Husband and wife Pavol Liska and Kelly Cooper, aka Nature Theatre of Oklahoma (NTO), are on the hunt for theatre’s least common denominator.  One of the most talked about theatre companies in New York, their work engages with the un-theatrical, taking inspiration from the likes of Duchamp, Malevich and Gertrude Stein. Language is central to the work of this duo who originally met whilst studying at Dartmouth College. Since then, they have produced six shows, won an Obie and have been hailed as a significant presence in the American East Coast avant-garde. Like the theatre with the same name in Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, this is art that has a place for everyone, without the irony; the company are not only interested in taking what is outside of dramatic remit and attempting to appropriate it, but they also consider and capitalise on the social dimension of theatre, from cooking a barbeque for their audience to welcome notes at the onset of productions.

Their latest work, Life and Times, is the epic ten-episode adaptation of a woman’s life from first steps to first mortgage.  Episodic structures are not new to theatre, yet NTO’s approach brings everything to the mix, from the abstract language of 20^th century Russian movement Suprematism through to pop culture, animation and musicals. Each Episode is focused around a different phone conversation with the protagonist, Kristin Worrall, and takes a completely different stylistic approach at its centre. These contrasting styles and concepts contour a range of different approaches to this ongoing, real-life subject matter, yet they also create a space for investigation that deconstructs the role of personal history and verbatim in performance. For NTO, this is less about investigating the biographical, and more about inquiring into the pitfalls of language and truth- there’s a lot of interplay between narrator and character, fictionalisation and representation.  And a lot of humour, too.  Ultimately, the Episodes will lead to a twenty-four hour performance based on Worrall’s life. Here we speak to Pavol Liska about art, drama, Lacan and abstraction.

RR: What’s it like, speaking to Kristin Worrall about her whole life in consecutive (and progressively longer) phone conversations? And why ten episodes and 24 hours?

Pavol Liska: Kristin is one of my best friends, and it is always a pleasure to speak to her on the phone. No extraordinary effort was necessary. I love her speech patterns, the way she formulates thoughts and makes connections between small events and big ideas. There are ten episodes because there were ten phone calls; twenty-four hours is an estimation based on what we’ve done so far, and how long that is.  

RR: Verbatim presupposes a particular relationship to representing truth, yet in Life and Times, you engage more with a fractured idea of truth (you make reference to Lacan in one of your interviews). Can you talk a bit about that?

Pavol Liska: For me, the truth happens in the breakdowns of language. Certainly not when the language is coherent and clear. All the revelations happen in these moments of failure.

RR: Life and Times is not really about creating oral history or engaging with autobiography onstage. You take your cue from verbatim, but stylistically, the six episodes are completely different.  You start with a musical, move on to pop video, murder mystery and animated film, amongst others. Yet the language is resolutely undramatic. How do you mix these ingredients? 

Pavol Liska: The theatrical vocabulary, and that of other art forms and genres, helps us formalise the language and transform it. It’s all about a transformation.  We don’t know how far we have to travel from the original source material to what could possibly be considered ‘art’. And of course, what ‘art’ is, is always questionable, at least for us.

RR: You’ve taken what seems to be the undramatic and put it onstage. What’s your process? What decisions do you make about language and representation within this?

Pavol Liska: There’s nothing mundane about what we’re putting on the stage. We never use that word when we talk to each other, yet other people talk about the mundane. I don’t really know what that word means. I don’t experience it in any area of my life. Maybe I’m just wired too tight.

RR: There’s a clear relationship, particularly in Life and Times, between this engagement with the mundane and abstraction. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Pavol Liska: I’m interested in abstraction as the best way to express the unknown and the unknowable. For me, it’s a way to deal with the idea of God and the origin of the world. Representational art only takes me away from the divine. And that’s primarily what I’m looking for in the work we do.

RR: You work with representation and symbolism quite a lot. In one of your Episodes you have a white background- a geometry related to the movement language of the piece and its abstractions, but even more intriguingly, the actors wear a badge on their costumes, a hint at revolution. Is this Malevich’s red square, the 20^th century Suprematist? How do you deploy and develop these symbols in the Episodes? What is that white background, and does Gertrude Stein have anything to do with it?

Pavol Liska: Yes, it is Malevich’s Red Square in Episode 1, as it is his Black Square in Episode 2. We find early 20^th century art inspiring, especially the Suprematist movement. They wanted to make functional art and tried to figure out how abstraction can be useful. Gertrude Stein has also been an important figure in the work. Years ago I tried to write like her, and of course failed. Then I realised that all I have to do is record how we actually speak, transcribe it, and that’s as close to Gertrude Stein as you can get.

RR: Your show Poetics: A Ballet Brut featured absolutely no spoken language whilst No Dice had four hours of non stop talking. Life and Times, in this narrative, seems to be an altogether different challenge. How do you see it fit within your work?

Pavol Liska: In Poetics, we dealt with movements that people make when they’re not making art. In the rest of the shows we deal with language people use when they’re not making art. It’s the same process. We’re interested in art that happens when we’re not consciously trying to make art.

RR: The name of your company comes out of Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, and has a particularly playful, utopic reference to your own relationship to audiences.  How do they fit into the politics of your work?

Pavol Liska: Audience is the most important ingredient of our performances. But not in a sense that we pander to them, try to figure out how to please them, how to make them love us. Our theatre is a social event, and without the audience it doesn’t exist. We don’t do it for ourselves. The work is about the audience and how they perceive the world around them, and how they come out of our shows transformed.

Norfolk and Norwich Festival present
Nature Theater of Oklahoma:
The Life and Times
at Norwich Playhouse
42-58 St George's Street
Norwich NR3 1AB

21 -24 May 2013
Info and tickets nnfestival.org.uk

Official sites for Nature Theater of Oklahoma
oktheater.org
@oktheater
facebook.com/oktheater