something that I haven’t used but I was always very impressed with—you know there is the famous photograph of the big steam engine crashing through the Gare Montparnasse. There is a big picture of the steam engine falling out of the station and down into the street. I’ve always been interested in that image. Maybe that had something to do with it.

SM. My next question pertains somewhat concretely to the film-stage performance in Mr. Sleepy. In a way I’d say, it has to do with a unique moment in the current staging, where to my mind it seems that two separate tracks are “running parallel” for a molecular length of time. It happens approximately eight minutes into the film, where one actor is standing and two rows of actors are arranged behind her. All of a sudden the actors stand up and start to disperse, out of the frame of the camera. At this point we here a voice, in the film, calling them to “come back, come back, come back”. This is actually your voice. It is unique because it is the only example of your voice we hear in the film. Also it is the only instance when the onstage actors repeat a statement made by the actors on film. So it seemed to me as if at this moment, for this molecular space of time, there is an oozing perhaps across this “spark gap” that you refer to, as this sort of absent dimension, that there is something maybe temporarily resembling a completeness happening in the film-stage performance? I don’t know. It’s a very striking moment for me.

RF. Well, I am happy that you say that it’s striking; I see what you mean. You have to understand that when I am making things, I am not thinking intellectually about anything. I am just trying different things that seem to reverberate in some way that seems interesting. So I have no theory, I have no theoretical reason for that happening at that point. What can I say, I just wait to get ideas, wait to try different things matched against different other things; most of them are lousy which is why we rehearse so long and I keep changing things. Who knows, by the time this play opens that may or may not be there.
There’s not much I can say about it. I would say, but to return to the airplane of course, as the play sort of mentions, it is an image from a dream I had when I was a teenager of an airplane flying over me as I climbed up from a pit, and I saw people in the airplane staring at me and dotted lines came from their eyes into my eyes, so I think that’s why the airplane is here, and what its relationship to the unconscious is I don’t know, it’s that image of things breaking through the walls, as if something broke through from your unconscious. I suppose that’s why I am using the airplane and flight and any implications of that, but flight vis-à-vis the people getting up and leaving the screen and I say come back come back, somehow that has reverberations with this whole notion of things that might arise out of your unconscious but you can’t keep them because they vanish almost before they arise, or like a dream image that you can’t hold on to the next day so it’s like come back come back. Even making art is an attempt maybe to re-evoke those quick silver things that flitter through you but you can’t hold on to in normal life, so to make a work of art is to say come back come back to things that are escaping you all the time, that seem to be profound things on some level, but you can’t hold on to them.

SM. I wonder if this gesture of saying “come back” to this molecular field of impressions which you called art, if that isn’t an intrusion of a subject that then imprisons that field, these objects.

RF. Well you should be able to let go. I’m not saying it’s good to say come back, come back, maybe you should let everything pass through you and go, that’s certainly a spiritual position that basically I approve of. Most of my moments I don’t have the enlightenment to be able to let them just pass through me, and I want them to stay and I want to imprison them, and I don’t find that to be particularly noble or even desirable. But that’s part of the tension out of the contradictions and the human contradictions that I try to make my art—you are always saying come back, come back when you know you should let go. And indeed they don’t come back do they?

SM. No.

RF. The screen wipes.

SM. Yeah it cuts.

RF. Yes.

SM. It wipes, cuts.

RF. So you can start again but they don’t come back.

Entry #9

RIC GARCIA, A CURRENT FOREMAN INTERN, INTERVIEWS RICHARD ABOUT THE VIDEO IN THE CURRENT WORK:


Ric Garcia- So I’m wondering what one of your memorable movie making experiences is?

Richard Foreman- A memorable movie making experience for the piece in this project?

Garcia- Yes

Foreman- Sophie was going around patting everyone on the back telling everyone what a good job they were doing in some sense and I had this real realization all of a sudden. It was out doors and I was sitting in the grass and I realized that, you know in 1930 cartoons where a little cat would be chugging down the street happily and all the houses would smile at him and the trees would bend over and smile at him, and I suddenly realized that’s not what I wanted at all. At least for me, to reach that place where you can make real art, like all of a sudden the trees and houses turn away from you and you’re alone, it’s the exact opposite in the energy I felt when I was watching her film. It was a slight momentary revelation--Yes. What I was interested in, in my remaining days, was pursuing what happens, what comes through when you feel that everything turns away from you.

Garcia- Where did you collect the footage for this piece?

Foreman- This piece was filmed in Lisbon Portugal, at a mental hospital. This hospital is still active. It has a panopticon, which is not used anymore—it was a big round circular building with big trees and grass in a middle circular place. The middle circle is about 70 feet across and then little cells line that building and that’s where we filmed, in the cells. There were two larger rooms with blue tile but they’re pretty small rooms, maybe 40 by 40. I was also very excited about filming there because one of my favorite filmmakers is this Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro, and two of his films had scenes filmed in this same panopticon. So I thought well, filming where Monteiro filmed…

Garcia- Were there mental patients on the exterior?

Foreman- Yes, well there were mental patients in buildings next door. They didn’t come into the building where we were shooting but we passed through them everyday when we were coming to work.

Garcia- How many minutes of footage would you say was collected--or hours?

Foreman- I shot for three days and in that time I probably got somewhere between an hour-and-a-half to two hours and what I’m using adds up to just a little over an hour, so I’m using a great deal of it. It’s what I want to do—I want to film stuff in its raw documentary form that I edit, obviously fairly simply, but I like all the mistakes, I like all the roughness.

Garcia- What are you looking for when you turn the camera on?

Foreman- Well, I see… Okay I don’t actually turn it on myself, but I’m trying to set up the poses, these formal things almost as if you’re posing for your photograph. I’m looking for something that is full of the kind of tension you can feel hovering in the air; something, something might emerge any moment. Not from what you are filming but from behind it… Somehow something might suddenly manifest in the screen that’s another energy, another level that creates that kind of tension and manifestation in each of the takes, each of which lasts five to ten minutes.

Garcia- Do you have a top five list of movie directors?

Foreman- Oh, these days. Yeah, it changed over the years but I’d say Rossellini, Manoel de Oliveira (another Portuguese filmmaker), Monteiro, Angelopoulos. Some of Godard’s films. I find Godard very provocative but I don’t like all of his films. Jacques Tati.

Garcia- Can you comment on cinéma vérité?


Foreman- It never meant that much to me… I used to be interested in films that had a lot of razzle dazzle. You see cutting, a lot of complicated traveling shots. Now I’m interested in directors that tend to have fixed long takes and nothing much happening.

Garcia- What is the visual relationship between objects when you put them on the screen?

Foreman- What I film doesn’t have as many objects as my theatre does. My plays obviously have many, many objects, but film is not about composing people in terms of minimal furniture. I’m trying to create (in everything that I do) the kind of hovering tension, waiting for this something to be real, that’s never been real.

Garcia- One final question: how do you feel the effects of dreaming have on a person’s waking consciousness?

Foreman- According to studies that I read we’re sort of dreaming all the time, even though when we’re awake we’re not aware of it because our waking consciousness has taken over. So I think dreaming is a response to impulses of something that is always going on within our system. I don’t write out of dreams; I know people say my bodies are dreamlike. I don’t particularly think about that, because I am immersed trying always to be somewhere else. I am not interested in stories that talk about how to navigate conscious daily life, to me that is banal, boring. I am interested in trying to reach some other level.

Entry #8

FULYA PEKER, intern, responds to rehearsal:


Maybe…Continue. . .
Anything can change anytime, because anything can change anytime. The whisper of unconscious mind echoes in the resonance of conscious mind. Trembling, naked and endless momentum, circulating in our blindfolded heads, struggles with stillness. Even when one is perfectly still, there is the movement of existence in the body, expressing itself as a mild turbulence. Does the mind ever rest?

Like the thoughts of “young children,” cognition shifts from one object to the other, perception dances in and out of time and space. After a while senses become wide open, without questioning the surrounding disorder, without the side effects of explanations or indications. One understands, one learns without restrictions, like “young children” who are the great observers, who are ready to inhale whatever there is, without perplexity. Were we not also young children once?
The “flowers” exist, so much so that they do not worry about fitting into our rational definitions. You do not know what the hell you are doing, so much so that you finally overcome the idea of finding a reason for every other act you perform. Even this very statement is an act of reasoning itself for me. This is a conversation in-between sleeping and awakening without the screams of reason. Is it possible to pause reason for a second?

This is not a dream anymore, although the staccato siren of awakening is not serving our hunger of aesthetic harmony, the harmony that can be forgone only in dreams. There is nothing beautiful about it. It is complex, because it is simple, more than the sub-conscious mind can handle. Is this sleeping without a dream or a dream without sleeping?
. Everything is incomplete, that is why it is hard to bear. Everything that needs focus and deep involvement happens all at the same time. Lights, music, effects, projectors, actors, costumes, props, tea, delivery man, colors, dust, anxiety, excitement, curiosity, etc. As if while we listen an intense Wagnerian non-explosive melody, all theatrical devices delicately come together and the implications of all objects “twitch.” It is not boring, because there is no gap that one can fill with boredom. There is no time for an emotional arousal either, just “moving on,” without “holding on.”

Even now, these long, so-called complicated sentences I have written need to be put on the tip of a screw gun, and engraved from the beginning. Mr. Sleepy and all his neighbors are yet asleep, but can a screw gun work without noise? Instead of saying “we have a happy life” why not say “we have a life like an airplane on a plate, no forks but broken heads.” While my brain was recording these unconscious lines as sparks of consciousness, my fingers were recording these as light cue 105. Now, so, the unconscious mind is dead…and it is dead, unconsciously…

Continue…Maybe…

Entry #7

A SILLY BUT ENLIGHTENING INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD FOREMAN
BY CHRIS MIRTO, PERFORMER

BIO
FULL NAME? Richard Albert Foreman
DATE OF BIRTH? June 10, 1937
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN? Gemini
PARENTS' NAMES? Albert and Clare
SIBLINGS? 1 sister
PETS? None at the moment
FAVORITE COLOR? Brown
LUCKY NUMBER? I don’t really have one. Maybe 3 or 7
EYE COLOR? Brown
HAIR COLOR? Brown
HEIGHT? 5’7 1/2”
PEIRCINGS? none
TATTOOS? none

MOVIES/MUSIC
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE? French Can-Can. (later he changed his answer to Miracle in Milan)
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE TYPE OF MOVIE? Art films and Foreign
HAPPY ENDINGS OR ENDINGS WITH A TWIST? Endings with a twist
IF YOU WERE AN ACTOR, WHO WOULD YOU BE? Paul Muni
NOW, WHICH ACTOR DO YOU MOST LOOK LIKE? (laughs, then says Gregory Peck
WHAT GENRE OF MOVIE DOES YOUR LIFE REFLECT? Psychological Drama

WHAT TYPE OF MUSIC DOES YOUR LIFE REFLECT? Stockhausen
IF YOU COULD SING A DUET WITH SOMEONE, WHO WOULD IT BE? Jean Paul Sartre
WHAT SONG WOULD IT BE? Roll Out the Barrel
GIVE US A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE SPEECH FOR THE GRAMMYS: “You all suck.”

IF YOU WERE A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT, WHAT WOULD YOU BE AND WHY? Piano, because it has so many keys.
WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT FAVORITE SONG ON THE RADIO? Air America
WHAT SONG GETS YOU GOING? Anything from Mahagonney

FOOD/DRINK
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE GUILTY PLEASURE FOOD? Confit
WHAT ARE THREE FOODS YOU REFUSE TO TOUCH? Snails, oysters, and clams

WHAT ARE THREE FOODS YOU CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT? Bread, chocolate … (after much thought) Bread

FAVORITE MIDNIGHT SNACK? Potato chips
IF YOU WERE A FOOD, WHAT WOULD YOU BE? Baklava

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DRINK (NON-ALCOHOLIC)? Coffee
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DRINK (ALCOHOLIC)? Wine
ARE YOU LACTOSE-INTOLERANT? Yes
WHICH ONE--PEPSI-COLA OR COCA-COLA? I can’t tell the difference.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN DRUNK? Yes
IF YOU WERE A DRINK, WHAT WOULD YOU BE? Pernod

CHILDHOOD
WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE TOY? A koala bear.
YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE? Bambi
DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST WORD? I started to speak much later than normal kids. I’m told that I was pointing at a toy. When it was finally brought to me my first words were “No, that one!”
WHAT IS ONE MEMORY YOU HAVE FROM CHILDHOOD? Hiding my head in the baby carriage when asked to play with the other boys.

SCHOOL
WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE TEACHER'S NAME? Juan, my Comp Lit teacher at Brown.
BEST SUBJECT? English
WORST SUBJECT? French
WHAT WERE YOU KNOWN AS IN SCHOOL (NICKNAMES, LABELS, ETC)? Dick
CLUBS/ORGANIZATIONS? Oh lots. Drama club. Lit magazine.

WHO WAS YOUR BEST FRIEND IN SCHOOL? Ken Rich
ARE YOU STILL FRIENDS? No

FRIENDS
WHO IS YOUR BEST FRIEND? Kate (his wife)
WHO DO YOU GO TO FOR ADVICE? No one.
WHO IS THE GUY/GIRL YOU LIKE SPENDING THE MOST TIME WITH? Kate.
WHERE DO YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS LIKE TO HAVE A GOOD TIME? Restaurants.
DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO IS INTERVIEWING YOU? (Laughs and smiles, then says) Hmmm….

ABOUT YOU
ARE YOU MORE LIKELY TO JUMP OUT OF A PLANE OR WATCH FROM THE GROUND? Watch.
IF YOU HAD THREE WISHES, WHAT WOULD THEY BE? 1. To become enlightened; 2. To have my mind opened; 3. To see the closest thing to God that human beings can see.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CAR? Chevrolet.

WHERE WAS YOUR LAST VACATION? Cape Cod.
WHERE IS YOUR DREAM VACATION? Corsica

WHAT IS YOUR BEST FEATURE (PHYSICAL)? Eyes.
WHAT IS YOUR BEST FEATURE (NON-PHYSICAL)? Creativity.

DATING
ARE YOU DATING? SINGLE? TALKING? Married.
HOW IS THAT? Good.

WHAT ARE THREE CHARACTERISTICS YOU LIKE ABOUT A GIRL? Eyes, face, hair.

WHAT ARE YOUR MAJOR TURN OFFS? Stupidity, arrogance, and over-sweetness.
ARE YOU MARRIAGE-MATERIAL? Yes.

HOLIDAYS
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE HOLIDAY? Tuesday. (this is when we begin rehearsals)
WHAT IS YOUR LEAST FAVORITE HOLIDAY? Sunday. (this is our last rehearsal of each week)

DO YOU BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS? (with a sigh) No.
THE EASTER BUNNY? No
THE TOOTH FAIRY? No

HAVE YOU EVER PLANTED A TREE ON ARBOR DAY? No.
WHAT WAS YOUR BEST COSTUME FOR HALLOWEEN? Night of the Bath. (His mom wrapped him up in towels one year)

WORK
WHERE DO YOU WORK? Ontological-Hysteric Theater
DO YOU ENJOY YOUR JOB? Sometimes.
WHAT IS YOUR DREAM JOB? To continue.


RELIGION
WHAT RELIGION ARE YOU? Jewish.

DO YOU PRACTICE YOUR SET RELIGION? No.
WHAT DO YOU NOT BELIEVE IN? That America is always right.

FAVORITES
THE OCEAN OR ON THE RIVER? Lakes.
CHOCOLATE OR VANILLA? Chocolate.
CHRISTMAS OR BIRTHDAY? Birthday.
DOGS OR CATS? Dogs.
DVD OR VHS? DVD.
TANNING BED OR BEACH? Beach. But I have some problems with the beach.
SNOW OR RAIN? Snow.
TOO HOT OR TOO COLD? Too cold.
KISSES OR HUGS? From who? What kind?
PLAYS OR MOVIES? Movies.
TOOTHPASTE? Crest.