Anne Bogart
Anne Bogart is artistic director of the SITI Company and a teacher of theatre at Columbia University, New York University and other schools. She was president of the TCG board from 1991 to 1993..
Beginnings
I was born in Newport, R.I., into a Navy family. We moved every year, and the place I lived longest was actually Japan, where I lived for two and a half years at the age of six or seven. I was dumped into big schools and was in a state of complete loss as a young child. So at every school that I was plopped into, I would find where theatre was made. I found that every school was doing theatre, and it was a state of grace for me, because it was something that repeated the pattern I was living in my life–short, intense experiences. You get very close to people–it involves beauty and love–and then you lose them. My French teacher at Middletown High School introduced me to art with a capital A when I was 15 years old, in 1967, in Middletown, R.I. Now, usually the plays we did in school were things like Brigadoon or Charlie’s Aunt. But she decided to do The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco. As her student director I collected props. And, just like All About Eve, one day I got a phone call and my teacher said, "Anne, I’ve got the flu. I want you to take over." All of a sudden there I was directing a play, and all the right things happened. It took place in the lunch room. There was a space at the back where there was a curtain and you opened it and there was the stage. The theatre always smelt like lunch at Middletown High School. Believe it or not, the play was a big success, which always helps. I also had a crush on this boy, who played Mr. Smith. We would chase each other around. Love is great. So then I decided that I would actually make directing a career.
When I was 15, I was one of those school children put onto the big yellow buses and brought to Providence to see Adrian Hall’s Macbeth by the Trinity Repertory Company. He went to Washington to the newly formed NEA and asked for a million dollars to bring every school child in Rhode Island to see theatre in his theatre. It was life-altering, mainly because I didn’t understand it. I’d never heard Shakespeare before. I didn’t understand what was happening. But when it was over, I was further convinced that this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. It was a first lesson for me as a director, from Adrian Hall directly–the lesson being, don’t speak down to your audience. Theatre is not about understanding what’s going on. It’s about meeting something you don’t know.
After high school, I wanted to go to a good girls’ school and study theatre. I applied to Vassar, where my mother had gone; Sarah Lawrence, which is where I really wanted to go–and a number of other colleges. And to my great dismay, I was turned down by all of them. I was very frustrated. Anyway, I ended up going to a school that would take you if you could pay the check, which was called Briarcliff College, which doesn’t exist anymore. I directed plays while I was there, but I had no intention of staying there. By then, I had decided I really wanted to be a director. So I applied to the newly formed CalArts and Carnegie Mellon and I can’t remember what other schools. Again, I was turned down by all of them. So in a state of woe, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stay at Briarcliff. So I found a place in Athens, Greece, where you could study for a year. I fell in love with the language, modern Greek, and the country. I studied Greek history, theatre, archeology, but mostly bummed around the islands. I totally adored it. I stayed there until the last minute, and I suddenly thought, "Wait a minute! Second year of school–I have to get a degree in something, don’t I?" So I ended up going to Emerson College in Boston for one semester. I hated it, because they wouldn’t let me direct. Anyway, after a semester there, I finally transferred to Bard College, which became a great joy. It’s essentially a college in the middle of nowhere and I could direct. I stayed an extra year and it actually took me five years to get through undergraduate. I graduated from Bard and my teacher there, Roberta Sklar, said, "Okay, you go to New York, get yourself a company and a writer and get to work." So I thought, "Okay."
New York Years
I did go to New York with many detours beforehand, which involved being part of a company that was headed to India and hijacked in Israel. But that’s another story, which would go on far too long. I did go to New York in 1974, the end of the year, and decided to find a place to live. I had $3,000 saved up for my trip to India, which never happened. New York was where I wanted to be. I found a place to live in a loft on Grand Street between Crosby and Broadway for $325 a month. Three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room and a dance studio. No heat. I found two other people to live with me, so our rent was a little over $100 apiece per month. I worked in a series of jobs, including as an expense analyst on Wall Street and as a collector in a water company. I gave after-school classes in theatre for the after-school program for the United Nations School. I worked in a halfway house for people who were mentally disturbed, teaching theatre workshops. In other words, I did everything.
Meanwhile, I thought "Okay, my job is to get a company and get a writer," as my teacher had told me from Bard, and start to work. I asked around. I said, " Does anybody know how you get actors in New York?" Somebody told me, "Well, what you do is you put an ad in Backstage." So I put an ad in Backstage and it said, "Actors interested in an investigation of assassination and murder using Shakespeare’s Macbeth, call this number." The phone began to ring in my $325 loft floor. To this day I’m afraid of the sound of the phone ringing, because the phone didn’t stop ringing. It was like looking into a Pandora’s box of the state of the actor in New York City. It was unbelievable. I’d forgotten to mention in the ad that there was actually no money involved. So half the people hung up. The other half wanted to come in and audition. But I was afraid to audition them. I didn’t really have the confidence to do that, so I had them for some reason come in for an interview. I would sit behind a table in the studio in the loft and hold onto it, so people wouldn’t notice I was shaking. I was so scared. They would come in, and there was this one guy who came in, I’ll never forget it–such a lesson. He was twice my age. His résumé showed Broadway credits, Off-Broadway credits, television credits, movie credits. His breath smelled a little bit of alcohol and he started crying and he said to me, "Just let me work. Let me do something that means something." I’m so overwhelmed and scared.
Anyway, I started creating work downtown in New York. I would go and make the rounds to all the little theatres and I would ask them if I could direct in their theatres. I didn’t have much of a résumé, except for college, so nobody said yes. And so I managed to do theatre pretty much in found environments, if a friend had a space we could work in. Meanwhile, I was moving from place to place in New York. I had moved down to Walker Street, then I moved out to a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn.
Anyway, I was going around trying to find a job actually directing in a theatre, meanwhile directing on the street or in found environments. Finally, I went into Theater for the New City and spoke with George Bartenieff. I asked if I could direct in his theatre, and he was the first person who said, "You know, Crystal’s talking about turning the prop room into a theatre. I think you could use that space."
So it was arranged that I would come back in three weeks. I went to talk to the actors who I’d been gathering. There were four actors working on a project. I was so happy. They were happy. We were going to actually act in a real theatre, do a show in a real theatre. Three weeks later, when I went back to Theater for the New City, George looked at me, remembered his promise, and said, "Oh, I forgot, Crystal decided not to turn the prop room into a theatre." And I had to go back to these four actors who’d been rehearsing in my house and say, "In fact, we don’t have a theatre."
Three actors stayed. I was in despair, didn’t know what to do, and my roommate said, "Well, why don’t you do theatre in the house in Brooklyn?" I said, "Well, nobody’s going to come to Brooklyn, first of all, and this is a silly idea." So I kept trying to find a place to do our production and I couldn’t find one. Finally I had a friend who had a truck and she agreed to carry the audience from Manhattan to Brooklyn every night. So we put an ad in the Village Voice, and we named the play Inhabitat. The ad in the Village Voice, tiny little ad, said, "Meet on the corner of Third Street and LaGuardia if you want to see this play."
People would come to Third Street and LaGuardia and there’d be this truck with no windows, and they’d get in the back of it. We could take 29 people a night and carry them across the bridge to Brooklyn. They’d get out of the truck, not knowing where they were, in front of my house, and there at the top of the stairs would be Dee Dee O’Connell carrying two bags of groceries. She would say the first monologue.
Her character’s name was Fanny and she later told me it was based on me, but I didn’t know that at the time. Anyway, so then they would go in the house. The play would happen in all the different rooms of the house. Then the last scene would happen in the biggest room.
Anyway, it became a little cult hit. John Cage came to it, much to my thrill. Somebody asked him what he thought, and he said–and he sent all kinds of people to see it–he said, "Oh, the sound of the dogs barking mixed with the scenes and the rooms." He gave a lot of people the idea to come and see it and a lot of articles were written about it. So this started my career of doing site-specific work, which I did a great deal of in New York in the late ’70s, early ’80s, still not having a theatre.
I forgot to mention that I did go to graduate school. I got a degree in theatre history and criticism from NYU, a department that is now called performance studies. It was then called theatre history or something. I essentially read sociology and anthropology for two years, which was the best director training in the world. To actually think, what are we doing instead of how do we do it.
Early Influences
I took a year and lived in Montreal, and one night I saw a film and was blown away by it. I felt much like I had felt when I was sitting 15 years old watching Macbeth–that feeling of excitement and knowing that I had to drop everything and follow it in a different direction. It was a film of a play directed by Peter Stein and the actors were part of a company in Berlin. I didn’t speak German at the time, and I saw the film. It was of Summer Folk by Gorky. When it was over, I sat in my chair, feeling much like I had felt at 15 when I didn’t know what I had just seen. It was the most galvanizing thing I’d seen in years. What was it about? It was a film of a play, but I’d never seen such passionate acting plus a political point of view, plus beauty, plus intellectual rigor balancing a work of art.
As an American, I’m used to seeing something that’s very beautiful, but very empty, or very intelligent, but ugly, or very funny, but no intelligence. And to see all of it lined up this way...I squinted my eyes to try and figure out who it was who had done this and discerned at the end with the credits that it was the Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin.
I didn’t know what to do. I was so excited. I’d never seen anything like this. I knew I had to drop everything and move in that direction. So without knowing what to do, I did the only thing I could think of, which was to sign up for German classes. I signed up for German classes the next day. As I was studying, I found that there was this glossy German magazine called TheaterHeute, that came monthly. It was big and glossy. This was in the late ’70s.
Every month there would be an article about the Schaubuhne because it was such a hot company at the time in Berlin. They had sort of changed the rules of how theatre was made and organizations are created. I would get people to translate the articles. In these articles would be the most wonderful ideas about how to direct, and I started stealing them. Then I’d start to learn so I could actually read it myself. Then I would start stealing these ideas and applying them to the theatre I was doing on the streets in New York or in found spaces in the sort of poor theatre I was doing. I would steal from the very rich theatre of the Schaubuhne and apply these ideas.
Then I would get phone calls from people, because my friends all knew I was crazy about German theatre. Whenever they met somebody German in the theatre, they’d say, "Oh, call Anne." So I’d get these phone calls saying, "Hello, my name is Hans. I’m in New York. I’m here for experimental theatre." So I’d invite them to see my rehearsals or see the plays and sometimes I’d put them in my plays.
I was interested in them to an obsessive point at which I memorized the names of every company member, could recite what plays they produced and who was the dramaturg, that sort of obsessive thing. I stole everything; they were working in ways I had never dreamt of.
So what happens is when you’re very interested in something, it comes back at you. It simply does. Two years after I started stealing and learning German and meeting people and stealing again, a huge article, four pages, which was a lot, in TheaterHeute, came out about my work, saying, "This is the new American work!" I found that very ironic since I’d stolen all my ideas from their magazine. At any rate, from that article came many invitations to direct in Germany and Austria and Switzerland. I accepted all of them and learned brutally that I’m not German. The first play I directed in Berlin was with graduating students at the acting academy there and it was a disaster. I was trying to pretend I was German, and I refused to speak English. I tried to direct like a German director, but what it did was close me down. I gained a lot of weight, became very alcoholic and got the thing that all Germans know, and it grew in my stomach. It’s called angst, and it’s a terrible feeling.
So through a great deal of unhappiness I had a revelation, actually in a pensione in North Italy, where I went to recuperate after the huge failure of a terrible production in Berlin. I suddenly realized I’m an American. I have an American sense of humor. I have an American sense of structure. I, in fact, love the people who came just before me, upon whose shoulders I stand. With this revelation came a great freedom to work in any way I wanted to, that I’m an American and I can work like an American. I became obsessed, as I am to this day, with American culture and American history. So I would say a good 75 percent of my work is about American phenomena, American culture and American individuals, such as the American vaudeville play I did, or American Silents, about silent film acting. Plays about people, about Americans, like just recently Robert Rauschenberg [bobrausschenbergamerica].
So most of my work now is an investigation of being an American. Some people call me avant garde, which I find a misnomer, because I don’t spend my time thinking about the future. I spent all of my time thinking about the past and my work is an engagement with the past.
The Company Model
A company obviously is a theme that’s come back and back. I was in Berlin in a conversation with Ariane Mnouchkine, who’s really my model, though I don’t know her personally really. Everyone needs a model. She’s a generation older than I am, a director of a company, and somebody I admire very much. She said to me in a brief conversation, looking at me in the eye, "What are you going to do without company? Don’t get me wrong," she said in French, "a company will make you miserable. People are going to leave. There are always problems, but what are you going to do without a company?"
I had an epiphany in that moment, which was that every great production I’d seen, with no exception, theatre or dance, was always with a company. No exception. So how I dealt with that issue was that I started saying it out loud. I believe that you create the future by describing it…but that’s another story. I described a company.
My first company was Trinity Repertory Company in Rhode Island. I was the successor to Adrian Hall. When I first got to Trinity, I was planying the seeds.I decided as a season opener, as a way to bring a new energy into the building, I would bring back a play that I’d directed with my company at the time, Via Theater, which is a little company in New York. We’d created a play based on the theories of Bertolt Brecht, and it was a promenade piece, actually. I decided to place it in and around Trinity Rep as a way of inviting the audience to look not just where the stage was, but also to go through the dressing rooms to see theatre happening in the costume shop. So it was a wonderful, refreshing way to open a season and a new era, I thought, since I was expecting to be there for at least 10 years, and to bring the audience through the theatre in a new way with fresh eyes.
Trinity Rep had been the theatre of Adrian Hall, who is a great director with a huge vision, and his vision was contagious. He gathered a company of actors who were very talented and they created galvanizing theatre–I was in the audience as a kid and very changed by it. What I found out during my wonderful and terrible year, there was that you can’t adopt somebody else’s company. But it was a company really used to creating work in a very particular way. I was bringing in a new way of working in a more, dare I say, postmodern way, and I think this was a shock. Some people enjoyed it, some people hated it. But, again, what I learned was that you can’t take one company and turn it into something else, that you have to start your own, which is what I’ve done since then. But I did do an extraordinary season of work with my collaborators and friends in Providence, which to this day I’m proud of.
SITI Company
Sometimes my company, the SITI Company, and I create from nothing. We’ve created probably about, I’m guessing, six or seven or eight plays from scratch. We often work also with classics. Sometimes we do opera, believe it or not. We work with opera singers. Sometimes we, quite often, actually now more and more, we work with playwrights such as Naomi Iizuka or Chuck Mee. I think my company is now addicted to working with playwrights. I think they’re tired of making their own work. They say, "Oh, playwrights can do it much better than we can."
After the demise of my relationship to Trinity, I was devastated. Around 1990 I got a call from Peter Zeisler, who was then the director of TCG, and he said, "You want to go to Japan?" I said, "Sure." He said, "You’re going with Mark Lamos and Bob Falls. We’re going to go to Tadashi Suzuki’s summer theatre festival up in the mountains of northern Japan." I thought, "Great. That’s cool. Two weeks in Japan." Paid vacation in exchange for talking for half an hour.
What I didn’t know was that it was an audition. Turned out Bob Falls couldn’t go, because he had an earache and didn’t want to make the trip. But Mark Lamos and Peter Zeisler and I went to Togomora in Japan. I met with Suzuki. Apparently, I guess, he liked me a lot, because I had a great time, having no idea that there was any agenda behind this.
A number of months later I got a phone call from Suzuki’s manager, who said, "Mr. Suzuki would like to meet with you, and Peter Zeisler should be there as well." So we all met in a room off the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. Suzuki was there with his company, and he asked me if I would like to co-found a new enterprise that would happen in the United States. He was interested in creating a place that would be a fellowship of theatre artists from around the world, based on his idea of what he does in Toga, which is up in the Japanese Alps. I very naively said, "Sure. Cool. Why not?" He said, "But you should choose where this takes place, because in four or five years I have other things to do. It will be yours."
So I immediately said, "I know where this should be. It should be in Saratoga Springs, New York." He went up to visit Saratoga with his entourage and they met with the Mayor of Saratoga and the head of the Arts Council. Several months later I saw Suzuki again and he said, "Saratoga is a very good thing."
I said, " Oh, good."
He said, " Do you know what Saratoga means in Japanese?"
I said, " No."
He said, "You know, it’s very easy to raise money for Saratoga, because the translation of Saratoga in Japanese is ‘The New Toga.’"
Now, his company is called the Suzuki Company of Toga. So he would say, "Saratoga" to Japanese businessmen and they would just dole out money to him, say, "Sure, I understand that."
So we started it as a summer enterprise in Saratoga Springs through the auspices of Skidmore College and SPAC, Saratoga Performing Arts Center. I went to Japan with a company of American actors. He worked with some of the American actors on a play and I worked with the American actors on Chuck Mee’s Oresteia, and we performed it at the Toga International Festival. Then we brought both plays to Saratoga Springs and performed them at Skidmore and at SPAC. This was the inaugural season of what became my company.
Since all of the actors who were involved had trained with Suzuki in some way or another, and had done my training as well, very soon we realized we were a company. All of these actors live in New York City and I live in New York City, and we decided to form a year-round company, rather than a summer enterprise, which is what Suzuki had originally had had in mind. Very quickly we became a year-round enterprise. Right now we’re going into our 10th year.
The first four years we went to Japan every summer, brought a new play back. Then we started touring. Then we started also teaching. So the company’s mission now is that we create and tour new works nationally and internationally. We train young theatre artists. We do this year-round. The third part of our mission is to encourage international cultural exchange. So all of our choices are based on these three missions of the company.
Regional Theatre
I find, also, that a large part of making this company is in response to my frustrations with the regional theatre, which come directly out of working at Trinity. These theatres–these palaces around our country–were born as Strasberg says, "On the wings of a dream"–the dreams of artists who had a vision. The artists gathered around them actors who could enact these visions, then managers who could make stability within the art form–and then came the buildings, the administrative and artistic and production sides of the art form, the subscriptions and responsibilities to the theatres’ communities.
When an Adrian Hall leaves a place like Trinity Rep, suddenly you have a building and an organization and an administration and actors and a community who are used to art, and suddenly you say, "What should happen in these buildings now?"
I wanted to try something new, and so the SITI Company is trying to get less institutional and more art-based. We work a lot in the regional theatres and we love working in the regional theatres, but we are like a friction cell that goes in. I think we bring fresh energy to theatres that are struggling to stay awake.
On Collaboration
One of the reasons I love having a company is that, without people in the room who call me on my weaknesses, I would be weak. I’ve worked with these people for years. They know all of my weak points. They know my bad jokes, which I can’t tell over again. I also can’t use my old tricks with the actors, designers and writers that I work with, because they know them! Therefore, they push me to be better, to be more in the moment, to be more awake, to be more responsible for the choices I’m making. Collaborators for me are not people who say: Is this what you want? Collaborators are people who disagree, who can allow me to see from an angle I’ve never looked at before. It’s scary at times, to be in a room with people who agree not to agree, but absolutely necessary. I have no interest in being in a room where people are simply doing what I want.
I am the kind of person who, left to my own devices, would do very little. I function best with people. Now, I’m interested in a lot of subjects. Say, right now I’m interested in making a play about the Group Theatre. If I didn’t have deadlines and people I’m working with, I would not do the necessary research. But because I know that on May 24th I’m going to be in New Orleans with a group of people who are expecting me to have some preparation done, I go into the heat of preparation.
What I want is for us to engage together around a theme, a play, a question, and to find a vehicle in which that question or theme can live–a vehicle meaning a staging, a use of time and space that you can share with an audience, so that an audience can go through that vehicle or that conduit in space and in time and perhaps be stopped by certain strength of presence. A certain.…I’m avoiding using the word "new," because I actually don’t think anything is new…but fresh ways of perceiving and experiencing life and issues of what it means to be a human being in this world now.
On Touring with the SITI Company
We very purposely do not have a theatre. We don’t want a theatre. We tour. In New York we work a lot at New York Theater Workshop or at BAM. We tour not only regional theatres, but art houses, art centers. My dream of my company is that I want to be the Kronos Quartet of the theatre world, because I’m interested in the kind of audiences who are interested in new work, new commissions, new writers, fresh ways of seeing things. We do need desperately rehearsal and teaching space. Right now we have an office in New York and we scramble to find teaching and rehearsal space in New York.
Right now we’re doing a capital campaign to raise money to be part of the Brooklyn Extension, Harvey Lichtenstein’s dream in Brooklyn. It’s a long road, but it’s very, very important for us to have not a theatre, but a space to gather where the company can create work and teach.
On Rehearsing
As a director, I was so relieved when I heard Richard Foreman–the most intellectual theatre director in the world, perhaps–say to my graduate students at Columbia that being a director is 100 percent intuitive. Deep down inside I knew that, but I had never had the courage to say it. A rehearsal is not about thinking; it is not about making intellectual decisions. It is completely intuitive. You have to move in the moment. When I’m really, really stuck, I get up and walk towards the stage saying, "I know!" without having any idea what I’m talking about. In that moment between standing up and walking to the stage, something has to come to me. It’s a terrible crisis. It feels like falling down a well, because I have no idea, no answer. But in that state of not knowing, something is born. So to me the rehearsal is a place where we are allowed not to have any idea and to act with great visibility and articulation and violence–violence as an articulate act in the midst of not knowing. I think a lot of young directors are led to believe mistakenly that directing is about knowing and a rehearsal is about the actor saying, "Is this what you want?" Or the director saying, "This is what I want." I actually think the word "want" is killing the American theatre. If a rehearsal is about doing what the director wants, it becomes a parent/child situation.
I have no interest in being a mother in a rehearsal room. I have an interest in collaborating. Actually what I want is usually a little perverted and has nothing to do with the play. The question is, what does the play want? I am actually very careful about what words I use in rehearsal, and "want" is one that I use very, very sparingly. I can say, "I want you to do your best." That’s fine. But, "I want you to walk downstage?" What does that do? What kind of psychology does that set up in a rehearsal room?
To me the rehearsal is a place of rapture. It is a place where we are allowed not to have any idea and to act with great visibility and articulation and violence. I mean, violence as an articulate act in the midst of not knowing. And that’s what creation is to me. I believe in treating the rehearsal space and the actors in it in a very special way, and I take a great deal of consideration with how I approach a rehearsal room. I expect the actors I work with, the collaborators I work with, to take a great deal of care with how they bring themselves into a rehearsal. Therefore, what happens is special and extraordinary and allows me to live happier, and I hope that people I share it with will feel some of the contagion of that.
On Directing
It is the easiest thing in the world to make me cry. All you have to do is you have a dog, a collie, for example, and a little boy run across the field when they haven’t seen each other for a month, and I burst into tears. Loss is easy. It’s easy to make an entire audience feel the same thing. I think that that is fascism and too easy, and actually makes the audience feel small. I’m interested in creating moments on the stage where everybody in the audience feels something different. And that’s harder to do, to create a moment in which the associations of the audience are opened up, rather than shut down. I think the theatre is an art form at heart. I treat it as an art form. I approach it as an art form. Therefore, I have to ask questions such as, how do I work as an artist in the theatre? One of the major notions, to me, is that art is about opening up, rather than closing down and defining.
James Baldwin said, "The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been given by the answers." If the theatre is an art form, then its function is to stop us rather than to move us, to stop us in our tracks. When you see Cezanne’s painting of apples, you don’t desire to eat the apples–you are stopped in your tracks by the appleness of the apples. I want to create work that creates questions rather than answers. Because as soon as you have an answer–we all know this–you fall asleep. But with a question you’re irritated and awake, and I’m interested in creating theatre that irritates and awakens us. That doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining, which is should be. Ten percent should be entertainment. But there’s another 90 percent which should do different things. Theatre, I think, was born in terror. People create art out of the terror of life. If I didn’t make theatre, I’d be extremely unhappy–I’d be in a state of entropy. In the rapture of a rehearsal I can create an environment in which I believe. In this environment there is an attempt at the poetic, at dilating the human being into something extraordinary.
Everyone in the theatre knows that a director wields power, and it’s about manipulation. I think that you can make a choice about power. You can either have power on the outside, where you’re always throwing a fit and always telling people what to do and whatever, but that’s very weak power, actually. A deeper power is a strong inside, an ability to listen. Ultimately it’s the greater manipulative act if people don’t know that they’re being manipulated. It’s what the Taoists say, it’s like a flagpole or steel surrounded by cotton. The cotton allows for input. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have a very strong interior, a strong sense of what you believe in, a strong sense of values. I think it’s about what you read, how you treat people, what your politics are, what the values are you develop, because those are in the room with you.
The number one job of a director is to listen. I actually think the number one job of an actor or anybody is to listen. From listening comes action. I treat most rehearsals with the attitude of "Show me." If somebody’s got an idea, please show me. Rather than, "Let’s talk about it," "Show me what’s on your mind." And out of that, some movement occurs and then I can add my two bits, and then they add. I think the rehearsal is a snowball. I will suggest something. I’ll say, "I think it starts on a diagonal. You’re coming down on a diagonal, and maybe you’re a little staccato, I don’t know." So that starts something.
Then from that a good actor will say, "Well, diagonal and staccato, what the hell does that mean?" So they’ll come up with something on top of that. Then from what they show me and my listening and watching, it will inform me intuitively of how to respond to that. So it is not me coming in saying, "Okay, do this. Now do that." Because at that point when does the art start? When does the art begin?
The art begins in the crisis of not knowing, and from that not knowing making an action. Picasso said that in a painting you make the first stroke and that the rest of the painting is about correcting that first mistake. I feel that in rehearsal you make a stroke and then all the rest of the work is about trying to turn that mistake into something extraordinary.
I don’t believe in starting with the emotions. I don’t believe that a rehearsal is a place where–and this happens a lot in American rehearsals due to the misunderstanding of the Stanislavsky system–it’s all about somebody who does something really emotional and the director goes, "Okay, keep that."
We don’t own emotions, but the emotions are the most precious thing that we ever experience. Therefore, we should lay off. Of course, in a rehearsal we’re interested in emotion. I believe you cannot go through the front door to get to paradise, as Kleist said. You have to go through the back door. In a rehearsal I’m actually interested in emotions, therefore I don’t touch them. I pay attention to somebody, the way they place their hand on a table. I pay attention to where their focus is. I don’t know. I’ll pay attention to anything but the emotion, not because I’m most interested in that, but because I’m most interested in the emotion.
If I say, "Keep that emotion," you know that, the next time you do it, it’s going to be dead and affected and you are manufacturing emotion. There is nothing cheaper in the world than watching a manufactured emotion. I’m looking to create in rehearsal vessels or vehicles in which the emotions can change. Each time you do it, you know that your shoulder’s up and your elbow’s over here and that’s causing you to breathe a little shallower. Therefore, certain emotions will come. But they’ll always be different. I don’t want to nail down emotion, I want emotion to be like an ocean that flows through, and every performance is different and you could fall madly in love with the person across from you at any point, not because you have decided that’s what happens, but because you are in a relationship in which anything can happen.
The open space in which emotionality is possible–its intensity is never known. What is known is body placement, for example, or an agreement that on this word I’ll be over here. Those are cheap things, so I pay attention to the cheap things in order to allow God to speak through us, through the actors in the moment.
There are two problems, I find, with the misinterpretation of the Stanislavsky method. Actually, there are a lot of problems, or as Christo, the artist, said, "There’s no such thing as problems, only situations." There are many situations that we face in the American theatre. I referred to the word "want" before as a disease. I want you to do this. I want that. Do you want that?
Another one is the notion that if I feel it, the actor, the audience will feel it. That’s one of the biggest mistakes in our field. It ain’t true. Maybe in film it’s closer to being true, but in the theatre, "If I feel it, they will feel it," is not true. The other thing that’s not true is that an actor–and this is all due to film and television I would say–thinks that the audience is looking at their face. Ain’t true. Maybe in film or television. The audience is looking at the body, and the body is the expressive instrument. So these are the problems that we face in our rehearsals in this country at this time.
TCG Years
I was shocked when I was voted on as president of TCG. I thought I was the last person who should be president, because TCG seemed very corporate to me. It seemed extremely institutional, and I felt so uninstitutional. I feel like an artist blowing in the breeze working in institutions. But actually–and I will say that Peter Zeisler had a great deal to do with pushing my nomination and thinking that an artist should hold this position–an independent individual artist should have this position. I actually think Zeisler was right, in retrospect. I think he was looking for a fresh wind, a point of view from the artist, rather than from somebody who’s in charge of an institution.
So it was actually a great two years. I was always very nervous about running meetings. But the discussion that takes place on board level at TCG is always galvanizing, is always important, always affects the field, and ultimately is for the good of the art. For that reason I’m very, very proud of having been president and to have had that opportunity to contribute to the field. I feel that in the theatre we have a responsibility to the well-being of the theatre, and I think that TCG does that with wholeheartedness.
I think that in the years that I was at TCG as president, one very important issue concerned the artistic home–artists finding homes in institutions, rather than just employment opportunities. I think that that’s an issue that to this day. It’s something that all institutions struggle with. For whom are we making theatre? A lot of places now think that we are going to plan a season around what we think the audience wants. I actually think that it is always important to make theatre in an institution based on the artist’s interests–not to say, "Let’s see, I want to do this season How I Learned To Drive. Now, let’s find a director." To ask a director or to ask actors what they’re interested in will ultimately be the most beneficial for the audience. I think second-guessing the audience is the biggest problem that we face. It’s the deep galvanizing interest on the part of the artists involved, no matter what you put in front of the audience, that gets the audience to come back.
So I think that the issue was, and still is, where do decisions come from in an institution in the theatre? How are decisions made? As Ben Cameron will say, "Core values. What are your core values and how are you functioning from those?" So that was an issue when I was president and I think remains an issue and can never be addressed enough.
On the Future of Theatre
All great art is created from a state of imbalance. Actually, all heroic acts are created from imbalance. So you think of the classic car trapping child–mother gets the necessary energy to lift car. From a state of imbalance is created the creative act. Rehearsals need to be a place where imbalance is encouraged, and the striving for harmony from a state of imbalance is what makes the heroic act of creation.
So first in order to do that you have to accept imbalance. So that’s at the heart of our work. On a national level and even an international level and in terms of the state of the theatre we are in a state of imbalance and it’s wonderful. We are imbalanced economically. We’re imbalanced because we are between mythologies. We are living in a brand-new world, dare I use the words "global culture." Dare I use the words "media-invaded culture."
I was reading in the paper the other day that most teenagers multi-task to the number of 17 things at the same time. You can have a conversation, be doing your homework, be on the Internet, be answering instant messages. Our psychology is changing tremendously. We are in between mythologies. We don’t have a new one yet, the old one doesn’t make any more sense.
So this is the time to create. Not to wait until we know where we are. Two years ago, I think, Yale Theater was doing a series on Utopia in the theatre, and they asked me to write an article and I just really didn’t want to do it. Something in me was just resisting writing that article. They kept calling me saying, "Anne, the deadline’s coming up." Finally they said, "Well, would you just write a blurb?"
So I sat down finally in the crisis of this not-knowing and realized what I had to say, which is–and I think it relates to this situation–that Utopia is not some wonderful subsidized theatre of the future where technology has met the art form, etc. Utopia is the act of creating. If you are making theatre now, you are experiencing Utopia. Utopia is not something in the future. Therefore, we are in a fecund period. The screen, the movie screen, is becoming smaller. Therefore, the theatre is taking on a whole new meaning.
I remember going to see Night of the Iguana a couple of years ago at Roundabout with Cherry Jones. They’d done this lovely set that had sort of palm trees and a little lake and it was a wonderful night. For some reason the audience was in a good mood, it was very tranquil. It was a wonderful play. There were these palm trees and little cabins that kind of came out into the audience. I was sitting in the audience, and the audience was happy and the play was going on. I suddenly thought, "This is amazing. There’s real palm trees and real people in front of me, and they’re speaking." I suddenly saw theatre in this whole new way, as this novel event.
I think we will have that experience more and more in the theatre–seeing it as something that may seem at first like an exotic flower. The idea of being in the room together, of sharing common air, of being able to reach out and touch somebody and to be addressing issues together, is an extraordinary thing, which will become rarer and rarer and therefore more and more precious. I don’t mean precious in a negative sense; I mean precious in the sense of gold.
A couple of years ago I was seeing a play with my dearest friend, Tina Landau. We were sitting together and saw a play and I hated the play. It was a one-woman show. I will say no more. At the end of the play I turned to Tina and I said, "It’s not a play." She said to me, "You know what? It is a play. And you know what? Theatre can be a lot of things." And I realized she’s right. That’s the glory of it. Theatre can be many, many things. The Actors Theatre of Louisville has theater on a t-shirt. When does theatre begin? Or phone plays? I mean, I’m not crazy about those things, but that’s the glorious thing about the theater–that it can be so many things.
Max Reinhardt is somebody I admire very much. He would do theatre out of doors in Salzburg using hundreds and hundreds of actors. Then the next play he would do would be a tiny chamber piece. Then he’d do an opera. He had an appetite for many things. I think the theatre can be many, many, many things. Personally, as an artist, I am not interested in the mediated event. I’m interested in using extraordinary lighting, top of the level lighting. I’m interested in newest technology in sound, digital, etc., etc. But ultimately that is to support the human presence. That’s my taste. I’m not interested in projections personally. I’m not interested in video on stage.
But I think that the explorations in that will be wonderful, and I look forward to them. I think we should not try to say theatre is this and isn’t that, that we should try to have our arms as wide open as possible in terms of what constitutes a theatrical event. There are extraordinary experiences happening with live feeds from all over the place. Personally, I’m interested in something else. I’m interested in the human body and the human voice. But I look forward to these experiments, and I think they will lead us places that… Lord knows what they’ll be. But I think it’s our task to be open to them.
Heroes
I have many, many, many heroes. The person who I look to as a model of a director in the world is Ariane Mnouchkine who runs the company called Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, mainly because whenever I lose faith, I think of her, because she had the courage to do extraordinary things.
I admire and heroize, certainly, Peter Stein and Klaus Michael Gruber in Germany. Bob Wilson is a hero; he’s a hero to me. But there are many heroes in the American front, including people like Meredith Monk, people who are a generation before me. People like Joe Chaikin, certainly. Suzuki is a generation older than me. I have heroes who are dead. Harold Clurman is a hero.
I actually believe in heroes, because as Heisenberg said, "If I can see far, it’s because I stand on the shoulders of giants." I believe in doing nothing but standing on their shoulders. And my heroes change daily. A hero sometimes is somebody I’ll see on a street, someone whom I see in an act of kindness with somebody else, who will become my hero for the day. I believe in heroism.
I play a game with myself sometimes, which is I imagine, what would have happened if the Moscow Art Theater hadn’t come to our shores in 1923, ’22 and ’23, and galvanized a generation of young people whose names are like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and Elia Kazan, etc. What would have happened? Where would our influence come from? I like to pretend and imagine that it might have been Martha Graham. I actually think that Martha Graham is on to extraordinary things that are useful to the theatre, the notions of thinking about character and drama and the relation between the intimate, private and the public and the mythical, all wrapped into one. So I look to her for inspiration. It’s the biggest tragedy I can imagine, the fact that her company’s fallen apart, because even in its disastrous crisis-laden existence, I would go to see those works and be deeply moved by things that were made in the ’20s and ’30s, which still feel more vulnerable and more personal and more powerful than most anything else I see. I felt terribly galvanized by her work, which I think is the heart of American work in the theatre and in dance. I’d like to see more applied Graham inspiration in the theatre. I think it would become a better place.
On training
Why is it that every other art form outside of the theatre has a daily practice and we don’t? We think you graduate from theatre school, you graduate from graduate school and you’re done. Why is it that we don’t have a bar for actors? Dancers have bar work. Singers do their scales. Musicians wouldn’t dream of not practicing. Yet we think because we can walk and we can talk, that we can act. Why don’t we have a regular training, a mirror in which we can see ourselves develop daily?
I’ve done a great deal of work in training and developing and stealing. Actually, everything that I do is stolen. My company does two kinds of training, Suzuki training and Viewpoints training. The Viewpoints is what I’ve developed and stolen from Mary Overlie, who’s a choreographer and worked with the Judson Church-era dancers, who did a great deal of innovations. It had a big effect on me. I don’t think of the Viewpoints or of training as a fixed thing with an end. It is a process in which I can work with actors daily to refine and develop how we create fiction in time and space. It’s a practice. I believe that people should practice every day. It’s shocking to me that we don’t.
So my company practices every day. We do training before every rehearsal, before every performance. I believe in training. I think it’s necessary. I need to train myself as a director. I need to refresh the way I think and open my perceptions on a daily basis. Actors, I think, need to practice making art together. You have to deal with the mechanism, the oil and the joints, and the practice of making fiction. So the training is about that practice.
Some people mistake the training for the product. There’s a story, this is before my time, but I think it was 1967 when Grotowski came to do a workshop at NYU with all these people whose names were all very famous now, like Olympia Dukakis and Richard Schechner and Andre Gregory and all these people. They took this workshop and Grotowski did these exercises that were very based on yoga.
Anyway, he worked with them and changed their lives. He left the country, went back to Poland, and all of these people in the workshops founded companies–companies with the names of the Manhattan Project or the Performance Group, etc., etc. I think it was the Performance Group that did one of the first performances after that workshop and it was called Dionysus in ’69, which was essentially the exercises that they had done with Grotowski.
Meanwhile, couple of years later, Grotowski comes back with his company to the States to perform, I believe, Acropolis, and everyone was shocked because it was a play. It was a play, and they thought, "Oh, you don’t do the exercises as the performance?" In fact, that’s still a mistake that’s made often. People think I do something called the Viewpoints training, that that is actually what you do in rehearsal. No, you make plays. There’s a difference between training and actually working on a play. That’s a misconception I’d love to address. Training helps you play characters, situations, create new forms, but it’s not about doing a play in a style of viewpoint or Suzuki or whatever it is.