Guest Blogger of the Week: Kathleen Warnock

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We would like to thank Judith Malina for her inspiring blogs last week.

We are happy to announce this week's guest blogger, Kathleen Warnock.

Kathleen Warnock is a playwright and editor, whose work has been seen in New York, London, Dublin (Ireland and Georgia) and regionally. She is Playwrights Company Manager for Emerging Artists Theatre, NYC, and curates the Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Project for TOSOS. She is Ambassador of Love for North America for the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. She also curates the series Drunken! Careening! Writers! the third Thursday of the month at KGB Bar (since 2004). Her short play, Staying Put, is running as part of EATfest, Series A, through March 19. She is also series editor for Best Lesbian Erotica (Cleis). She is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

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Human Happiness is Our Cause

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Contributed by guest blogger of the week, Judith Malina.

Today, New York is the hub of energy that will spark the next step in the international peace movement.  It is here where the proximity of the rich – those who have much more than they need, and the poor – who have much less than they need, grate against each other in an intolerable encounter.

It is here that the artists and the scholars mingle with the uneducated and marginalized…

If we can make the next step it will happen here - yet – it is in places remote from this great city that the fervent of revolution occurs.

10 years ago in 2001, The Living Theatre went from New York to Paris to Lebanon, where in the ruins of the bombings, and the foretaste of a terrible war, the young people gathered to do a street play; invented by themselves - and performed in their own Lebanese language – to plead for peaceful solutions to the warlike reality.

A dozen of the 35 participants left the play, regretfully and took with them all of the eloquent statements of their position.  They believed that armed struggle was necessary + inevitable.  And we parted as friends, with embraces – and they attended the final performance, for they too longed for the peaceful solution which they thought was unattainable.

Today we watch the moving results of the Egyptian Revolution + at the same time the terrifying struggle of the Libyan Revolution, and we know that there too the young people would welcome peaceful solutions –  and even as the bloodshed continues, we know that those peaceful solutions are a possibility + that we must never abandon hope…

So in New York, where we are still far from the bloodshed, we work to explore, to investigate, to invent new ways to make peace.

Let's not give up because the cause of human happiness is our cause though the despair of violence is still occurring.

Judith Malina's handwritten post
 

Go Beyond Your Borders

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Contributed by guest blogger of the week, Judith Malina.

Since 1961 – When The Living Theatre began its European Tour, we have been concerned with the climate of international experimental theatre on both sides of the Atlantic.  The love and appreciation of innovative theatre is surely most fertile on the Italian Peninsula, and while The Living Theatre has performed in every Western European country, it has found its deepest understanding and hospitality in Italy.

We were first invited by The Theatre de Nation’s in Paris, that wonderful festival which annually brought together theatres of many many nations – European, African, Asian, with conferences, fringe festivals and encounters of all sorts; that furthered the dialogue between theatre people of varying cultures + many languages…

From there we began our work in Italy + Europe + eventually even in Brazil, where we were invited during the military dictatorship and when no experimental theatre was permitted.  In the early 70’s, The Company quickly studied Portuguese and went to Sao Paulo + Rio de Janeiro + then settled in Ouro Preto, where we performed clandestine theatre until we were arrested while rehearsing a play for children called Six Dreams about Mother.

In one of Brazil’s notorious torture prisons, we served 70 days (though – believe it or not we even did some potent prison theatre there) till international publicity got us liberated.  The prison we were confined in practiced terrible tortures + when we left we asked our jail - mates how we could best help them and they said ‘show them how it is here.  Tell the world what they do to us.’

Out of this request came Seven Meditations on Political Sad-Masochism in which we not only portray the inhuman forms of torture practiced then in Brazil (not currently) but also today in many other parts of the world, including these current Middle Eastern revolutions; but we make our premise the relations between the ownership of women by men as the model of our political, social, educational and legal and military structures.

We have performed the play in Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and German….among others, also with the help of skillful translators in a dozen other languages…

We are reviving this play in New York City, where it will open March 15th, as part of Culture Project’s Women Center Stage Festival.

The Theatre unifies the world, our work is an example of the multiple possibilities of transcending national, lingual, and cultural boundaries.  We urge other companies to go beyond their borders + work with theatre people + audiences of many places!

Judith Malina's handwritten post

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Guest Blogger of the Week: Judith Malina

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We would like to thank David J. Diamond for blogging for us last week. 

We are really excited to announce our next guest blogger, the legendary Judith Malina.

Malina founded The Living Theatre with husband Julian Beck in 1947 as an alternative to commercial theatre. Based in a variety of small New York locations which were frequently closed due to financial problems or conflicts with city authorities, they helped to establish Off-Off-Broadway and Off-Broadway as significant forces in U.S. theatre.

In the 1950s, the group was among the first in the nation to promote such international dramatists as Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Luigi Pirandello. Additionally, the Living Theatre took the unconventional step of performing the work of modernist poets, including T. S. Eliot, Paul Goodman, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. Their work during this period shared some aspects of style and content with Beat generation writers.

The Brig (1963), an anti-authoritarian look at conditions in a Marine prison, was their last major Living Theatre production in New York before a disagreement with the IRS led to the closure of the theatre space and even the brief imprisonment of Beck and Malina. During the 1960s, the group toured chiefly in Europe, and turned to even more politically and formally radical work carrying an anarchist and pacifist message, with the company members creating plays collectively and often living together. Major works from this period included adaptations of Antigone, Frankenstein and Paradise Now, which became their best-known play. Paradise, a semi-improvisational piece involving audience participation, was notorious for a scene in which actors recited a list of social taboos that included nudity, while themselves disrobing. leading to multiple arrests for indecent exposure.

Having returned to the U.S. in 1968 to tour Paradise, the group broke apart the next year. Malina and Beck toured with the remaining members in Brazil, where they were imprisoned in 1971, then returned to New York to form a new version of the group. Though Beck passed away in 1985 after a two-year battle with stomach cancer, The Living Theatre has staged nearly 100 productions performed in 8 languages in 28 countries on 5 continents - a unique body of work that has influenced theater the world over.

In 2008, Malina received the Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Awards. This honor was presented to Malina by Olympia Dukakis on behalf of her peers and fellow artists of the Off-Off-Broadway community "in recognition of her unabashed pioneering spirit and unyielding dedication to her craft and the Off-Off-Broadway community".

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Maintaining ensembles

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the week, Brad Burgess.

Yesterday, Judith was talking to John Strasberg in her apartment about the highest artistic aim of maintaining an ensemble. I’m glad I did not write the blog yesterday, even though it was completely unintentional. Sometimes things just workout I guess. It ain’t called The Living Theatre for nothing! haha, Come on down to Clinton Street if you haven’t, this place is out of this world let me tell you. Never know what you are going to find.

Anywho, this blog is gladly stealing from those two technique tycoons and their minds who have been developing ensembles with their legacies for well over 100 years combined. Holy moly is right.

A true ensemble has one essential quality that cannot be taught or come from natural talent: they know each other. Being on stage with Judith during The Connection, we had a whole personal relationship to draw on. She’s my roommate, she’s my mentor, she’s one of my best friends. We share almost everyday with one another.

Tom Walker, is a company member of ours who has performed in 39 seasons with The Living Theatre. To put that into perspective, Mickey Mantle played 16 seasons for The New York Yankees. Judith and Tom have been on stage with each other for almost 40 years.

These examples are just a couple of dozens and dozens of similar stories. The profound effect these real relationships have on our ability to make our art together, is very present for us. It’s what makes being a pacifist anarchist political theatre group even possible.

Our art can’t help but manifest itself from these experiences. Our thoughts and feelings as people are developed this way. It makes sense then that our ability to relay translations of reality from the writer/director/actor/thinker as artists and produce something that has a connection to reality that is clear to the audience.

One balance we have is the problem of not being involved enough with our audience, as strange as it sounds. We are such a culture unto ourselves, that we need to be careful to keep our every day reality a part of the culture we are living in. We are very fortunate to be a part of the academic culture, so that much of our audience, theatre students and professionals especially, know something coming into the show about what to expect. Well, in our case I suppose its more of what not to expect.

When I see the experienced ensemble here working together, the company members who have been doing it for 10, 20, 30, 40 or in Judith’s case 65 years, I feel connected to the development of the culture. I see an ability for compromise, an ability to find a common ground, an ability to move forward in the midst of crisis.

I think we are able to accomplish this because we are really able to be who we are to one another. It’s part of the vibe and message from the moment you arrive here, from Judith to the babies that are born into the company. It’s a real family, in all the wonderful clichéd sense of it.

This adds a reality to the work for me personally that I have not been able to find or see in many places other than the theatre community at large. I think the connection we have to each other here at The Living Theatre, but also industry wide helps us communicate and relate to people who love their friends and families. That’s most people in the world.

It’s certainly not always perfect as again is the norm, but I feel theatre and its ensemble nature can be a real example for societal structuring. People should be working together with people they love on something they care about that says what they believe, in their deepest, and most elevated selves. Hopefully our work as an artistic community is doing so. I believe it is in this city.

Happy World Theatre Day!

BB