OKtheater is in town

Wer es kaum mehr erwarten kann bis zum 10-Stunden-Marathon des Nature Theatre of Oklahoma am Eröffnungswochenende, kann schon mal einen Blick in die Welt der beiden künstlerischen Leiter werfen: Videos, Interviews und Inspirationsquellen (wie Marcel Duchamp und John Cage). Seit gestern ist die Truppe in München – auf was sie sich am meisten gefreut haben? Club Mate!

LIFE AND TIMES

Pavol Liska: „I always strive for my work to be socially undismissable. Every day, I fight for what I do to be central to public discourse. However, if I want the world to see my relevance, I myself have to be able to see it first. Unfortunately, it is not always easy. I live in a perpetual existential crisis regarding the meaning and purpose of what I have chosen to do with my life. On a daily basis, I struggle against doubt and futility. There is very little in the world I live in that tells me what I do is important, or that it even matters, and I have a hard time seeing the impact of my work on my environment. The few compliments I receive don’t have enough staying power to convince me it’s necessary to continue. This is my biggest challenge as an artist: to wholeheartedly take myself seriously as an artist, and to take the artist’s role in society seriously. How is it not just me playing in my own private sandbox, by myself, while the rest of the world moves ahead without me?“

LIFE AND TIMES

Kelly Copper: „My work has evolved from a preoccupation with the most basic form and function of theatre. I’m always looking from an extreme distance and with a deep curiosity about why it happens. What are the rules? If I take away an element that seems to be essential to this experience, what is revealed in that absence?

One of the biggest challenges in my work is time. I’m asking for more time from the audience than is polite—or even reasonable—to ask. I’m interested in time as the essential element of live performance. This is the only way in which it differs from other narrative-driven, audience-centered art. The time it takes to make the work live is equal to and coterminous with the audience’s experience of it. We ask to share time with the audience, and I’m interested in everything that suggests—that time has value, that it encompasses complex consciousness, accepting that it may include a wide variety of experience from enjoyment to boredom, sleep, hunger… When we get past the minutes and seconds, is there room for biological, or even geological time in the theatre? If theatre is a radioactive isotope, then what is the rate of decay“